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  • Curing the Brain

    Curing the Brain
    2026/03/12
    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 分
  • Methalox Rockets

    Methalox Rockets
    2026/01/15

    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.

    (Season 1, Episode 10)
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    6 分
  • Becoming Invisible

    Becoming Invisible
    2025/12/20

    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.
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    6 分
  • Hydrogen Fueling the Future

    Hydrogen Fueling the Future
    2025/12/12

    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.
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    8 分
  • Can a Robot Love?

    Can a Robot Love?
    2025/11/26
    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 分
  • The Power of Glowing Color

    The Power of Glowing Color
    2025/11/12

    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.

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

    National Fuel Cell Center
    2025/10/31

    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.

    (Season 1, Episode 5)
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    4 分
  • Upcycling EV batteries

    Upcycling EV batteries
    2025/10/22
    Diran Apelian found a way to recycle EV batteries and co-founded the billion-dollar company Ascend Elements, one of TIME'S America's Top Ten Green Tech companies of 2024. Find out about the cutting-edge technology his lab uses to upcycle metal at UC Irvine's Samueli School of Engineering. Transcript: [sound of Tesla starting] [sci fi music] NATALIE TSO, HOST: What happens to EV batteries when we’re done with them? Diran Apelian invented a way to recycle them and co-founded a billion dollar company Time magazine named one of America’s Top Ten Green Tech Companies of 2024. Apelian is a distinguished professor of materials science and engineering at UC Irvine’s engineering school. What inspired him to get into metallurgy – the science of metals? DIRAN APELIAN: Even in my teenage years, I was very interested in rocks, minerals. I sort of had a connection with the Earth, you know. I found it to be beautiful, actually. Then I was exposed to a tour of a steel mill, United States Steel. And for the first time, I saw molten steel, but not in a few grams, but in tons of it being poured. I was completely taken back. I was fascinated. There was something magical about the smell, the visual Earth and the fire. And I got attracted to it. And the same time the Sputnik age was coming up, you know, where we were sending missiles up to the moon and trying to get to the moon and everything in the headlines was all the material problems. You know, the tiles protecting the vessel, they were falling off. I put two and two together and that's how I got interested in metallurgical engineering. TSO: And the world is better for it. He not only made aluminum foil stronger, he put aluminum in cars. APELIAN: Many years ago, most of the cars were mostly steel, and in the nineties or so we moved from steel to aluminum because aluminum is three times lighter. So we want to decrease the weight of the car so we don't use as much fuel. So we actually got involved in developing the alloys for the Audi, all aluminum. TSO: That was the Audi A8 — the first mass market car with an all aluminum body. He also tells us what led to the billion dollar company he co-founded, Ascend Elements, which is a major recycler of EV batteries. APELIAN: The battery comprises of anode and cathodes. The cathode has a lot of prescious metal in it – cobalt, nickel. So when these things are end of life, they need to be recovered, all these precious metals. So we developed the technologies to recover the cobalt, the nickel and lithium, all the important elements that are not critical, but near critical and reuse them into a new cathode. And ironically, the recycled material has better properties than the virgin material because we can manipulate the morphology of the powder sizes and all that to control the conductive electronic charges and all that. TSO: Apelian’s lab is a leader in upcycling end-of-life metal products. [sounds of ultrasound machine melting metal] [RAQUEL JAIME: It’s only going to be a small amount] TSO: That’s Ph.D. student Raquel Jaime. She’s melting scrap aluminum in their lab and it does look pretty cool. She’s giving them an ultrasonic treatment that can potentially remove impurities in the metal. She’s researching how the ultrasound – which is not yet used in industry - can make stronger metals for cars and jets. [JAIME: There we go cool, and then we’ll just remelt it in a little bit.] TSO: As for the molten metal that captivated her professor? She loves it too. JAIME: - That’s like my favorite thing that I get to do in here, that treating it with the ultrasound. It all sounds very crazy. It's not something I would have imagined myself doing as a kid. It sounds weird. I always say that it sounds like the two combination things that you need to get like a Marvel super villain. Ultrasound frequency and molten metal, it sounds like if I fell in, I would turn into some weird sort of character. I don’t know. [Jaime laughs] [sound of cold spray machine] TSO: Another cutting-edge technology in the lab is the cold spray machine which you hear in the background. Now cold is relative because here it means at least 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Graduate student Michael Ross explains what’s special about this million-dollar 3D printer: ROSS: So the big advantage of cold spray is that you don't need to actually melt the metal that you're processing so you can make solid metal parts without melting your material, which really opens up the possibilities of using more advanced materials that melt at higher temperatures. And that's important for applications in extreme environments like aerospace, where they need to withstand higher temperatures. TSO: That’s the cold. As for the spray, it runs at three times the speed of sound or Mach3. Ph.D. student Jack Webster explains what happens in cold spray: WEBSTER: We have a robotic arm that moves this substrate plate around while a nozzle flings powder at a super high ...
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    6 分