MRI

By Jamie Oberdick and Ashley WennersHerron

Moore's Law, a fundamental scaling principle for electronic devices, forecasts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years, ensuring more computing power — but a limit exists.

Today's most advanced chips house nearly 50 billion transistors within a space no larger than your thumbnail. The task of cramming even more transistors into that confined area has become more and more difficult, according to Penn State researchers.

By Jamie Oberdick

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Six Penn State materials researchers have received the 2023 Rustum and Della Roy Innovation in Materials Research Award, covering a wide range of research with societal impact. The award is presented by the Materials Research Institute (MRI) and recognizes recent interdisciplinary materials research at Penn State that yields innovative and unexpected results.  

By Adrienne Berard

Dental plaque, gut bacteria and the slippery sheen on river rocks are all examples of biofilms, organized communities of microorganisms that colonize our bodies and the world around us. A new study led by Penn State researchers reveals exactly how growing biofilms shape their environments and fine-tune their internal architecture to fit their surroundings. The findings may have implications for a wide variety of applications, from fighting disease to engineering new types of living active materials.

For the first time, researchers demonstrate how to electronically alter the direction of electron flow in promising materials for quantum computing

By Gail McCormick

By Jeff Mulhollem

USDA grant to fund Penn State researchers developing new and sustainable materials from lignocellulosic biomass

A sustainable resin material comprising agriculturally derived components could potentially replace plastics used in large-format 3D printing, which can produce furniture, boats and other similarly sized objects, according to a team of Penn State agricultural and biological engineers.

By Tim Schley

One double-helix strand of DNA could extend six feet, but it is so tightly coiled that it packs an entire sequence of nucleotides into the tiny nucleus of a cell. If that same DNA was instead split into two strands and divided into many, many short pieces, it would become trillions of uniquely folded 3D molecular structures, capable of bonding to and possibly manipulating specifically shaped molecules — if they’re the perfect fit.