Physicists at Rensselaer have uncovered what they believe is the pathway that an HIV peptide takes to enter healthy cells. The discovery could help scientists treat other human illnesses by exploiting the same molecules that make HIV so deadly proficient.

The project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, will call upon a diverse team of researchers and institutions to create detailed computer models of a new type of nuclear reactor. These models could play a key role for the future development of the new reactors.

With help from an underlying substrate, researchers have demonstrated the ability to control the nature of graphene. They have determined that the chemistry of the surface on which graphene is deposited plays a key role in shaping the material’s conductive properties.

A group of researchers is engineering characters with the capacity to have beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others. The characters will be able to predict and manipulate the behavior of even human players, with whom they will directly interact in the real, physical world.

Fundamental advances in physical and biological sciences and the development of new measurement and characterization tools have made it possible to understand spatial and temporal phenomena on the atomic, molecular, microscopic, and macroscopic scales. Microelectronics has led this revolution through the development of integrated circuits with shrinking scales, increasing density, and faster speeds. Knowledge of biological systems is following a similar course as understanding focuses on molecular and cellular processes.

The research performed in the Computational Nanomechanics Laboratory has two principal thrusts. The first major goal is to understand the correlation between structure and mechanical properties at the nanoscale level. The second goal is to determine the expression of nanoscale phenomena in the material’s behavior at larger scales.

With the exception of trivial cases, the solution of partial differential equations via the finite element method generates some degree of error. The usefulness of the method as a design tool largely depends upon the ability to quantify this error for a given analysis. Given the true solution for a posed problem, this quantification is readily accomplished. However, the finite element method is typically employed to solve problems for which the analytical solution is not known.

The process of microelectronic fabrication relies on transferring the design pattern to a semiconductor wafer with incredible accuracy and precision. The precursor to this pattern transfer is a lithography step in which a pattern is transferred to a photosensitive polymer on the wafer’s surface, but the actual transfer of this pattern to the wafer is accomplished by an etching process.

Using advanced computer vision technology to detect subtle cell movements that are impossible to discern with the human eye, Professor Badri Roysam and former student Andrew Cohen ‘89 can forecast how a stem cell will split and what key characteristics the daughter cells will exhibit.

The master’s track in Financial Engineering and Risk Analytics (FERA) is a collaboration between Lally’s finance faculty and other departments including computer science, applied mathematics, decision sciences and engineering systems, and economics.

The animated movie follows the adventures of Oxy, Hydro, Hydra, and Carbón as they navigate the nanoscale landscapes of everyday items including snowflakes and plastic toys. Molecules to the MAX aims to boost national and global science literacy through story, song, and fun.