Treeswift’s Autonomous Robots Take Flight to Save Forests News / September 22, 2020 Forests cover 30 percent of the Earth’s landmass, but that number is on the decline. Despite forests’ crucial role in conserving wildlife and processing carbon dioxide, many are threatened by deforestation and wildfires. Complicating these threats is the lack of quantitative information that foresters and environmental researchers need for making... Read More
Gardening in Costa Rica Yields Inspiration During Quarantine News / September 10, 2020 When the coronavirus pandemic began in March, María Suarez, junior in bioengineering, left Penn’s campus and returned home to Costa Rica. What should have been the final weeks of club activities, social events and end-of-year celebrations shifted to months spent at home, far away from Philadelphia. But Suarez, like many... Read More
Danielle Bassett on ‘A Radical New Model of the Brain’ News / August 18, 2020 Early attempts to understand how the brain works included the pseudoscience of phrenology, which theorized that various mental functions could be determined through the shape of the skull. While those theories have long been debunked, modern neuroscience has shown a kernel of truth to them: those functions are highly localized... Read More
New Funding Supports Milestone Initiative to Advance Solar Energy Research News / August 10, 2020 Researchers in the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology have been awarded a Department of Energy grant focused on the production of fuels from sunlight. As a partner institution with the Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels (CHASE), the $40 million grant, awarded over five years, will... Read More
High School Students Lead ‘Maskathon’ During Remote M&T Summer Program News / August 5, 2020 Due to COVID-19, this year’s Management & Technology Summer Institute (M&TSI), switched to remote learning for 94 dedicated high school students interested in the intersection of engineering and business. Run by the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology, the for-credit summer program is for rising high school juniors and seniors and provides... Read More
Pennovation Accelerator Moves Online News / July 23, 2020 Even while working remotely and staying socially distant this summer, 10 startup companies made progress on developing their businesses as part of Pennovation Accelerator program at Pennovation Works. Launched in 2018, the six-week summer program is designed to support Philadelphia’s entrepreneurial community. This year’s online program, presented by the Pennovation Center, PCI Ventures, and... Read More
Plato was right. Earth is Made, on Average, of Cubes News / July 21, 2020 Plato, the Greek philosopher who lived in the 5th century B.C.E., believed that the universe was made of five types of matter: earth, air, fire, water, and cosmos. Each was described with a particular geometry, a platonic shape. For earth, that shape was the cube. Science has steadily moved beyond... Read More
Navigating ‘Information Pollution’ With the Help of Artificial Intelligence News / July 20, 2020 There’s still a lot that’s not known about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, the disease it causes. What leads some people to have mild symptoms and others to end up in the hospital? Do masks help stop the spread? What are the economic and political implications of the pandemic?... Read More
Rooting Out Systemic Bias in Neuroscience Publishing News / July 9, 2020 Scientific papers are the backbone of a research community and the citation of those papers sparks conversation in a given field. This cycle of publication and citation leads to new knowledge, but what happens when implicit discrimination in a field leads to papers by minority scholars being cited less often... Read More
Can Contact Tracing Stop the Spread of COVID-19? News / June 24, 2020 As economies around the world start to reopen, governments are looking for ways to help track and contain new coronavirus infections. One tool is contact tracing, used by public health officials to halt the ongoing transmission of an infectious disease. Some states have already retrained state employees to work as contact tracers,... Read More
