The Quest for a Heart Attack Cure
A BU-led team is engineering small patches of cardiac muscle that could repair the heart, treat heart disease, and speed drug development By David Levin for BU Brink Heart disease is one of the world’s most deadly and insidious killers. In the United States alone, it causes one in every four deaths nationwide—that’s a staggering […]
New Miniature Heart Could Help Speed Heart Disease Cures
Boston University–led team has engineered a tiny living heart chamber replica to more accurately mimic the real organ and provide a sandbox for testing new heart disease treatments By Andrew Thurston There’s no safe way to get a close-up view of the human heart as it goes about its work: you can’t just pop it […]
Cross-disciplinary research teams win Kilachand funding
Five Studies Pushing the Limits of Science: This year’s Kilachand fund awards will support pioneering research across engineering and life sciences
Soft Robotics, 4D Printing: Undergrad Luce Scholars Present Research
Three ENG winners of the 2021 Clare Boothe Luce Scholar Award presented their research during the 24th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium in the George Sherman Union Metcalf Ballroom. The symposium was sponsored by Boston University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). More than 275 BU undergrads earned UROP funding and faculty mentoring to complete research projects […]
It Looks Loopy, But It Works
Loops of string make rock piles stand tall in study by Holmes and Guerra By Patrick L. Kennedy Say a missile or an earthquake has just damaged your apartment building. Stone rubble litters the street. Must you wait for the Army Corps of Engineers to arrive, clear away the rubble, and rebuild the blasted wall? […]
Tiny Satellite Will Take Widest Ever Images of Earth’s and the Sun’s Magnetic Fields Colliding
Images captured by the probe, developed by BU engineers, could reveal new insights into radiation that impacts satellites, astronauts By Kat J. McAlpine A first-of-its-kind satellite, designed and built by Boston University engineers, on Monday morning hitched a ride aboard a NASA rocket launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Over the next five […]
Small Satellite, Big Questions: CuPID CubeSat Will Get New Perspective on Sun-Earth Boundary
Professor Brian Walsh lead the development a spacecraft that uses novel Lobster-eye optics to measure X- rays in space. It will launch into space on September 23, 2021.
AHA Moment: Lejeune Awarded Funding for Heart Cell Data Work
By Patrick L. Kennedy With a promising technology aimed at combating heart disease, Assistant Professor Emma Lejeune (ME) has earned the American Heart Association (AHA) Career Development Award. Lejeune’s software and computational methods have the potential to empower future researchers to develop medicine and artificial tissue that will cure cases of cardiac disease—the leading cause […]
These Soft Robotic Grippers Were Inspired by an Ancient Japanese Art Form
Douglas Holmes, BU PhD student Yi Yang and alum Katie Vella explain how they were inspired a traditional Japanese art of paper cutting (cousin of origami paper-folding art), to design soft robotic grippers. Their work was published in in Science Robotics.
From the Dalkon Shield to Britney Spears’ IUD: Why Diverse Teams Need to Be Involved in Contraceptive Design
When the people who are the main users of a technology are not consulted in the design phase of that technology, the results for the end users are subpar and sometimes outright harmful.