Episodes

  • Revolutionizing Gyroscopes

    Revolutionizing Gyroscopes
    Apr 23 2026
    Andrei Shkel revolutionized the production of gyroscopes by miniaturizing them and using a glassblowing technology he observed from glass artists in Barcelona, Spain. Step into one of the most high precision gyroscope labs in the world and learn about how they're helping firefighters in this episode. Transcript: [sound of wire bonder] [sci fi music] ELENA WOLGAMOT: This is the wire bonder. This allows us to measure the signals that are coming from the gyroscope, so we can detect the rotation that the sensor is experiencing. NATALIE TSO, HOST: That's Ph.D. student Elena Wolgamot describing a machine in one of the world's most high precision gyroscope labs at UC Irvine. What's a gyroscope? They’re key devices that measure orientation and positioning. They're used in phones, ships, planes and spacecraft to help us stay on course. Most look like a spinning top, but the ones in Andrei Shkel's lab look like wine glasses. Andrei Shkel is a UCI Chancellor's professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. In 2009, he led a $200 million U.S. Department of Defense national program to miniaturize gyroscopes. He was inspired to make them smaller and more accessible after he saw $1 million gyroscope used in space satellites. ANDREI SHKEL: The highest performance gyroscope ever built. This device is made out of fused quartz, very special device, very expensive, used only on space satellites. In space, there is no GPS and you don't know where you are. So you need some reference. You can use stars, but sometimes stars are not visible. So gyroscopes and accelerometers are really the only sensors that can tell you where you are, your orientation, your position. TSO: It takes three months to make and manually assemble the 96 parts in that hemispheric resonance gyroscope. Shkel revolutionized the production of gyroscopes after an artist in Barcelona, Spain, inspired him. SHKEL: In Barcelona, there is a replica of Spanish Village and where they demonstrate different crafts and this is where I saw this glassblower creating these three dimensional shapes and vases and spheres. TSO: That gave him an idea. SHKEL: Maybe something like this can be done on a micro scale and on a very small scale. I went back and asked one of my students to try it out. Didn't work, didn't work. And then suddenly we were able to make these three dimensional structures, spheres. TSO: Like a glassblower, Shkel uses a furnace of 1,700 degrees Celsius to form glass into wine glass-shaped structures. Researchers line the inside of the structures with a thin layer of metal. Then they bond wire electrodes to the shell to make two millimeter-wide gyroscopes. WOLGAMOT: There's about 15 to 20 steps in the whole process from start to finish, and it's a lot of testing the device, doing another step, testing, seeing if it's better and we're constantly improving our process and seeing how our different steps and making the devices are affecting their performance. [sound of vacuum pump] This is a vacuum pump, so this pulls all of the air out of a chamber. So that way we can test the gyroscopes in a space that has no air. The gyroscopes need to be tested in a space that doesn't have air, because they move so fast and the air slows them down. So it would be like if we were trying to run through honey. These gyroscopes are moving and vibrating so fast it's causing that much resistance for them. So we use this vacuum pump to pull all of the air out of the chamber where we test so then it can move freely and fast and we can sense small rotations. TSO: Shkel’s mini-gyroscopes have been used for autonomous driving, drone navigation, phones and more. Another exciting project they're working on is called NeverLost. It’s for firefighters. SHKEL: When they are on a mission trying to fight fire, they're in a very extreme environment. Environment is so complicated. It's hard. It's almost zero visibility and they don't really have a way to know where people are while they're on a mission. And they said, well, one of the important problem is to develop ability to locate where each first responder is at any point in time. And of course, they’re operating in an environment where it is likely there is no GPS. So what we proposed is to use inertial sensors technology and integrate these inertial sensors in the sole of a shoe. TSO: Graduate student Eudald Rafart explains what they've achieved so far. EUDALD RAFART: We are able to track firefighters within one meter, walking around 20 minutes. Also, part of my research has been developing this Google Maps. It's not just knowing where you are, also it comes with the ability of say, I want to go here inside the building. TSO: Shkel’s NeverLost project won the Innovator Award last year at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. His ultimate dream is to help restore the vestibular system in the inner ear for the elderly, to help them prevent falls. Those are the innovations happening at Andrei Shkel’s Lab ...
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    5 mins
  • Curing the Brain

