Penn State

External sensors to measure patients’ health are invaluable, but they can also be inaccurate. Pulse oximeters, for example, can give false readings if the patient is a smoker or even wearing dark nail polish. And sensors that monitor a…

As we get closer and closer to the reality of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman and life expectancy continues to increase, wear and tear on our joints and organs means we need more and replacement parts to ensure our quality…

Hydrogen, whose only byproduct is water, has to be produced from other energy sources: natural gas, nuclear, biomass, solar, or wind power. It isn’t yet a practical source of energy, because 95% of all hydrogen is currently produced from…

Biologists have always been the world’s biggest fans of fruit flies, with Drosophila melanogaster considered superstars for their contributions to the science of genetics. Now, they’re being studied by engineers who, by examining how fruit…

Cold weather is the enemy of our current batteries, slowing the chemical reaction inside, making them less reliable and negatively affecting their performance. In the search for a reliable, quick-charging, cold-weather battery for…

Unlike human joints, some of which are just badly designed, soft robotic actuators’ moving parts are fairly easily fixed. Repeated activity wears on them too. Recently a team of researchers has a created biosynthetic polymer, patterned…

Small magnetic fields from the electricity that lights our homes and powers our appliances are present all around us. Now, Penn State scientists have developed a new mechanism capable of harvesting this wasted magnetic field energy and…