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Auburn’s Detection & Food Safety Center

More than 48 million Americans each year fall ill from foodborne illnesses like Salmonella and E. coli. Those illnesses – according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – cost the U.S. more than $77 billion per year. The sheer volume of food imported or produced in the U.S. makes the problem terrifically complex. [...]

Tiny Sensors Detect Huge Diseases

Sensors developed by food safety engineer Bryan Chin are revolutionizing the way inspectors test food for biological pathogens that sicken about one in six Americans each year. A 2011 outbreak of Listeria claimed 16 lives in Colorado. Salmonella contamination of eggs, tomatoes, jalapenos and peanut butter from 2008 to 2010 infected thousands of people and [...]

Plant Experts Combat Dangerous Weed

…like the famed iceberg that slew the Titanic, the majority of the danger from this plant lies underground. It’s got an incredibly dense root system—as much as 80% of the mass of the plant—and it sends out specialized root systems, called rhizomes, to choke the life out of everything around it for meters.

Studying Plasma to Save the Satellite

Small microparticles trapped in plasmas have strange and wonderful properties because sometimes they behave like fluids and sometimes like gases. On small scales, these particles can be used to improve the properties of things like solar panels. On very large scales, these particles give you the spectacular patterns in Saturn’s rings.

Industry Collaboration Superteam

When it comes to innovation, the most basic approach is often the most successful. Ask and listen. That’s how faculty and students in Auburn’s School of Building Science and Department of Industrial & Graphic Design are helping one of the nation’s biggest industries — construction — improve productivity, working conditions and safety. They start by [...]

You’re really going to eat THAT!?

Salmonella in peanut butter. E. coli in beef. Listeria in lettuce. Each year a surprising number – one in six – of Americans get sick from tainted food. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that more than 3,000 of those people die. Part of the problem is the global supply chain. Those peanuts may come [...]

Re-engineering the Human Heart

More than one out of every four deaths in the United States is caused by heart disease, making it the leading cause of death for men and women every year.
Cardiac regeneration scientist Elizabeth Lipke sees a solution. […]

Waste Not: Auburn Makes Progress in the Energy Battle

Auburn engineers and scientists are one step closer to replacing coal with waste as the primary energy source in portland cement production. It might not sound like a big deal, but the use of waste materials, such as poultry litter or old tires, will have tremendous environmental and cost-saving benefits. Coal is a non-renewable resource and makes up 40 [...]

MRI Research

MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is fairly common these days. The scanners allow physicians a non-invasive, pain free look inside a patient’s body. But Auburn University’s newly-built MRI Center will take medical imaging and imaging research to a new level. The facility currently houses an open-bore, 3 Tesla scanner – one of a very few in the [...]

2010 Annual Update

Auburn researchers last year set university records for the number of U.S. patents and license and option agreements in fields as diverse as advanced materials, biotechnology and environmental sciences. The Auburn Research Park also grew, adding a new MRI Research Center with one of the most powerful diagnostic tools available.

Energy the Way Nature Intended It?

When Wei Zhan got to thinking about solar panel expenses, he started looking at the inefficiencies in traditional silicon solar panels and researching systems that were more efficient. He found some. They’re called plants.

Biofuel Solutions for the Southeast

The IBSS partnership is a group of Universities and companies determined to bridge the divide between farmers and liquid fuel producers. Through improved genetics, planting and harvesting processes, transportation and storage innovations, IBSS is equipped to make bio-fuel production in the Southeast a reality.

Training the Super Dog

Detection dogs coming out of Auburn’s rigorous training program can locate explosives in a moving crowd –just by scenting the vapor wake an explosive leaves behind- or find IEDs in a dense urban environment. Some can find infected trees in an otherwise healthy forest, or track down evasive pythons in the Everglades. They’re at work everywhere from Washington DC to Afghanistan.

Using a Laser to Illuminate the Invisible

Auburn engineer Brian Thurow and his team use wind tunnels in their work to create airflows, but while traditional wind tunnel testing focuses on measuring the forces and mapping the flows, Thurow’s method helps pinpoint the causes behind them.

Reducing Bird Strikes at the Airport

“Hit birds. We’ve lost thrust on both engines.” That was the radio transmission from US Airways Flight 1549 on January 15, 2009. The Airbus A320 hit a flock of birds a mere two minutes after takeoff. Unfortunately, that’s not an unusual occurrence.

