New observations of 30 planet-forming disks – the birthplaces of planets around stars – reveal in greater detail than ever how gas and dust behave over time and shape the evolution of exoplanet systems. 

Several years ago, a cosmic particle detector in Antarctica observed a series of unusual radio signals, according to an international research group that includes scientists from Penn State. The unusual radio pulses were detected by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a range of instruments flown on balloons high above Antarctica that are designed to detect radio waves from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere — and a new study provides additional context to the signals.

A collaborative team led by Ravi Radhakrishnan of the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Jake Brenner and Jacob Myerson of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has unraveled the mathematics of a 500-million-year-old protein network that acts like the body’s bouncer, “deciding” which foreign materials get degraded by immune cells and which are allowed entry. “This discovery enables us to design therapeutics the way you’d design a car or a spaceship—using the principles of physics to guide how the immune system will respond—rather than relying on trial and error,” says Brenner.

A new cooling technology could significantly improve the energy efficiency of data centers and high-powered electronics while reducing water use associated with cooling. By passively removing heat through evaporation, it offers a promising alternative to traditional cooling systems.

A research team has developed a microbubble-based nano-gene delivery platform (BTN MB) that precisely delivers gene suppressors into bacteria to effectively remove biofilms formed by the super bacteria Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory unveils a machine with unmatched capabilities to explore the phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection.

In a world first, a team led by researchers at Penn State used two-dimensional materials, which are only an atom thick and retain their properties at that scale, unlike silicon, to develop a computer capable of simple operations. The advancement, published in Nature, represents a major leap toward the realization of thinner, faster and more energy-efficient electronics, the researchers said.