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The Lab Beat

The Lab Beat

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

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

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

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  • 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
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