Cover crops have been promoted for their abilities to reduce erosion and retain or enhance soil nutrients. Now there is evidence that they can significantly reduce weed seeds from entering the soil seed bank.

A pair of Purdue University professors are using the popular Nintendo Wii gaming system to help people with Parkinson’s disease. Jessica Huber and Jeff Haddad from the College of Health and Human Sciences are studying how playing specially created games can improve a patient’s movement, speech and overall quality of life.

Purdue University achieved another record year of sponsored research funding, reaching $418.3 million in fiscal year 2017, topping the previous year’s record of $403 million.

Determining how to improve the resilience of power grid structures in the face of outages from severe weather events is the focus of a multidisciplinary study by Purdue professors.

The project, “Towards a Resilient Grid: An Investment Prioritization Decision Framework that Integrates the Growing Risks of Severe Weather-Induced Outages,” received a $468,851 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Through a collaborative project, Purdue University and Dow AgroSciences researchers have discovered a novel soybean gene that provides resistance to a devastating and costly fungal disease.

The National Science Foundation has chosen Purdue University to lead an engineering research center, which will develop new technologies to produce fuels from U.S. shale-gas deposits that could inject $20 billion annually into the economy.

A consortium of experts is working to modernize a process that is used in making a wide range of products, from freeze-dried space foods to lifesaving wonder drugs.

The process, called “lyophilization,” removes water at low temperature and pressure. Lyophilization is needed for products that would be damaged if they were dried by heating, but it can be slow, energy-intensive and expensive.

Researchers at Purdue University are creating a device that they hope will help identify risk factors that cause breast cancer.

The device, known as risk-on-a-chip, is a small plastic case with several thin layers and an opening for a piece of paper where researchers can place a portion of tissue. This tiny environment produces risk factors for cancer and mimics what happens in a living organism.

The National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center has awarded Purdue University’s Young Kim, associate professor with the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, and Md Munirul Haque, research scientist with the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering, and their interdisciplinary research team, a $385,000, two-year grant to improve mobile testing for anemia in resource-limited settings.

As heavy flooding events, including those in Houston, Texas, and Mumbai, India, continue, research teams from Purdue University and India have been working on improving the models that can help predict heavy rainfall from weather events.

The researchers found that including an improved representation of how hot and wet the land surface is before a storm forms gives significant information that leads to improvements in the prediction of heavy rain timing, location, magnitude and duration.

New measurements of molecular iodine in the Arctic show that even a tiny amount of the element can deplete ozone in the lower atmosphere.

Growers of tomatoes, cucumbers and other vegetables can extend their growing season and increase yield by placing high tunnels over their cold-sensitive crops, but those tunnels don’t provide the pest protection that has long been assumed.