    Curing the Brain
    Mar 12 2026
    Dion Khodagholy is trying to cure epilepsy by implanting a neural interface on the brain. Khodagholy is a UCI associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and has created the NeuroGrid which maps the brain's activity once it is placed on it. Listen to the sound of the brain and learn why the NeuroGrid is such an effective neural electronic for the brain in this episode. Transcript: [sound of brain waves] NATALIE TSO, HOST: That's the sound of the human brain. [sci fi music] Those are spiking neurons from a brain of a child with epilepsy. They were recorded by a NeuroGrid placed on the brain during surgery. What's a NeuroGrid? It's a conformable neural interface that one puts on the brain to help map it. It looks like a transparent film that's thinner than a human hair. On it are gold electronic patterns that carry the neural signals. It was created in Dion Khodagholy’s lab at UC Irvine. He's an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Why does he think it can help children with epilepsy? DION KHODAGHOLY: Epilepsy is one of the few neurological disorders that has an electrographic signature. You can track it and identify it. We believe that by being able to accurately pinpoint where it’s originating from during development, there's a high chance we can correct it. TSO: That was the first child to have a NeuroGrid placed on the brain. The NeuroGrid was first conceptualized in 2009 and implanted in a patient's brain in 2014. It's thinner, safer, and offers higher resolution readings than current electronics for the brain. Ten hospitals in the U.S. have used it. KHODAGHOLY:: One of the unique features of NeuroGrid is that it is able to record individual neurons firing from the surface of the brain without penetrating inside. This was something practically no other device could do. TSO: Khodagholy explains why his NeuroGrid is so effective. KHODAGHOLY:: They're very similar mechanically to the brain itself. It’s very soft and can follow the curvilinear surface of the brain. They're made out of conducting polymers. These are inherently closer to what body and neurons are and makes it a lot easier and more effective to transduce neural signals. [sound of metal evaporator in lab] [music fades] TSO: The NeuroGrid is made in clean rooms, but his lab has machines such as this metal evaporator that makes prototypes and deposits gold on the polymer. Why gold? KHODAGHOLY:: Gold is our interconnect. That's how the electrical signal from the brain gets carried to our amplifiers. It's a very good conductor. It's very inert. In the brain, we have lots of salt and water. It will cause oxidation. So we use inert material like gold, platinum to not have any chemical reactions. TSO: The NeuroGrid helps map brain regions and detect individual neural spiking. So far, the NeuroGrid can have 256 contacts with 128 surface contacts on the brain. Khodagholy's lab is now partnering with Children's Hospital of Orange County. Before that, the NeuroGrid was used in adult epilepsy patients. KHODAGHOLY:: Our goal with the grid is that because it has a higher resolution, we find out more effectively where these unwanted couplings are. And because of its scalability and the fact that it's made with the same technology as the rest of our electronics that can also stimulate or deliver electric charges for effective intervention, we convert this eventually to a fully conformable closed loop system, meaning it can record in real time process, identify where those unwanted activities are, and then deliver electrical stimulation to suppress it so closing the loop in real time. TSO: The lab has made progress in countering the effects of epilepsy, like loss of memory in rodents. KHODAGHOLY:: We've recently showed that indeed, if you're able to establish a device to detect this in real time and create electrical stimulation at the right time, you're able to significantly improve memory in rodents that had epilepsy. We’ve also shown signatures of this exist in the human brain, so it's not a complete disconnect. We have just a recording from the human brain that shows indeed the patterns we're seeing in rodents exist in humans as well. Our next logical step is to stimulate human brain. That is where things becomes a bit more challenging, both from a regulatory perspective as well as overall device safety concerns. What if that device breaks instead of delivering charge to the brain? What are the safety measures that controls the amount of charge you deliver? Right now from device perspective, we're heavily focused on meeting all the safety requirements for stimulation. Hopefully in a year or two, we'd be able to have this completed and go for human testing. TSO: Khodagholy’s time from lab to bedside is fairly short. KHODAGHOLY:: Maybe this is achieved because we are able to do most of these things at UCI. We don't need to subcontract or outsource it. This is very unique because UCI is one ...
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    7 mins
  • Methalox Rockets

