No Motor, No Battery, No Problem
05-15-18
Chiara Daraio, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, and colleagues have developed robots capable of self-propulsion without using any motors, servos, or power supply. Instead, these first-of-their-kind devices paddle through water as the material they are constructed from deforms with temperature changes. "Combining simple motions together, we were able to embed programming into the material to carry out a sequence of complex behaviors," says Caltech postdoctoral scholar Osama R. Bilal, who is co-first author of the PNAS paper is titled "Harnessing bistability for directional propulsion of soft, untethered robots." [Caltech story]
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Chiara Daraio
MCE
APh
postdocs
Osama Bilal
Solving Pieces of the Genetic Puzzle
05-09-18
Postdoctoral scholar Nathan Belliveau working in the laboratory of Professor Rob Phillips has applied a method called Sort-Seq to mutate small pieces of noncoding regions in E. coli and determined which regions contain binding sites. Binding sites are the locations where specialized proteins that are involved in transcription—the first step in the process of gene expression—attach to DNA. "Humans have such a wide variety of cells—muscle cells, neurons, photoreceptors, blood cells, to name a few," says Professor Phillips. "They all have the same DNA, so how do they each turn out so differently? The answer lies in the fact that genes can be regulated—turned on or off, dialed up and dialed down—differently in different tissues. Until now, there have been no general principles to help us understand how this regulation was encoded." [Caltech story]
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Rob Phillips
APh
postdocs
Nathan Belliveau
Caltech Climate School
04-20-18
To mark the start of Earth Week, Caltech hosted a two-day series of lectures about climate and climate change, which the organizers dubbed "climate school". The speakers included Professor Austin Minnich whose presentation focused on the myths and misconceptions associated with climate change. "Instead of asking for people to trust us, we should ask them notto trust and instead give them guidance for how they can check out what's going on for themselves," Minnich said. [Caltech story]
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MCE
Austin Minnich
APh
Professor Fultz Named TMS Fellow
02-02-18
Brent Fultz, Barbara and Stanley R. Rawn, Jr., Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics, has been named a 2018 Fellow of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS). Professor Fultz received the award for leadership in establishing the importance of vibrational entropy to the phase stability of alloys and for transformational advances in measurement techniques. This is a pinnacle award for the society and it recognizes outstanding contributions to the practice of metallurgy, materials science, and technology. [List of TMS fellows]
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APhMS
honors
Brent Fultz
Building Blocks to Create Metamaterials
01-17-18
Chiara Daraio, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, and colleagues have created a method to systematically design metamaterials using principles of quantum mechanics. "Before our work, there was no single, systematic way to design metamaterials that control mechanical waves for different applications," Professor Daraio says. "Instead, people often optimized a design to fulfill a specific purpose, or tried out new designs based on something they saw in nature, and then studied what properties would arise from repeated patterns." [Caltech story]
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Chiara Daraio
MCE
APh
