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The Lab Beat

The Lab Beat

Written by: Cutting-edge science and engineering labs
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The Lab Beat is an award-winning podcast that offers an inside look at cutting-edge science and engineering labs at UC Irvine. Natalie Tso visits the labs, interviews professors and presents their innovations and inspirations in cool short features.

From biomedical engineering, mechanical and aerospace engineering, materials science and engineering, civil and environmental engineering, electrical engineering to computer science, The Lab Beat gives a fascinating look into the newest research at the UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering.

The Lab Beat won Best Podcast/Audio Storytelling at the 2026 OC Press Awards.

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Episodes
  • AI and Drones

    AI and Drones
    Oct 13 2026
    Guinness World Record holder Peter Burke is integrating AI with drones. He won the Guinness World Record for farthest distance to control a drone when he managed it from halfway around the world at Réunion, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. Burke talks about how drones are transforming warfare and how we can keep them safe with AI. Burke is a UC Irvine professor of electrical engineering and computer science. [Drone sound: Drone detected, Peter!] NATALIE TSO, HOST: That Peter is the Peter Burke who won the Guinness World Record for farthest distance to control a drone. The drone was at UC Irvine being controlled halfway around the world from Réunion, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. Peter Burke is an electrical engineering professor at UC Irvine. His lab is now enabling AI to control drones. He tells me when he became fascinated with airplanes. PETER BURKER, UCI PROFESSOR: Probably twelve. TSO: And what did he love about them? BURKE: Everything. It's just a magic that you can go up in the air and stay in the air like a bird. My dad was in the Air Force, and I always grew up with planes flying around over my head, and I always wondered why not have them remote controlled? So I've always wanted to be a pilot. And I was too tall. My eyes weren't good enough. So I became an electrical engineering professor instead. TSO: Burke is six foot two and wears glasses. BURKE: Yeah, there's a height requirement for pilots. You have to fit in the cockpit and they have to have really good vision. So I was doing model airplanes. And then when drones first came out, I started building them in my garage just as a hobby. So that's how I got interested. TSO: And in 2022, he won the Guinness World Record. BURKE: There was a Guinness category, which is longest distance to fly a drone. What I needed was somebody far away that could help me. So I met somebody at a conference off the coast of Africa, which is almost on the other side of the world, and they agreed to help. TSO: What breakthrough enabled it to be controlled from 11,440 miles away? BURKE: It was getting the drone connected to the internet so that it could be controlled over the internet. TSO: Now he's on to the latest technology. BURKE: We're pushing the boundaries of how to integrate the drones with AI. One of the projects that we demonstrated in the recent preprint is to have an interface between the drone and basically a chatbot, where you just speak in plain English what you want the drone to do, and it converts that to commands to the drone to cause it to do what you ask it to do without writing any programs or anything like that. So, for example, take off or fly to the nearest grocery store. So we've demonstrated that integration with all 11 major providers Frontier models, open AI, Claude, Google, Gemini, etc. and a lot of the open source models. TSO: Now what about the talk about AI taking over drones and starting wars? BURKE: Well, I think that's a real risk, not just for drones, but for AI in general. I don't think banning AI is the answer. The short answer, I think, is to have some sort of a kill switch. For example, in our recent work, we have a kill switch. It's literally a button. I press it and the drone falls out of the air. But that will limit probably the capabilities of the positive side of AI if there's always a kill switch. So I don't think that's the long term solution. TSO: What's the next step for drone technology? BURKE: The rule right now is that drones aren't allowed to fly beyond visual line of sight, and that's for safety. So there's a need for technology that will prevent collisions between drones and manned aircraft that doesn't really exist. So my goal would be to try to enable that somehow. TSO: So the first application would be — BURKE: I think probably point-to-point deliveries are very likely to be successful. The civilian drone companies that are doing test drone deliveries in small areas are already flying more missions per week than major US airlines. So, for example, Zipline flies 5000 drone missions a week. Delta Air Lines flies fewer flights a week than that company, and that's one company in one city. I think search and rescue, inspection is also very likely. The big application now is military drones, because it has completely transformed the way wars are fought. TSO: How is it changing how wars are fought? BURKE: Small drones are being used on the battlefield for short range battles. It's become like WWI trench warfare where the soldiers can't leave the trench, In WWI they couldn't leave the trench because they'd be hit by guns. Now they can't leave the trench because they'd be hit by kamikaze drones. So there's a No Man's Land in Ukraine where soldiers don't go. And it's stabilized the lines. In the larger drones, they're used for long range attacks. They're hard to shoot down. And the primary reason is the economy, because they can be built very cheaply whereas to have a person in an airplane go chase them ...
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    8 mins
  • Fierce Mantis Shrimp