    Methalox Rockets
    Jan 15 2026
    The UCI Rocket Project Liquids team is one of the few undergraduate teams that launched a methalox rocket in 2023. Methalox is the leading-edge fuel companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are using to get to Mars. Join this visit to the rocket lab as they prepare to launch their second-generation methalox rocket. Transcript: [male voice: 3 2 1. Ignition. Female voice: Good light, good light.] [Sound of cold flow] [sci fi music] NATALIE TSO, HOST: That's the UCI Rocket Project Liquids Team doing a cold flow on campus. In 2023, the UCI team was one of the few undergraduate teams in America to launch a methalox rocket using the same cutting-edge fuel type the new space industry is using to reach Mars. Propulsion lead Uma Iyer told me why they chose this challenging leading-edge fuel. UMA IYER: So we chose methalox because as students, it's really important to work our way up to industry. And that's what all these big new space companies use, like SpaceX, Blue Origin, they’re using methalox. So by getting our hands on cryogenics, we're basically adapting ourselves like towards the jobs that we'll be working on in the future. ERIC TRAN: One of the big reasons we use methalox is to follow in the footsteps of giants like SpaceX and Blue Origin, and they use it because you can actually produce methalox on Mars, and that way you can actually go home from Mars. TSO: That's operations lead Eric Tran who tells us about the fuel’s challenges. TRAN: One of the big ones is the fact that methalox unlike other more traditional fuels is a cryogen so it has to be super cold in order to stay a liquid and that introduces a lot of issues of stuff freezing over when you don't want IT to freeze over, stuff leaking due to the fact that it needs to stay at a certain pressure to be able to continue staying in a liquid form and stuff like that are like some of the main issues compared to more traditional fields like kerosene, hydrolox, ethanol. TSO: Methalox is made from liquid oxygen and methane, which is a hydrocarbon that can be made on Mars. But methalox needs to be stored between -160 and -180 degrees Celsius or it starts to vaporize. Iyer explains how they deal with this challenge. IYER: You never know exactly how much propellant you have inside your tanks because it's going to keep vaporizing. So we chill our tanks to get it at a proper temperature and also to not induce like thermal shock to our system like we want our hardware to still be okay so we chill our tanks and then we fill them and try to get them as full as possible. And that’s why like time is of the essence and making sure that we're moving quickly at the Mojave Desert, like when we do our test fires so we chill, fill, pressurize our system and then immediately hot fire. [MALE VOICE ON WALKIE TALKIE: 350 Closing….] TSO: I visited their lab on campus as they were getting ready for a test called a cold flow. TRAN: Out there they're working on the hardware. They’re I think right now doing instrumentation checks of just double checking if like all the valves and sensors are working properly and they're trying to communicate what they see out there to inside. [MALE VOICE ON WALKIE TALKIE: Can you close vent?] [MALE VOICE ON WALKIE TALKIE: Closing vent] TRAN: Yeah. So like, they're opening and closing vents and just checking before we get the ball rolling. TSO: Avionics engineer Alex Amaro told me how he coordinates with the engineers near the rocket. ALEX AMARO: I just relay whatever information they need. So we have pressure readings all across here and all these dials, temperature readings. [MALE VOICE ON WALKIE TALKIE asking for reading] [AMARO: PT is reading 270 psi] [MALE VOICE ON WALKIE TALKIE more dialogue on psi] [AMARO: Copy opening…] TSO: So what exactly is a cold flow? Tran explains. TRAN: To get up to launch, we need to test our engine, which is when we go out to the desert and hotfire the engine. So we light it with actual propellant in the system. But leading up into a hotfire, we validate the system even before then. What we do is we roll out our test stand and rocket here on campus where we conduct a cold flow, which is where instead of running actual liquid oxygen and liquid natural gas, which is methane through the system in actual fuel and lighting it, we run liquid nitrogen through the system. That way we can simulate those cryogenic conditions for the rocket and also the pressures needed for a hot fire. That way we can validate the system like check for leaks to see if it holds up under really cold temperatures and also if we get the flow that we want and the pressure data that we want. And with that cold flow is what gives us the confidence to go out to do a hot fire. TSO: The team's first methalox rocket Peter reached 9,300 feet in 2023. Now they aim to go higher with a second generation rocket Moch4. Iyer tells me what's new about this rocket. IYER: It's much slimmer in diameter and also conserving a lot of mass because ...
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    6 mins
  • Becoming Invisible

