Bioengineering

Registration for the Great Exhibition Road Festival is now OPEN!🎉

The Festival takes place on 7-8 June 2025, and will be full of exciting free events for all ages: from hands-on workshops to fascinating talks, and immersive performances to amazing art🎨🧬

Enjoy a relaxing yoga workshop inspired by insect movements, paint the northern lights with astronomers, or discover the science behind Bollywood dance. Design butterfly carnival costumes, take to the tiniest disco floor in the universe to explore quantum, discuss the new space race or experience chemistry brought to life through amazing reactions, slime and explosions at the interactive family-friendly show.

Read Events: Spring 2025 in full

The latest paper by the Yang Lab, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, delves into a pressing issue in AI development: what happens when generative models train on their own synthetic data? This phenomenon, known as AI autophagy, leads to model collapse, loss of diversity, and ethical risks.

As the awareness of AI autophagy grows, so does the call for a comprehensive framework to understand, detect, and mitigate its effects. Our research brings together conflicting findings, theoretical perspectives, and empirical evidence to highlight the risks and propose potential solutions.

One key takeaway is that technical fixes alone, like watermarking or detection methods, aren’t enough.

Read AI Autophagy: Understanding the Risks and Solutions in full

Congratulations to Karina Cheng, Biomedical Technology Ventures BSc student, and teammate Yihan Pu, on winning Imperial College’s Advanced Hackspace Hackstarter Grand Final with their Menosense device which monitors menopause via saliva!

Women experiencing menopause undergo hormonal changes that affect their mood, metabolism, and health. Traditional hormone tests need blood or urine samples, which can be invasive and take a long time to produce results.

Menosense introduces a portable saliva-based hormone detector for menopause that uses Lateral Flow Immunoassay technology for home use. It provides quick, noninvasive, and accurate hormone readings in just 20 minutes. A handheld reader analyses disposable test strips, and results appear on the device and a Bluetooth-connected mobile app, allowing users to track their health.

Read Saliva-based Menopause Test Wins Hackstarter in full

Dr Eleonora Moratto, a postdoctoral researcher and professional ballet dancer in the Microbiome-Microscopy and Microfluidics Lab, showcased her SciBallet Project at an Imperial Late event themed “Weird Science” in February.

Eleonora initiated the SciBallet project after choreographing and performing a dance that illustrated her PhD research. This experience earned her a spot as a finalist in the Dance Your PhD competition. It sparked her fascination with the intersection of science and art, particularly the use of ballet’s storytelling capabilities to convey complex research to the public.

Her dance wrapped up the event, featured a presentation on the historical relationship between science and art, and demonstrated how electric fields can be utilised to prevent plant root infections.

Read Science on Pointe in full