purdue

Gestural interfaces like the Leap promise a world in which we'll all be driving cars and flying planes by waving our hands in the air, "Minority Report"-style.

Pudue University is joining the fun with the Handy-Potter, a design tool that lets you fashion 3D virtual objects with your bare hands.

Recently presented at the ASME 2012 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference in Chicago, the research won the All-Conference Best Paper award.

The Handy-Potter is a departure from traditional computer-aided design. It works with the Microsoft Kinect to track the user's body and hand gestures, modifying 3D shapes according to motions such as waving or pulling. … Read more

Blowing up a balloon yourself is boring. It's always better to spend more than 5,000 hours building a machine that can do it for you in an extremely absurd fashion.

The Purdue Society of Professional Engineers recently broke its own record for creating the most complex Rube Goldberg machine with a 300-step dazzler that goes through many, many motions just to blow up a balloon. And then pop it.

The entry failed to win the latest Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, which honors the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist with a gizmo that accomplishes a simple task in a convoluted way. It did, however, break the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers' own Guinness record, according to Purdue University.

"We did some bold things with this machine that have never even been attempted that probably startled judges, competitors and spectators," a university release quoted team president Zach Umperovitch as saying. "But we were hungry, and we were going to go large or stay home." … Read more

Anyone got a charger? If you're tearing your hair out at your phone running out of juice all the time, it could be that your favorite apps are to blame. New research suggests that up to 75 percent of free Android apps' battery use is spent on advertisements and other hidden tasks.

New Scientist reports the findings from Indiana's Purdue University, where curious boffins built special software to analyze apps' power demands.

For example, the research reveals (PDF) that smash hit Angry Birds, among others, spends just a fifth of the power it uses on actually playing the fowl-flinging game. Instead, nearly half of the energy used by the app goes toward checking where you are using GPS and downloading adverts over 3G that are specific to your location.

Read more of "Free Android apps waste 75 per cent of power on adverts" at Crave UK. … Read more

Names and Social Security numbers of 43,000 Yale University students, faculty, staff, and alumni were accessible via the Google search engine for about 10 months, according to the school newspaper.

The problem was discovered June 30 and university officials disclosed it on August 12, offering affected individuals two years of free credit monitoring and identity theft insurance even though they said there was no indication that the information had been exploited, the Yale Daily News reported last week.

The data, mostly belonging to people who worked for the university in 1999, was stored on a file transfer protocol (FTP) … Read more

Researchers at Purdue University have had a breakthrough that may completely change how engineers design cooling systems in everything from computers to electric and hybrid cars.

Using special computer chips from Delphi Electronics, Suresh Garimella, the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, and doctoral student Tannaz Harirchia, have developed and tested new mathematical formulas concerning the properties of boiling liquids in "microchannels."

It's no secret that engineers, particularly chipmakers and computer manufacturers, have been striving for years to design cooling systems with highly efficient heat-transfer rates.

Microchannels are tiny channels … Read more

A team of researchers from Purdue University's Center for Systems Integrity created a high-tech "speed bump" that can detect damage to Army vehicles.

Unlike the speed-deterring cement humps in the road that drivers typically encounter, Purdue's invention is a rubber-jacketed "diagnostic cleat" that contains sensors. The sensors measure vibrations created by a vehicle as it moves over the cleat, and signal-processing software interprets the data to check for damage to the tires, wheel bearings, and suspension components.

Researchers conducted tests with high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles, or HMMWVs, commonly known as Humvees and found the … Read more

While I love going to large events like Giants games or the circus, I hate dealing with the traffic afterward. Finally though, some good has now come out of the frustration of after-event traffic.

Engineering students at Purdue University have come up with a new method to track traffic: Bluetooth. The students tracked Bluetooth signals from cell phones and other devices carried by football fans as they drove home from a recent Penn State game.

The method uses each signal to constantly update how long it takes vehicles and pedestrians to travel from one point to another. Darcy Bullock, professor … Read more

Moore's Law may get a new lease on life thanks to a discovery jointly announced Friday by researchers at IBM and Purdue University.

Named after Gordon Moore, former Intel co-founder and chairman, the well-known predict posits that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. But while Moore's Law has held true for the last 43 years, scientists say the computer industry is bound to bump up against limits to the shrinkage of conventional silicon transistor dimensions sometime in the next decade.

But that may no longer be true. IBM and Purdue researchers say … Read more

I've often wondered what a true geek's best pickup line would be, but thought "come on over and build this computer with me!" might be a little far-fetched. As it turns out, not at all.

To help students to get their geek on, Purdue University on Monday announced Rack-A-Node, an online computer game that lets you build... a computer.

But it's not just any computer, it's a supercomputer. In the game, players are asked to build a cluster supercomputer using a variety of computing types to run science experiments. A player begins with a … Read more