    Becoming Invisible
    Dec 20 2025
    Alon Gorodetsky is creating materials that mimic the camouflage capabilities of squids that can change color, transparency and temperature. Learn how he figured out the secret of their skin and how it can be used for medicine, the military, smart fabrics and more. Transcript: [sci fi music] NATALIE TSO, HOST: What if you could change the color, transparency and temperature of your skin at any time? Well, if you're an octopus, you can. And Alon Gorodetsky, UCI associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, with the help of this electron beam evaporation system, [SOUND OF ELECTRON BEAM EVAPORATION SYSTEM] is creating materials that imitate those camouflage capabilities so we can use them in smart fabrics. How did he get inspired by cephalopods? ALON GORODETSKY: Well, I actually did not know much about squid and cephalopods other than the fact that they're delicious. I went into a talk by a scientist named Roger Hanlon from the Marine Biological Laboratory, and there was a video he showed of an octopus basically popping out of an algae covered rock. And, you know, it was like something straight out of a science fiction movie. I basically said, okay, I'm going to drop half my research and start working on materials inspired by these animals. So this is much cooler than anything I was planning on doing. Literally, the science fiction aspect, it's like seeing a shapeshifter in real life. It's the equivalent of me backing up onto a file cabinet without really knowing what that is or having ever seen it, and then suddenly being indistinguishable from that file cabinet. That's how amazing their camouflage abilities are. TSO: Now his lab is known for figuring out exactly how a squid changes its color and transparency. They discover the structure in their skins that enabled them to change from transparent to colored states. Gorodetsky showed me squid inspirations in his lab from his collaborator Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Lab. GORODETSKY: So we actually keep little vials of squid skin in the lab for fun. What's amazing about this is, you know, you look at it and see that color almost completely disappears. The squid can control this neurophysiologically. TSO: Then he showed me the electron beam evaporation system. [SOUND OF ELECTRON BEAM EVAPORATION SYSTEM] GORODETSKY: This is where we do the depositions. So a deposition is when you take, let's say, a metal or an oxide, and then you heat it up until it turns into a vapor. And then that vapor will condense or deposit on some substrates or some flat surface and it’ll form a coating. So we were making the material with this machine. TSO: That's a key part of the process of making squid skin like material. It allows them to program the nanostructure and microstructure of the material so that it can change color and regulate the flow of heat. GORODETSKY: So we've been able to make materials that can change color and change transparency in a very similar way to squid skin. And we have been able to extend that to not work only in the visible, but to also work in the infrared. So you could change infrared transparency, let's say, and then change how infrared light or heat is transmitted or reflected. And that corresponds to a change in effective temperature. TSO: There are a lot of applications for material that can change temperature. GORODETSKY: Well, you can make warming devices, for example, for clinical applications. You can make clothes that adapt in response to changes in the environment to keep you comfortable. One thing that we played around with was making coffee cup covers, right? Or it's just kind of like a cup cozy that we put around paper cups. And for me, you know, I get up every morning, I have a nice hot cup of coffee, right? And it's always hard to get the temperature just right. So it's just something that will make my day a little bit brighter. TSO: A key discovery in making their squid skin like material was the discovery of the protein called reflectin in the squid cells. GORODETSKY: We found that these structures, these kind of plates, if you will, from this protein, were arranged in a specific way in the cells that could change color and transparency and had a particular refractive index gradient. And so the cells in the skin were using that idea of having very controlled changes in refractive index to enable their ability to go from transparent to colored. So we could take those refractive index distributions that you see in the cells and then translate them to material and actually get some of the same effects. And so we even have a video online where we have our material next to a squid underwater and you shine light on both and they're basically indistinguishable. TSO: Gorodetsky’s Lab has already been able to make prototypes of squid inspired materials that can change color, transparency and temperature. [sci fi music] GORODETSKY: We have made the materials washable and breathable. We've been integrating them ...
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    6 mins
  • Hydrogen Fueling the Future

