By Sarah Small

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For wearable electronics to live up to their promise for health care monitoring, they need to do at least two things: transform from rigid to soft to accommodate changing structural needs, and heal their own normal wear-and-tear. With the help of liquid metal and specialized polymers, researchers have developed sensors that can do both.  

By Ashley WennersHerron

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For mere dollars, a Penn State-led international collaboration has fabricated a self-powered, standalone sensor system capable of monitoring gas molecules in the environment or in human breath. The system combines nanogenerators with micro-supercapacitors to harvest and story energy generated by human movement. 

By Mariah R. Lucas

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Neurons, which are responsible for producing the signals that ultimately trigger an action like talking or moving a muscle, are built and maintained by classes of motor proteins that transport molecular cargo along elongated tracks called microtubules. A Penn State-led team of researchers uncovered how two main groups of motor proteins compete to transport cargo in opposite directions between the cell body and the synapse in neurons.  

By Mary Fetzer

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A research lab at Penn State will equally share a three-year, $2.55 million grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) with three other teams at Carnegie Mellon University and the Adolphe Merkle Institute of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. The multidisciplinary research collaboration aims to develop a framework for the design and production of soft, self-charging, bio-inspired power sources for applications in space.