Science Highlights
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Pat Zollner and his students have golden eagles, butterflies, bats, herons, flying squirrels, chipmunks, martens and raccoons wandering around at Purdue but you needn’t worry about the University being overrun. The insects, birds and mammals are safe...
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Geospatial data project will let almost anyone put almost anything on the map
Purdue researchers and ITaP are embarking on a $4.5 million, four-year project to create a powerful Web-based system that will allow researchers worldwide to manage, curate, share, analyze and visualize geospatial data for purposes ranging from predi...
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Given the myriad uses we put lithium-ion batteries to — from the smartphones in our pockets to the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner passenger aircraft — how much we don’t know about the batteries' inner workings, especially at the molecular or atomic scales...
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Economic modeling with Carter cluster, DiaGrid offers empirically based guidance for policymakers
For about two decades voluntary pollution abatement programs have shifted in and out of popularity with national — popular in the George W. Bush administration, not so much under President Obama — state and even international policymakers. The progra...
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Carter cluster aids in probing turbulent combustion in engines
Consider two vital processes that go on in your car engine. One is turbulence, a kind of chaotic, random flow involving fuel and air. The other is combustion, a chemical process by which fuel ignites to provide the oomph to move the vehicle forward....
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Particle accelerator, supercomputing are revealing the universe’s original recipe
Quark-gluon plasma, formed at temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, is something you won’t find cooking in any kitchen on Earth. But scientists believe it was the soup of the day over the entire universe for a few microseconds...
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Virtual environment makes Purdue’s real-life accessible biology wet lab available worldwide
Purdue faculty members and ITaP’s Envision Center for Data Perceptualization have developed a Web-enabled, 3-D virtual environment that recreates the real-life Accessible Biomedical Immersion Laboratory (ABIL) located at Purdue’s Discovery Learning R...
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Purdue researchers using SubmitR on DiaGrid to get results
Agricultural economics Professor Michael Delgado uses computationally demanding statistical models to study questions like the effectiveness of voluntary pollution abatement programs and the impact of education in economies of developing nations. “Al...
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PURR provides a campus hub for research data management
In January 2011, the National Science Foundation began requiring all grant proposals to include two-page plans that describe what data will be generated in the research and how the data will be managed and shared. Other funding agencies such as the N...
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Research using DiaGrid and community clusters helps make computer systems we rely on more reliable
International treaties that ban detonating nuclear weapons for testing are generally viewed as a good thing, but it certainly creates challenges for people charged with ensuring the weapons' reliability, in storage as well as in use. Electrical and c...
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Agent-based models help identify path of least resistance in hurricane evacuations
Emergency managers would do well to consider staggering evacuations in a disaster like a hurricane, perhaps advising people living nearest the storm surge and neighborhoods with a lot of elderly residents to leave first, followed by advisories to les...
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Research uses clusters to explore how biomimetic composite materials meet and greet
To the computer savvy, "interface" might bring to mind the way a computer operating system like Windows presents the world inside the machine to its users. Business types might hear interface and think of meeting to explore mutual interests...
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Airline cabin environment research could make the air up there better
"Contagion" is just a thriller of a movie but its premise - a deadly disease spread around the world by airline passengers - is no fiction, as experience with SARS and the H1N1 flu virus illustrate. That’s one reason Purdue mechanical engin...
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Silicon wire 4 atoms wide and 1 atom tall may be small, but it can carry a load
Like that little old ant with the rubber tree plant in the song, silicon wires just four atoms wide and an atom tall may be small, but they can carry a load. Purdue Professor Gerhard Klimeck's lab helped a team from the University of New South Wales...
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Computational simulation opens a window on planet formation with a new view
Our Solar System formed about 4.5 billion years ago so it is a little late to watch Earth, Mars and their fellow planets coalescing out of the cloud of gas and dust surrounding the young sun. Nonetheless, David Minton, a Purdue planetary scientist, i...
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Shared licensing brings powerful data visualization tool to Purdue researchers
When entomology Professor Jeffrey Holland’s class wanted to find out how changing the size and increasing the isolation of a landscape affects its ability to host 15 insect species ranging from butterflies to wasps, the researchers built a 3-D pictur...
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Virtual ICU created by faculty, ITaP partnership supports research and training
When a physician is treating a patient in an intensive care unit, nurses are more than partners. They’re also human safety checklists. Are the right medicines and equipment on hand? Has the patient consented to the procedure? Did the doctor wash his...
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ITaP, faculty partnership looks at Lake Michigan in depth -- without anybody getting wet
ITaP data visualization specialists are helping provide some illuminating 3-D animations of environmental fluid mechanics processes affecting the Great Lakes. Civil engineering Professor Cary Troy models hydrodynamic flow in Lake Michigan and collect...
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ITaP supercomputer is remote guest of honor at Iowa high-performance computing school
Moffett, ITaP’s SiCortex supercomputer, was the center of attention recently for students in the annual Iowa High Performance Computing (IHPC) Summer School. Iowa Professor Greg Howes, the course instructor, contacted the TeraGrid looking for a syste...
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NASA, Purdue study offers recipe for global warming-free industrial materials
Let a bunch of fluorine atoms get together in the molecules of a chemical compound and they’re like a heavy metal band at a chamber music festival. They tend to dominate the proceedings and not always for the better. That’s particularly true where th...