    Hydrogen Fueling the Future
    Dec 12 2025
    Can hydrogen energy change the world? UCI Clean Energy Institute Director Jack Brouwer thinks so. His institute is creating sustainable hydrocarbon fuels for aviation and shipping. Listen as he shares his vision for how hydrogen energy can bring more equity and peace to the world. Transcript: [sci fi music] [Sound of electrolzyer spurting out oxygen] NATALIE TSO, HOST: That’s the electrolyzer at UC Irvine spurting out oxygen. The UCI Clean Energy Institute is using hydrogen to create sustainable aviation and shipping fuels. The Institute’s director Jack Brouwer explains why he believes hydrogen could change the world: JACK BROUWER: It's more equitably available. It's available everywhere around the world. You don't have to find only where oil is and you don't have to have the geopolitical challenges and everything else that comes with oil and the wars that we fight over energy. Why do we fight wars over energy? Because some people have it and some people don't. If we create a means by which energy conversion, energy storage and delivering energy to people can be made everywhere, we won't have as many wars. TSO: That vision is driving their hydrogen research. Brouwer is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. He explains why hydrogen is the ultimate solution for energy. BROUWER: It has the features that allow us to carry it around. It's lightweight. You can actually store it for a long time and use it later. You know you could use it in aircraft and engines and heavy duty things. And those kinds of things made me very interested in hydrogen as a solution to more and more renewable and sustainable energy use. You also can convert it, make it in the first place, and convert it back to electricity with zero emissions. TSO: Brouwer showed me the powerful electrolysis system that’s creating the sustainable aviation fuel. [Sound of electrolysis system] BROUWER This is taking in electricity and water, and it's converting the electricity and water to hydrogen and oxygen and then separating out the hydrogen into one stream that goes into this compressor. That's the main thing that you hear. It compresses hydrogen all the way up to 350 times atmospheric pressure, 350 bar. And then we store it in hydrogen tanks that are over here. So what this is doing is this is making renewable hydrogen in the same way. And we're using this in that co-electrolysis system for making the synthesis gas for synthetic aviation fuels. TSO: He explains the science behind this fuel and their partnership with industry. BROUWER: We're working with Chevron to actually use solid oxide electrolysis to actually co-electrolyze CO2 and water streams to make a synthesis gas, meaning a type of gas that has carbon monoxide and hydrogen in it that is the prerequisite for making a liquid fuel. You can make a synthetic liquid fuel from renewable hydrogen and CO2. The CO2 can come from bio sources or even captured from the air or come from another power plant or something like that. So you can take the CO2 and steam, make this synthesis gas, and then subsequently make the sustainable aviation fuel. And that's going to be the main way that we make air travel sustainable in the future TSO: UCI has always paved the way for sustainable fuels. UCI built America’s first hydrogen fueling station which enabled companies to test and deploy their hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. BROUWER: We were able to install a prototype fueling station before the Mirai was even invented to actually test prototype Toyota vehicles. We started with Toyota and the Highlander fuel cell electric vehicle. And then we also tested the General Motors vehicles and the Honda vehicles and Hyundai vehicles and we were able to actually deploy them here at UCI and all throughout Orange County because of our development of infrastructure to support them. We did the same thing with battery electric vehicles. It's one of the reasons why the state of California is really leading in deploying fuel cell and battery electric vehicles. We contributed to that introduction. TSO: Now Brouwer is working on the technology to enable hydrogen to power ships and airplanes We are working with the University of Naples, Parctenopei, as a collaborator to evaluate thermodynamically and dynamically how we might be able to make ship fuel for the future. And that includes not just hydrogen, which could be used directly as a liquid and we've evaluated that, but we're also looking at how to make synthetic ammonia or synthetic methanol as a ship fuel. And then we’re evaluating the characteristics of converting it onboard using a diesel cycle or using a fuel cell of various types. So we’re trying to figure out how you might be able to make shipping zero emissions with hydrogen and its deritative fuels methanol and ammonia. TSO: His vision is that the world’s major oil companies would convert their factories to produce renewable energy. BROUWER: The major oil companies, Chevron, ExxonMobil, ...
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    8 mins
  • Can a Robot Love?

