New Bubble Popping Theory Could Help Track Ocean Pollution and Viruses

Bubbles are fun for everyone. But, it turns out, they can also be little menaces.

When a bubble pops, it can concentrate and aerosolize any particles stuck on it. Not a big deal when it’s a store-bought soapy bubble bursting in the yard or on your hand. But it’s a major concern when the particles it carries are potentially hazardous: bubbles caught in a crashing wave can send vaporized microplastics into the air where they might mess with the Earth’s atmosphere; bubbles burst by a flushing toilet can fling bacteria meters and onto nearby surfaces; a frothing cruise ship hot tub was once shown to be a Legionnaires’ disease super-spreader.

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Learning From Animal Behaviors to Inform Control Systems

Research by Distinguished Professor of Engineering John Bailleul questions how animals operate and how you might use animal behaviors to design control systems. By Margo Stanton You may be familiar with the term “blind as a bat”, which is used to describe someone who has poor eyesight. However, recent research on animal behavior by CISE […]

Sabelhaus Research: Advancing the Safety of Soft Robots for Human Interactions

The emergence of soft robots will enable safe human interactions which will allow robots to assist in the industrial, medical, automotive and space industries. College of Engineering Professor Andrew Sabelhaus (ME, SE), has been working on making soft robots safer to improve these human interaction tasks, in areas such as medicine, as well as explore difficult or dangerous locations. His work will help improve the design of many other soft robots.

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Building a New Kind of Faculty

If you want to harness the power of having faculty from multiple disciplines address a societal challenge, you have to make it easy for them to do so. Cross-disciplinary collaboration has long been part of the college’s DNA, and that culture is now being formalized in way that is unlike any other engineering school.

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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 […]

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