Wed, 11/10/2010 - 09:47 by Prince damin
West Lafayette, Ind. -- U.S. researchers say they've developed a new heart pump that could help infants born with congenital heart defects survive necessary surgeries.
Scientists at Purdue University have created a "viscous impeller pump" for children born with univentricular circulation, a congenital heart disease that is the leading cause of death from birth defects in the first year of a child's life, a university release said Tuesday.
The normal human heart contains two pumping chambers, called ventricles.
One circulates oxygenated blood throughout the body, while the other less-powerful ventricle circulates deoxygenated blood to the lungs.
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Sat, 07/31/2010 - 02:57 by Prince damin
West Lafayette, Ind. -- U.S. researchers say a new theory may explain how an earthquake fault in the middle of the continent produces large temblors far from a tectonic plate boundary.
Purdue University researchers say energy that produced 7 to 7.5 magnitude quakes in the 1800s on the 150-mile New Madrid fault system that stretches south from Cairo, Ill., through Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee came from stresses built up in the Earth's crust long ago, a university release said Friday.
Rapid erosion from the Mississippi River at the end of the last ice age washed away sediment and removed weight pressing down on the Earth's crust, allowing the fault to slip and trigger earthquakes, they suggest.
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Fri, 07/09/2010 - 02:12 by Pankaj Damin
West Lafayette, Ind. -- If agricultural waste can't go to a biofuel processing center, then the processing center should go to the agricultural waste, U.S. researchers theorized.
Researchers at Purdue University propose creating mobile processing plants that would roam the Midwest to produce biofuels using a technique called fast-hydropyrolysis-hydrodeoxygenation, the West Lafayette, Ind., university said this week in a release.
Researchers said biomass and hydrogen would be fed into a high-pressure reactor and subjected to extremely fast heating, rising to as hot as 900 degrees F in less than a second in the biofuel process.
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Thu, 06/17/2010 - 11:08 by Pankaj Damin
Houston -- U.S. scientists say they've solved a basic scientific question about why some fluids containing polymers form beads when they are stretched and others do not.
Researchers led by Rice University Professor Matteo Pasquali, Purdue University Professors Osman Basaran and Michael Harris and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Gareth McKinley said their findings could lead to improvements in such fields as in ink-jet printing, nanomaterial fiber spinning and drug dispensing for personalized medicine.
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Wed, 11/18/2009 - 21:30 by Inderjit Singh
West Lafayette -- A new federally funded facility now under construction at Purdue University will be used to test aircraft engines and develop new aviation fuels.
Officials said the National Test Facility for Fuels and Propulsion, being funded with a $1.35 million grant from the U.S. Air Force, will be housed in the Niswonger Aviation Technology Building at the university's Airport.
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Wed, 10/07/2009 - 23:49 by surajdogra
West Lafayette, Ind. -- Purdue University researcher Xiaoqi Liu says he has discovered the absence of certain proteins needed for proper cell duplication can lead to cancer.
Liu, an assistant professor of biochemistry, determined cytoplasmic linker protein-170 plays a major role in proper cell duplication and DNA distribution. When the protein is removed, cell duplicates lack entire copies of DNA and can become cancerous.
"DNA has to be equally distributed from a mother cell to its daughter cells. If the cells are not identical to the mother cell, they become cancer," Liu said.
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Wed, 10/07/2009 - 01:12 by surajdogra
West Lafayette, Ind. -- A U.S. psychologist says the performance of people trying to accomplish a physical task can often affect their perception of the task after they are finished.
Purdue University Assistant Professor Jessica Witt and doctoral student Travis Dorsch said they studied the visual perceptions of 23 non-football athletes who attempted to kick field goals from the center of a football field at the 10-yard line. Those who made successful kicks "judged the goal posts to be farther apart and the crossbar lower to the ground," Witt reported. Participants who kicked the ball too wide judged the goal to be narrower, while those kicking the ball too short judged the goal to be taller.
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Tue, 09/29/2009 - 23:21 by surajdogra
West Lafayette, Ind. -- U.S. scientists say they have determined growing more corn to produce biofuels would contaminate water sources.
Purdue University researchers said their study of Indiana water sources found those near fields that practice continuous-corn rotations had higher levels of nitrogen, fungicides and phosphorous than corn-soybean rotations.
"When you move from corn-soybean rotations to continuous corn, the sediment losses will be much greater," Associate Professor Indrajeet Chaubey, who co-led the study, said. "Increased sediment losses allow more fungicide and phosphorous to get into the water because they move with sediment."
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Wed, 09/23/2009 - 00:27 by surajdogra
West Lafayette, Ind. -- Purdue University researchers say they have perfected an understanding of precisely how fluid boils in tiny "microchannels" in hybrid and electric cars.
That discovery, said the researchers, has led to formulas and models that will help engineers design systems to cool high-power electronics in electric and hybrid cars, aircraft, computers and other devices.
The new type of cooling system will be used to prevent overheating of devices called insulated gate bipolar transistors -- high-power switching transistors used in hybrid and electric vehicles.
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Fri, 09/11/2009 - 00:56 by surajdogra
Weat Lafayette, Ind. -- Purdue University says it has received a $105 million National Science Foundation grant to lead a national earthquake engineering network.
Purdue will use the five-year grant -- the largest in the university's history -- to create a center that will be the headquarters of the George Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation.
The center will connect 14 network research equipment sites and the earthquake engineering community through groundbreaking cyber-infrastructure, education and outreach efforts, university officials said.
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Tue, 09/01/2009 - 21:30 by Inderjit Singh
West Lafayette -- Purdue University freshmen and sophomores this fall will be using a first-of-its-kind computer system that will warn them if they need work in certain areas.
The system, called "Signals," will be offered to more than 11,000 students enrolled in so-called gateway courses. Signals -- using traffic-like signals of red, yellow and green lights -- tracks student academic progress and warns students as early as the second week of classes whether their effort is putting them on a path to success.
Purdue officials said the system uses a sophisticated data mining and analytics algorithm that checks more than 20 data points, focusing more on the student's effort, rather than just their grades.
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Wed, 08/26/2009 - 22:59 by surajdogra
West Lafayette, Ind. -- Purdue University scientists say they've determined tropical storms originating over oceans retain their strength after landfall when ground moisture is high.
The study of more than 30 years of monsoon data from India, led by Professor Dev Niyogi, showed tropical storms endure when ground moisture is high, but
lose power over dry land.
"Once a storm comes overland, it was unclear whether it would stall, accelerate or fizzle out," said Niyogi, who also serves as Indiana's state climatologist. "We found that whether a storm becomes more intense or causes heavy rains could depend on the land conditions -- something we'd not considered. Thus far we've looked at these storms based mainly on ocean conditions or upper atmosphere."
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