    Can a Robot Love?
    Nov 26 2025
    Top roboticist Magnus Egerstedt explores whether robots can love in the UCI Robot Ecology Lab, where his altruistic robots take cues from animals. Egerstedt is the dean of the UCI Samueli School of Engineering and the creator of the SlothBot, RaccoonBot and the Robotarium, a swarm robot lab which has been used by over 7,000 researchers. Transcript: [People laughing] MAGNUS EGERSTEDT: Raccoonbot! [people clapping and having fun] NATALIE TSO, HOST: That’s the moment the Raccoonbot – a robot shaped like a raccoon - made its debut at Crystal Cove State Beach in Southern California. The cute robot is the brainchild of Magnus Egerstedt, the dean of UC Irvine’s engineering school who is a philosopher turned roboticist EGERSTEDT: So let's ask a question. Can I build a robot that feels love? TSO: Egerstedt is a top roboticist but he has a bachelor’s in philosophy and linguistics. EGERSTEDT: I got really fascinated by questions around consciousness and mind and what does it mean to feel and to think. And I thought this was super cool. I was probably a little pretentious as a 20-year-old, but after a while I started to get annoyed because all we did was sit around and talk. And I actually started doing robotics almost like applied philosophy. I thought, you know what, these questions can either be solved by us building robots or not. So I really thought of this as I wanted to get at deep questions about humanity by building machines. TSO: He leads the UCI Robot Ecology Lab that creates altruistic robots modeled after animals. So far, there’s the SlothBot and the RaccoonBot. Egerstedt shares how he got inspired by these animals: EGERSTEDT: I was on vacation in Costa Rica and I thought sloths were really cool. You know, they they live off the as if a human being would live off a fraction of one of these small potato chips bags a day. They are so energy efficient. And I decided to model behaviorally this robot that I wanted to put out in nature on sloths. And born was the Slothb=Bot. This is a robot under the the tree canopies hanging on a wire and every now and then it goes out from under the tree canopy to sunbathe and recharge the batteries and then it goes back in and measures stuff in the microclimate. [sfx: raccoonbot moving along a wire] TSO: This is the sound of its cousin the RaccoonBot moving along its wire. EGERSTEDT: And then I moved to Southern California and discover our beaches are gorgeous Southern California beaches. [sounds of music and people at Crystal Cove beach] And we wanted to put SlothBots on the beach, but they're not indigenous to Southern California. And I was actually down at one of our local beaches here and saw a raccoon digging through a trash can. So we decided, let's turn it into a raccoon instead. TSO: I asked children at the beach what they thought of the raccoonbot BOY1: It’s really cool! BOY2: It’s cute too. With a bow tie. TSO: It has a bow tie! BOY2: And it’s on the rope TSO: Did you know it’s a robot? Boy2: Well, you just told us, so yeah. (laugh) TEEN GIRL: I’m wondering what it does? TSO: It collects environmental data. TEEN GIRL: Oh, woah, that’s cool. TSO: What’s up next? An otterbot EGERSTEDT: We’ve teamed up with the Ocean Institute in Dana Point. So instead of being on a horizontal wire, there'll be a vertical of wire down in the water anchored by a buoy, and it's going to look at the water quality at different depths. [Sound of deep water] But it's basically going to climb up and down a wire underwater looking like an adorable otter. [Sounds of swarm robots at UCI Robot Ecology Lab] TSO: There’s more to his lab than cute robots. Back at the UCI Robot Ecology Lab, there are these swarm robots you hear that are about the size of your palm. He created the first remotely-accessible swarm robot lab that’s been used by over 7,000 researchers. EGERSTEDT: So in the lab, we have a setup that we call the robotarium, and it looks like a small ice hockey arena, a rink. And really what it is, it’s just a test bed for testing different kinds of primarily mobility strategies TSO: His students are working on algorithms to see if the robots can be organically kind and helpful to one another. Postdoctoral researcher Brooks Butler explains: BUTLER: The idea is that we’re looking at ecology for inspirations and putting together algorithms for robots to work together. It’s essentially the idea that I’m willing to take on a personal cost to help you based off of how related we are. In nature you’d see that as say a mother lioness taking care of her sister’s cub. For robots we think about instead of thinking of genetic relatedness we think about how do their tasks relate to each other and how can we strategically algorithmically have them sacrifice or perhaps take on additional cost in order to benefit another robot’s task. I think we're seeing some really interesting results. We're seeing some really organic behavior emerge just naturally ...
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    7 mins
  • The Power of Glowing Color

