Just as defining the meter, kilogram and second helped lay the foundation for modern commerce, new measures and standards are needed to fuel the growth of the 21st Century bioeconomy.
The desire to create these new metrics brought more than 100 researchers from academia, industry and government to Stanford University on March 31st to launch a consortium convened by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST.
Five Stanford Engineering faculty members have received National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) awards for 2015. The CAREER program helps promising junior faculty pursue outstanding research while also improving education.
Stanford bioengineer Christina Smolke was recently delighted and surprised to learn that she had been chosen to receive an award for student mentoring by the Northern California Chapter of the Association for Women in Science (NCC-AWIS).
“I was really touched by this,” Smolke said. “Several of my current and former students put the nomination package together, and I didn’t know about it until I got the email notifying me that I had received this award.”
Sixty years ago, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Joshua Lederberg first described a biological mystery. He showed how bacteria could lose the cell walls that define their shapes, potentially becoming less visible to the immune system, only to later revert back to their original form and regain their full infectious potential.
A puzzling observation, pursued through hundreds of experiments, has led Stanford researchers to a simple yet profound discovery: under certain circumstances, droplets of fluid will move like performers in a dance choreographed by molecular physics.
Biology relies upon the precise activation of specific genes to work properly. If that sequence gets out of whack, or one gene turns on only partially, the outcome can often lead to a disease.
Now, bioengineers at Stanford and other universities have developed a sort of programmable genetic code that allows them to preferentially activate or deactivate genes in living cells. The work is published in the current issue of Cell, and could help usher in a new generation of gene therapies.
More than 40 million people worldwide suffer from concussions each year, but scientists are just beginning to understand the traumatic forces that cause the injury.
Now a team of engineers and physicians at Stanford has provided the first-ever measurements of all the acceleration forces imparted on the brain during a diagnosed concussion. The findings could lead to better injury detection or toward developing safer protective gear.
Cells are the fundamental units of life, but the rules that govern their successful growth and reproduction have remained mysterious.
Now, in one experiment, Stanford bioengineers show that bigger bacterial cells have an advantage over smaller ones. In a second study, they discovered that experimental microbes were able grow as fast as normal cells even with replacement parts from another species.
Stanford University has invited leading thinkers from several institutions to begin a 100-year effort to study and anticipate how the effects of artificial intelligence will ripple through every aspect of how people work, live and play.
This effort, called the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, or AI100, is the brainchild of computer scientist and Stanford alumnus Eric Horvitz, who, among other credits, is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
