In the news

Technology could help caregivers find infections earlier in infants, elderly WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A urinary tract infection can be painful at any age, with the burning sensations, frequent urges and pressure. It can be even worse and more dangerous for those who may not be able to communicate clearly what is happening to their bodies, such as the elderly and babies. Urinary tract infections are responsible for nearly 10 million doctor visits each year in the United States. They can also be a major source of additional disease, particularly for elderly people. Many current technologies to try to detect UTIs can be difficult to use and require a urine sample be processed, which can be inconvenient and slow in receiving results.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — When an HIV outbreak hit Indiana's rural Scott County in 2015, the sparsely staffed health department was stretched to confirm cases among an entire community with lab tests that aren't portable and could take weeks to return results. This meant that it took over a year to confirm 235 HIV cases for the area. Even at-home tests for HIV currently require a person to wait a couple months after possible infection before testing themselves.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers have been trying for many years to build a quantum computer that industry could scale up, but the building blocks of quantum computing, qubits, still aren’t robust enough to handle the noisy environment of what would be a quantum computer. A theory developed only two years ago proposed a way to make qubits more resilient through combining a semiconductor, indium arsenide, with a superconductor, aluminum, into a planar device. Now, this theory has received experimental support in a device that could also aid the scaling of qubits.

Lyophilization can help create food for space travel, new medicines for cancer WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Research continues on an eventual 140-million-mile mission to Mars, developing the latest transportation as well as habitats necessary for the red planet. But embarking on such a mission and safely living both during and afterward are differing ideas. The latter is the research focus of Alina Alexeenko.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Your chances of getting a nasty migraine increase following a spinal cord injury, thanks to a chemical messenger in the brain that spikes to toxic levels, past studies have suggested. For treatment to get any better, researchers need to catch that split-second spike in action and closely follow its path of destruction. Purdue University engineers have built a tiny, flexible sensor that is faster and more precise than past attempts at tracking this chemical, called glutamate. The sensor, an implantable device on the spinal cord, is primarily a research tool for testing in animal models, but could find future clinical use as a way to monitor whether a drug for neurotrauma or brain disease is working.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A fascination with movie technology that showed robots perform self-repair through a liquid formula inspired a Purdue University professor to make his own discoveries – which are now helping to lead the way for advancements in self-powering devices such as consumer electronics and defense innovations. The Purdue team, led by Wenzhuo Wu, the Ravi and Eleanor Talwar Rising Star Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering, has created wearable technology to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy. A video about the technology is available at https://youtu.be/TXo7zcijVjI.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Someone could hack into your pacemaker or insulin pump and potentially kill you, just by intercepting and analyzing wireless signals. This hasn't happened in real life yet, but researchers have been demonstrating for at least a decade that it's possible. Before the first crime happens, Purdue University engineers have tightened security on the "internet of body." Now, the network you didn't know you had is only accessible by you and your devices, thanks to technology that keeps communication signals within the body itself.

The deadline for faculty proposal submissions in support of the Discovery Park Undergraduate Research Internship (DURI) program is March 11. Interested faculty can submit abstracts for individual projects at the DURI website. Accepted proposals will be announced on March 18.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Qubits, the units used to encode information in quantum computing, are not all created equal. Some researchers believe that topological qubits, which are tougher and less susceptible to environmental noise than other kinds, may be the best medium for pushing quantum computing forward. Quantum physics deals with how fundamental particles interact and sometimes come together to form new particles called quasiparticles. Quasiparticles appear in fancy theoretical models, but observing and measuring them experimentally has been a challenge. With the creation of a new device that allows researchers to probe interference of quasiparticles, we may be one giant leap closer. The findings were published Monday in Nature Physics.

Quantum computers will process significantly more information at once compared to today's computers. But the building blocks that contain this information – quantum bits, or "qubits" – are way too sensitive to their surroundings to work well enough right now to build a practical quantum computer.