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  • AI and Drones

    AI and Drones
    2026/10/13
    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 分
  • Fierce Mantis Shrimp

    Fierce Mantis Shrimp
    2026/09/10
    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 分
  • The Female Heart

    The Female Heart
    2026/08/05
    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 分
  • Self-healing Cement

    Self-healing Cement
    2026/06/18
    Mo Li is out to transform the cement industry which creates 8% of the world's carbon emissions. Li has created concrete that can heal itself and a process to produce cement with clean energy. Find out more about her concrete innovations in this episode. Mo Li is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Irvine. TRANSCRIPT: [sound of crane] NATALIE TSO, HOST: That's the sound of a crane in a three-story high lab where they test pillars of cement for earthquake resilience. Concrete is the second most used substance on Earth, after water. And the cement industry creates 8% of the world's carbon emissions. That's why it needs an overhaul. And Mo Li is leading the way. She's a professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Irvine. Li wants to make concrete greener and smarter. One of her innovations is making it more like the human body — to be self-healing. MO LI: So self-healing concrete is a concept that how about we transform concrete from a brittle material to a ductile material like metal? But the physics is concrete cannot just be stretched like metal. In order for concrete to be stretched without failure, we designed this very unique damage process into concrete, kind of like a seashell. It actually forms many, many small, tiny cracks hardly seen to human eye. TSO: She explains how she designed her concrete to sense damage and heal its own cracks. LI: To make self-healing happen, we also need to design the chemical composition in the concrete so that once you have a crack, the healing process got naturally actuated. The crack surface will have chemicals exposed to the air and water, and then chemical reaction started. It formed the new ingredients in the crack that fills the crack. TSO: Li is working with California's Department of Transportation. Her lab has already created a concrete bridge slab that has healed itself. LI: So we tested the full scale bridge slab 30 feet long, create the damage. We put it outside in the field conditions, and we proved the cracks are gone. TSO: This technology could have a major impact on the cement industry. LI: We don't need to keep, repair and maintain a concrete bridge deck or pavement. So overall, in terms of life cycle, it becomes more, more sustainable because we end up using less material. TSO: Li is a national leader in self-healing materials, but that's not the only innovation happening in her lab. She also wants to recycle concrete LI: To make concrete, we need to take everything from the earth. Cement you need to take limestone, clay from earth. To make concrete, we not only need cement, we also need sand and rocks. We take all of them from Earth as well. And then we use some water and we use small amount of chemicals. Because a huge volume is involved, there's limited resources on Earth. TSO: But recycling concrete is not easy. LI: It sounds fascinating, but the main challenge is like turning something old into the baby again. So it's against time, against nature Because when cement turns into concrete, there's chemical process there. How do we reverse it? So we can imagine we can crush concrete first, old concrete from demolition site, and then with the smaller pieces, we first ball it into particles. Then we analyze those particles and find out the status composition. [sound of ball mill machine] TSO: That's the sound of the planetary ball mill machine, which helps turn old concrete into powder. The ball mill enables them to control the size of the particles. Then the lab analyzes the powder for its properties and how to reuse it. LI: With that understanding, we can do our magic — the chemical process, electrochemical process. We extract the mineral we want from the old concrete like calcium. We can extract other things like silica. Once we have the process to extract those ingredients out of it, and then we can see how we can return it into a fresh cement. So that's really a cradle to cradle approach. TSO: Her lab has been working with companies like Mitsubishi who supply raw materials. LI: We want to turn it into higher performance materials. So that is the main philosophy we have that is different from the other type of recycling — smartly redesigned into something even better. TSO: Another breakthrough she's made is electrifying the production process of cement so it doesn't use fossil fuels. She and her partner, UCI Professor Iryna Zenyuk, created an electrochemical process powered by clean energy that greatly reduces carbon emissions. They're working with industry to bring their greener process to market. Li’s vision is to transform the cement industry. LI: My ultimate dream is to create a building, a built environment that is more durable, more sustainable and more beautiful. You know, harmony with the natural environment. I think that’s the biggest, most rewarding things civil engineers feel is you go out, you see things you create out there. It ...
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    5 分
  • Revolutionizing Gyroscopes

    Revolutionizing Gyroscopes
    2026/04/23
    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 分
  • 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. 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 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. 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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