    Fierce Mantis Shrimp
    Sep 10 2026
    The fists of mantis shrimp are faster than a speeding bullet. The architecture of that powerful punch has inspired materials for hockey sticks, airplanes, wind turbines and more. [Sound: Anaheim Ducks game broadcast] NATALIE TSO, HOST: Professional hockey and mantis shrimp — there's an important connection. David Kisailus, professor of materials science and engineering at UC Irvine, looks at how materials from creatures like mantis shrimp can help humanity. DAVID KISAILUS: So let's start with hockey. If you're the owner of the Anaheim Ducks, like the person who donated to this building is, you want them to win. [Sound: Anaheim Ducks game broadcast: Ducks beat the Sabres 6 to 5. And remember, quack kills!] We want them to win not only for their glory, but you also can then get advertisements, more advertisements, more sponsorships, more money. If a player who's playing on the ice hits a puck, but the stick breaks, all of a sudden, you go from five people on the ice on your team to four people for about 10 seconds until that player can go get another stick. That 10 seconds turns into what in hockey terms they call it a power play. The other team has a one person advantage and they could score a goal. And if you do that over the course of a season and you lose 3 or 4 games because of that, that could mean playoffs or no playoffs, sponsorships or no sponsorships. So what we realized was that there is a lot of potential for making robust, strong materials that could be used in many different parts of our life, not just hockey. Wind energy, electric vehicles... But we identified an organism called the mantis shrimp, specifically the peacock mantis shrimp. [Sound: aquariums at David Kisailus’s lab] TSO: At the lab, which has tanks full of interesting creatures, materials science and engineering graduate student Andrew Nguyen tells me more. ANDREW NGUYEN: Yeah, so I can tell you more about the mantis shrimp. So they are this crustacean organism that, you know, they really pack a punch. They're usually around four inches long, but they have these specialized kind of dactyl clubs, I should say, like hammer-like appendages that can smack their prey at the speed of a bullet underwater. Underwater. So, you know, there's a lot of friction to overcome and all that. But because of that, not only is there a huge impact, there's also kind of like a second pseudo impact because of how quick it's hitting. There's something called cavitation. And so it just ensures at the end of the day that the prey is not going to be very happy, right? TSO: Kisailus tells me more about the power of those fists. KISAILUS: And so they are the fastest smashing organism on the planet in water. The speed is in meters per second, 23 meters a second, but the acceleration is incredible. It's 100,000m/s². To give that context, that is faster than a 22-caliber bullet. TSO: How did they get so fast and tough? KISAILUS: Their ancient ancestor would hide in the sand and wait for a fish to swim by, and then it would spearfish the fish. What happened over time, over a few 50 to 100 million years, organisms started to develop armor. So clams and crabs would develop hard exoskeletons to prevent being preyed upon by organisms like the spearing mantis shrimp. So the mantis shrimp said, Okay, I have to be able to defeat that armor. How can I do that? It couldn't use its spear, so it would use its elbow segment of its same...it's called a thoracic appendage. Its arms, if you will. So it tried to use its elbow to smack open the clam or crab. And over time, the well-endowed elbowed mantis shrimp spun off into a different species, which is what we study. TSO: In the shrimp's clubs, they found the secret to strength. KISAILUS: The secret sauce is this architecture called the helicoid, which is essentially layers of fibers that are stacked on top of one another, but each layer is rotated at some small angle to give you this helix-like structure. And it's the materials and the architecture that actually provide this robust toughness. So we did the same thing, but we used carbon fiber and glue epoxy and made panels about the size of maybe about five millimeters thick and about, I don't know, maybe a foot by a foot long and wide. And then we essentially made panels of another architecture. That is what Boeing uses in its 787. It's called quasi isotropic. Instead of a helix-like or helicoid-like architecture, the fibers are stacked 0, 45 degrees, -45 degrees, 90. That's called quasi isotropic. So we made panels like that and then we smashed them with an incredible amount of energy — it's the amount of energy that Boeing uses to test its composites. And we found that the damage to the mantis shrimp panel was half of the Boeing panel for the same thickness, same weight, same cost, which means if the 787 is 50% carbon fiber composite, if you could make it half the weight for the same strength and toughness, half the weight means half the fuel, half the fuel means...
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    7 mins
  • The Female Heart

