May 22, 2013
Hurricane Sandy caught the public and policymakers off guard when it hit the United States’ Atlantic Coast last fall. Because much of the storm’s devastation was wrought by flooding in the aftermath, researchers have been paying attention to how climate change and sea-level rise may have played a role in the disaster and how those factors may impact the shoreline in the future.
May 20, 2013
The allure of personalized medicine has made new, more efficient ways of sequencing genes a top research priority. One promising technique involves reading DNA bases using changes in electrical current as they are threaded through a nanoscopic hole.
May 17, 2013
A team of University of Pennsylvania engineers has used a pattern of nanoantennas to develop a new way of turning infrared light into mechanical action, opening the door to more sensitive infrared cameras and more compact chemical-analysis techniques.
May 14, 2013
In 1700, a massive earthquake struck the west coast of North America. Though it was powerful enough to cause a tsunami as far as Japan, a lack of local documentation has made studying this historic event challenging.
May 9, 2013
For the first time in nearly a decade, a team from the Department of Bioengineering took the top prize in the School of Engineering Applied Science’s Senior Design Project Competition.
May 2, 2013
What makes people change the way they behave? It’s a question that cuts to the core of human nature, and one that has been approached by researchers from many different fields.
April 29, 2013
Anyone who has flown in an airplane knows about turbulence, or when the flow of a fluid — in this case, the flow of air over the wings — becomes chaotic and unstable. For more than a century, the field of fluid mechanics has posited that turbulence scales with inertia, and so massive things, like planes, have an easier time causing it.
April 25, 2013
Early diagnosis is critical in treating Lyme disease. Existing tests, however, can only assess the presence of antibodies against bacterial proteins that take weeks to form after the initial infection and persist after the infection is gone.
April 25, 2013
Early diagnosis is critical in treating Lyme disease. Existing tests, however, can only assess the presence of antibodies against bacterial proteins that take weeks to form after the initial infection and persist after the infection is gone.
April 19, 2013
A dye-based imaging technique known as two-photon microscopy can produce pictures of active neural structures in much finer detail than functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, but it requires powerful and expensive lasers. Now, a research team at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a new kind of dye that could reduce the cost of the technique by several orders of magnitude.