Nature’s Mysteries Revealed with New DNA Libraries

Hundreds of drugs available today were derived from compounds scientists originally found in microbes. The development of these drugs relied on isolating microbial species in pure cultures — that is, cultures containing only a particular species of microbe. But less than 1 percent of the millions of microbial species on Earth have been cultured in [...]

Bomb Detection Robots Take the Field

Here in the U.S., there are roughly 11 million acres contaminated with unexploded ordnance—an area about the size of Florida. It gives a whole new importance to the policy “Call before you dig.” The EPA calls unexploded ordinance an “imminent and substantial” threat, and estimates that it may take more than $14 billion to clean up.

Lab Challenges, Protects Information Security

Students in Auburn’s Information Assurance Laboratory figure out how to crack government software, find messages encoded in images and music, and combat insider threats to corporate network security.

Weathering the Financial Crisis

“The financial crisis,” writes James Barth, “initially resulted from excessive credit flowing into the housing sector based on informational problems and bad incentives…” Unfortunately, home prices don’t go up year in and year out forever. Good thing Barth’s got a key to making it through financial crisis.

Television to Improve Your Relationship

For years, researchers have known that men and women in strong marriages tend to be healthier and wealthier than their single counterparts; and children raised in strong marriages are more likely to attend college, succeed academically, and live longer than those raised by single parents.

Invention Turns Garbage into Grub

The Agricultural Byproduct Value Recovery System ™ (“ABVRS ”™) is a patented process that takes fish, shrimp and chicken parts normally discarded during regular food processing and re-cycles them by adding them to existing animal feed. The end product is a high protein, nutrient rich meal. The raw material gets superheated, air dried and added to [...]

The New “Green” Asphalt

Asphalt may look sticky and black, but Randy West and his team at the National Center for Asphalt Technology are working to make it green.

Tatarchuk Tackles the Tiny Trouble

With a little wet spaghetti and piano wire you can power a Trident submarine, and build the world’s most efficient air filter.

Inhaler Drug Delivery Gets a Micro-Makeover

…inhaler particles that are the wrong size or shape or charge get stuck in the mouth and throat, or the wrong part of the lung – never making it to where they are needed for healing or relief…

Training for a Heart Attack

The only practical and sustainable countermeasure capable of providing cardio-protection is regular endurance exercise. Indeed, studies demonstrate that regular exercise reduces the risk of death from myocardial ischemia-reperfusion insult…

Dynamic Dosing with Contact Lenses

Byrne and his team have figured out a way to load drugs onto soft contact lenses, and tailor the release of these drugs to a prescribed therapy. Auburn was the first to demonstrate the extended release of antihistamines via contact lenses, and since that pioneering work, has tailored delivery systems to antibiotics…

How to Fly a Hospital

Baptist Health in Montgomery, Ala. has partnered with experts in aviation management from Auburn University to redesign the way hospital staff operate in extreme situations.

Hunting the Fruit Vine Killer

Pound for pound, one of the top cash crops in the U.S. is grapes. During 2009, 7.1 million tons, valued at $3.2 billion, were grown commercially in the United States. In California’s wine country, grapes for a certain cabernet sold at $27,000 per ton. So protecting the grape harvest is serious business…

Mosquitoes Fight Pesticides; Auburn Punches Back

Mosquitoes. Everyone knows they’re annoying, but did you know they’re also deadly? The American Mosquito Control Association estimates that every year, more than a million people die from mosquito-borne diseases. And it’s going to get worse. We’ve been spraying insecticides in massive amounts across the globe, but we can’t do that forever. Mosquitoes are becoming [...]

Auburn and the Soldier-Athlete

The Army’s emphasis on training recruits as “soldier-athletes” inspired Col. Terrence McKenrick, commander of the 192d Infantry Brigade at Fort Benning, Ga., to reach out to Auburn kinesiologist JoEllen Sefton. Each year, an estimated 14,000 soldiers cycle through nine weeks of basic combat training or fourteen weeks of infantry training. And six days a week, [...]

Tools for a Teen in a Relationship

With a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, Auburn researcher Jennifer Kerpelman’s created an innovative series of online learning modules that help teens learn successful coping skills.

Take a Virtual Tour Through a Chicken

Most people encounter a chicken on the dinner table, and then only parts of it. Professors in Auburn’s poultry science department want to be knowledgeable about everything chicken, including the workings of the reproductive tract. After all: no guts, no glory. So they created “virtual” chicken with the Media Production Group to better understand and illustrate what’s going on inside a chicken’s egg-making factory.