    The Power of Glowing Color
    Nov 12 2025

    Stacy Copp's lab is using glowing light and color to see deep inside human tissues which could replace the need for X-rays. Listen to Copp, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, share her inspirations and ground breaking work at her UCI lab.

    Transcript:

    [Sci fi music]

    [Sound of lab machine automated spectrometer chirping]

    STACY COPP: This is an automated spectrometer.

    NATALIE TSO, HOST: Stacy Copp’s lab at UC Irvine’s engineering school is on the cutting edge of using the power of light and color to see deep inside human tissues - which could replace the need for X rays. She’s an associate professor of materials science and engineering. Her fascination with light began as a child.

    COPP: I found it really exciting to sit in the closet with a flashlight or to look at a rainbow being cast from a piece of glass.

    TSO: In college, she had a life changing look under a microscope of a sample of little beads loaded with fluorescent dye.

    COPP: I remember the moment that they came into focus and they were there twinkling and they were glowing yellow. And I remember thinking at that moment, this is my universe under this microscope.

    TSO: That lit her path as a scientist. Years later she discovered she has a heightened ability to see and distinguish color - which explains a lot.

    COPP: I just find the things that glow so fascinating. I think it's some kind of innate love that I have. That color is just really vivid to me.

    TSO: Now she leads a lab that is developing ways to use color for bioimaging.

    COPP: We make glowing nanoclusters that are wrapped up in DNA, and DNA molecule is the code for this cluster. It determines the color that it glows. So our goal is to figure out what DNA sequence do we need to get that color, whether it's this near-infrared color of glow that can be used for deep tissue, biomedical imaging, or whether it's a visible green blue red glow that can be used for different types of photonic applications.

    [Sound of lab machine automated spectrometer chirping]

    TSO: The lab uses this chirping automated spectrometer to measure wavelengths of light emitted by nanoscale materials which are about 10 million times smaller than a blueberry.

    COPP: Inside of this box is a well plate that has 384 different holes. Each hole contains a different sample of DNA stabilized silver clusters with its own unique color of glow. We collect large data libraries using this tool and then train machine learning models that guide the design of DNA molecules that are well-suited for fluorescent nanoclusters.

    TSO: Copp is designing silver nanoclusters which contain only 10 to 30 silver atoms. She wants to make them glow in the near infrared.

    COPP: This is really exciting for biomedical imaging because our bodies and tissues are far more transparent to near infrared light than to visible light. So if we had very brightly glowing near infrared dyes, those could be used as medical contrast agents for using non-hazardous near-infrared light for biological imaging instead of something like X-rays or an MRI machine.

    [sci fi music]

    TSO: Unlike X-rays which use ionizing radiation that can damage cells, her infrared nanoclusters could offer a safer way to do bioimaging and to track cancer

    COPP: These types of brightly emitting near infrared dyes can be used to study cellular processes that happen on micron scales but inherently happen deep inside of tissues. At the moment we don’t have good ways to visualize those like we do for single cells on a petri dish where they’re just laying there. But if we had near infrared dyes with which we could label and track their molecules and cells, then perhaps we could do that type of imaging inside tissues so we could better understand biological processes. It’s also possible that these near infrared emitters could be added as contrast agents in order to label and track things like tumors or other types of tissues that are relevant for human disease.

    TSO: Copp’s lab could enable major medical breakthroughs and it all started with her enchantment with the rainbow.

    COPP: I honestly believe that basically every child is born as a scientist. They’re all just so interested in how the world works. They’re always asking questions. They always want answers to those questions.

    TSO: Sometimes those little scientists grow up to create light we can’t even see – that could save countless lives. That’s what’s going on at Stacy Copp’s lab at UC Irvine.

