Materials Science

Diabetes is a growing worldwide issue. In the United States alone, there are 25.8 million affected patients []. The annual cost of medical treatment (e.g. management and monitoring) and indirect expenses (such as disability and unemployment benefits) are…

For many years, sunlight has been seen as a potential gold mine of useable energy for our global needs.  Having successfully used the sun to grow food to feed the world, people are now trying to harvest the sun’s energy and convert it into electric…

Presented by Max Mankin, Lauren Hartle, and Kevin Chau

-- Every organ in our bodies performs a specialized role. So what happens when one of these organs fails or is damaged? Some animals can re-grow or replace lost tissue – newts can regenerate entire lost limbs – but unfortunately human organ regeneration…

-- Most of us have probably received vaccines and antibiotics at some point in our lives, and while they may have seemed to work like magic at the time, medical professionals’ precise understanding of the drugs’ mechanisms of action enables their use as…

-- The world is excited about solar cells – and with good reason. Imagine the City of the Future, where every exposed surface has solar cells on it, converting the sun’s energy into electricity. This vision could include solar cells on windows, on top of…

If you’ve watched the movie The Day after Tomorrow, you must remember the climate-related natural disasters that ravaged the human civilization. Though the events depicted in the movie are unrealistic, we are still dramatically altering Earth’s…

In 2004, Konstantin Novoselov, Andre Geim and their colleagues from Manchester, UK and Chernogolovka, Russia reported the existence of graphene, a two-dimensional sheet of carbon that is 1 atomic layer thick. This discovery took the world by surprise…

--In many cultures, including our own, bread constitutes a significant portion of the daily diet. However, how often do we stop to think about the unique material properties of the food that we eat and how those properties influence how bread (or any…