Touching the Virtual Frontier
If you’ve never been stung by imaginary gunfire, sent a texture sample by email, or had a sleeve teach you how to move your arm, Katherine Kuchenbecker’s Haptics Lab is a Pandora’s box of tactile trickery and strange sensations.
Smart Water
Aakash Mathur C’09 W’09 and Jay Parekh EAS’09
Tiny Solutions, Big Implications
Randy Snurr EAS’88
A Life Worth Living
Thanks to advanced technology and the family, friends, colleagues, and caretakers who make up his “crew,” Penn neuroscientist and alumnus Scott Mackler continues to function professionally and personally a decade after being diagnosed with the lethal neurodegenerative disease ALS.
Inside the Cancer-Cell Smasher
In the last century, American medicine has gone from a cottage industry to a technology-driven juggernaut. The machine at the heart of the new Roberts Proton Therapy Center, dubbed “the world’s most expensive and complex medical device,” provides a glimpse of what the coming years may hold.
“Little Ben” Finishes Fourth
Pretty big finish for “Little Ben”
The Best Inventions That Don’t Exist
Innovation for the rest of us: “2nd Best Idea Slam.”
And the Winning Prototype Is …
Parachuting robot snares annual PennVention prize.
“What Free Time?”
Webcasts let incoming freshmen “hear a voice and see a face”
The Next Internet and the Museum of Ideas
How Internet2 is transforming archaeology
Research in Brief
Research in brief
Fine ’09 Meets Online
Freshmen orient themselves online
Building a Better Mousetrap, Hip Implant, Beach Towel …
Better minesweeper takes PennVention prize
The Wild Web
Along with lots of junk, online writing has produced some captivating material.
Keeping an Extra Eye on the ICU
Penn E-lert improves ICU oversight
Poetry in (Sound-Wave) Motion
Odes and iPods
Simulated People Save Real Lives
René Gonzalez M’83 GM’86
A House Built with Ideas
Weiss Tech House is home for student-inventors
Creating The Sims—and a New Reality
Sims stylist Charles London
Building a Better Homepage
Spinning a new Web site
Kick-Starting the Internet in Ghana
Making “digital dreams” reality in Ghana
Flagging Down a Runaway Technology
Who’s minding the machines?
An Internet “Grandfather” on its Past, Present, Future
David Farber on what’s next for the Internet
James Thomson and the Holy Grail
In 1998, graduate alumnus Dr. James Thomson won the race to isolate and culture human stem-cells for a sustained period—one of the holy grails of medical science—but he can’t outrun the controversy generated by his work. Increasingly, he isn’t trying.