    The Lab Beat is brought to you by the UCI Samueli school of engineering, and I’m Natalie Tso. If you like our podcast, please share and leave a review. Thanks and I’ll see you at the next lab.

    (Season 1, Episode 6)
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    4 mins
  • National Fuel Cell Center

    National Fuel Cell Center
    Oct 31 2025

    National Fuel Cell Research Center Director Iryna Zenyuk is striving to enable clean hydrogen to power everything from Olympic buses, trucks, the cement industry and more. A former chess champion, Zenyuk is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UC Irvine.

    Transcript:

    [Sound of electrolyzer]

    [IRYNA ZENYUK: This is an electrolyzer, yeah]

    [sci fi music]

    NATALIE TSO, HOST: Today we’re at the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine’s engineering school. The director Iryna Zenyuk is a UCI professor of chemical and biomolecular enagineering. Before getting into clean energy, she was a professional chess player, ranked in the top 5 in the US.

    ZENYUK: My grandfather played chess and he introduced me when I was maybe four or five and then I showed actually some talent.

    TSO: She was so talented, she went pro as an engineering student. She played in a life-changing tournament right after the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

    ZENYUK: It was just a week after Olympic Games and the factories were just restarting. After a week it was already we couldn't see a few feet away. I never seen anything like that.

    TSO: That’s when she decided clean energy was more important than chess. She left her chess career and is now a global leader in clean energy research.

    ZENYUK: Now we have Olympic Games in LA in 2028 and we just organized the workshop to get hydrogen buses into the program. So it kind of for me it feels like full circle. I get a chance to impact what technology going to being there so that is also exciting for me now.

    TSO: Zenyuk is working with colleagues from UC Irvine and UCLA to get hydrogen fuel cell buses to the 2028 Olympic Games.

    Her lab at UC Irvine focuses on making clean hydrogen using electrolysis - where electricity splits water H20 into hydrogen and oxygen.

    ZENYUK: This is electrolyzer yeah. It pumps water and it makes hydrogen. So this is the sound of pumping water that gets water to electrolyzer and then hydrogen comes out. So you can see some of this bubbles are hydrogen.

    [TSO: The bubbles are hydrogen. That’s really cool.]

    [Zenyuk laughs]

    TSO: The roller mixer you hear now is mixing the catalyst for the chemical reaction that produces clean hydrogen.

    ZENYUK: So this is a roll mill. We have bottles of ink, which is made of catalyst particles, ionomer, and water and solvent and they are rolled for 48 hours.

    The catalyst is made from iridium. So that's where all the reactions take place. That's where water splits to make hydrogen on the surface on this catalyst.

    TSO: Her lab is advancing hydrogen technology to power trucks, planes, ships, AI servers and the cement industry. She paired with UCI civil engineering professor Mo Li to create a way to decarbonize the production of cement.

    ZENYUK: Cement industry uses 1600 degrees Celsius process to convert calcium carbonate to calcium oxide. We do it close to room temperature.

    TSO: That eliminates the need for fossil fuels for that key process. Cement companies are taking notice.

    ZENYUK: We already have inquiries from industry, from construction companies. They, they are interested in finding a way to decarbonize their processes. They are very interested in new technologies.

    [sci fi music]

    TSO: She also believes electrolysis has the potential to process and separate mined critical minerals which the nation really needs.

    ZENYUK: We have to we have to sieve through a lot of water to extract those elements. And if you think of like they're typically in ionic. They are ions dispersed in solution and ions that charge species. So we can use electricity, electric potential. We can use different membranes, we can use different potential windows to separate certain metals and to leave all the other metals out.

    There is a lot of innovation currently happening in this field and I think here at UCI, we can position ourselves to be really leader in this field as well.

    TSO: Looks like Zenyuk’s mastermind is always thinking about the next move. You’ll want to keep an eye on her lab at UCI’s National Fuel Cell Research Center.

    Thanks for tuning into The Lab Beat, brought to you by the UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering. I’m Natalie Tso. If you like our podcast, please share it with your friends. Thanks and see at the next lab.

    (Season 1, Episode 5)
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    4 mins