    The Female Heart
    Aug 5 2026
    The female heart has been vastly understudied. Naomi Chesler is a leader in researching the female heart and how sex hormones like estrogen affect the heart's function. Her research is helping prevent heart failure in women and men. Naomi Chesler is a UC Irvine professor of biomedical engineering and the director of UC Irvine's Edwards Life Sciences Foundation Cardiovascular Innovation and Research Center. Transcript: [Sound: Heartbeat of Emily Hope, Wikimedia Commons] NATALIE TSO, HOST: That is the heartbeat from a woman named Emily. [Sci fi music] Women's hearts have been historically understudied, and that is a loss not only for women, but men too as the female hormone estrogen could be useful in protecting the heart. Naomi Chesler is a leader in studying female hearts. She is a UC Irvine professor of biomedical engineering and the director of UC Irvine's Edwards Life Sciences Foundation Cardiovascular Innovation and Research Center. She discovered an important contributor to heart failure in women. What got her interested in biomedical engineering? NAOMI CHESLER: When I was a kid, I really enjoyed watching The Six Million Dollar Man, and that was very inspirational for me. I really loved the idea that we could rebuild people and make them stronger. I was also really good at math and science, and I was told when I was a kid that being an engineer was a way to be really creative, using math and science. So then engineering became really appealing to me. I got into the heart because I felt like, you know, we can argue with neuroscientists about this, but I thought it was the most important organ in the body that, you know, you can't really live without a functional heart. And it was a very exciting organ to me. It's got complex mechanical properties and electrical properties, and it drives blood flow that supplies nutrients and oxygen to every cell and tissue in your body. I think that's why I was so intrigued with it. TSO: So why have female hearts been largely understudied? CHESLER: Generations of scientists have been largely male, and those generations of scientists have considered the male the standard and just assume that women would be similar or just a smaller version, the way that folks often assume that children are a smaller version of adults, which is really a very bad assumption. They're very different physiologically, psychologically, you know, hormonal, like just almost in every way. They're not just small adults. And similarly, women are not just small men. TSO: She studies the aspects of the heart that most scientists don't. Right heart failure due to pulmonary hypertension, also known as high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs. CHESLER: Actually, pulmonary arterial hypertension, which is sort of the analog to systemic hypertension, which is very common, affects four times more women than men and used to be deadly within two to three years and also affect women in their 30s. So here was this disease that affected young women in their reproductive period and was like very quickly deadly. And we knew very little about it. So I started looking at pulmonary hypertension. And as an engineer, I recognized that when arteries are subjected to high pressure for long periods of time, they typically stiffen. And we knew this to be true about the systemic circulation. And I asked the question whether that was true about the pulmonary circulation. And I proved that it was. And I got a lot of “So whats” like “So what if the pulmonary arteries stiffen? The big deal is that the resistance increases.” And it wasn't until a couple of years after I published my findings that a clinical team showed that pulmonary artery stiffness was a better predictor of mortality from pulmonary hypertension than resistance, that people started paying attention. TSO: Chesler’s contribution was key to understanding right heart failure. CHESLER : And now permanent artery stiffness is measured quite frequently in clinical communities, and it's more well recognized that it's a really important contributor to right heart failure. TSO: Roughly 400,000 deaths each year are caused by heart failure in the US, and 15 to 24% of those deaths are due to right heart failure. Now, what is different about the female heart? CHESLER: So the female heart is smaller for sure. Actually, our most recent study shows that in rats there are changes in contractility over the estrous cycle, which is the rat equivalent of a menstrual cycle. I guess that's another reason why females have been excluded from a lot of scientific studies is that any kind of variation in any kind of function over the normal hormonal cycling is considered a source of error or variation. [Sound: EKG] TSO: That's an echocardiogram or EKG. CHESLER: That is the sound of flow through the tricuspid valve in a mouse heart. That's the kind of signal that we analyze to see how the heart is functioning, to see whether the heart functions better or worse with the ...
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    7 mins
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