Kayla Wiles, Purdue University

What if drones and self-driving cars had the tingling “spidey senses” of Spider-Man? They might actually detect and avoid objects better, says Andres Arrieta, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, because they would process sensory information faster. Better sensing capabilities would make it possible for drones to navigate in dangerous environments and…

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…

The rainbow is not just colors — each color of light has its own frequency. The more frequencies you have, the higher the bandwidth for transmitting information. Only using one color of light at a time on an electronic chip currently limits technologies based on sensing changes in scattered color, such as detecting viruses in…

A new manufacturing technique uses a process similar to newspaper printing to form smoother and more flexible metals for making ultrafast electronic devices. The low-cost process, developed by Purdue University researchers, combines tools already used in industry for manufacturing metals on a large scale, but uses the speed and precision of roll-to-roll newspaper printing to…

Billions of objects ranging from smartphones and watches to buildings, machine parts, and medical devices have become wireless sensors of their environments, expanding a network called the “Internet of Things.” As society moves toward connecting all objects to the Internet — even furniture and office supplies — the technology that enables these objects to communicate…

The way that electrons paired as composite particles or arranged in lines interact with each other within a semiconductor provides new design opportunities for electronics, according to recent findings in Nature Communications. What this means for semiconductor components, such as those that send information throughout electronic devices, is not yet clear, but hydrostatic pressure can…

Purdue researchers have discovered a new two-dimensional material, derived from the rare element tellurium, to make transistors that carry a current better throughout a computer chip. The discovery adds to a list of extremely thin, two-dimensional materials that engineers have tried to use for improving the operation speed of a chip’s transistors, which then allows…

Kayla Wiles, Purdue University Purdue engineers have figured out a way to tackle plastic landfills while also improving batteries — by putting ink-free plastic soaked in sulfur-containing solvent into a microwave, and then into batteries as a carbon scaffold. Lithium-sulfur batteries have been hailed as the next generation of batteries to replace the current lithium…