Award Data

The project focuses on making solar energy affordable to meet the basic energy needs for low-income, rural households. By focusing on solar energy as the source, this project addresses the societal challenge area relating to global change & amp; sustainable energy.Our goal is to substantially reduce the system cost to address essential energy needs, providing on the order of 10kWh per day with ene ...

Drought is a major constraint on crop productivity and a significant risk for American farmers. The challenges associated with drought are likely to increase due to climate change, which will increase temperatures and alter precipitation patterns. Adapting the nation & #39;s agricultural system to water-limited conditions is a major priority to ensure food security and sustainable farm economics. ...

Strawberries are the 2nd largest non-citrus fruit crop in the U.S., trailing grapes and surpassing apples (USDA 2012). With strawberries harvested for processing (as a value-added food ingredient), the calyx (the stem cap with green crown leaves) must be removed to avoid having inedible leaves in the food product. The current in-field labor intensive de-capping process using cutting tools risks fi ...

In studies conducted for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it was estimated that approximately 48 million new cases of food-related illness, resulting in 3,000 deaths and 128,000 hospitalizations, occur in the United States annually. These estimates, although lower than previous estimates, confirm that foodborne illness continues to be a problem. Together with the mortality and quali ...

A leading public health problem affecting individuals world-wide is food poisoning. Pathogen contamination of post-harvest food sources is a major health issue. There is a wealth of information and data that indicate that the occurrence of infectious gastrointestinal diseases is globally on the rise; and that food-borne pathogens can readily adapt to environmental changes, contributing significant ...

Well over 50 % of US land area constitutes low wind-speed sites, yet current wind turbines are not effective in low winds. To extract significantly more energy from such DOE Class 1 or Class 2 wind sites requires substantially increasing turbine blade rotor diameter (wind power is proportional to the square of the blade diameter).Recently, we have successfully demonstrated advanced low-RPM generat ...

Intramammary infection (a.k.a., mastitis) is the largest attributable cause of lost productivity, discarded milk, chronic morbidity, and prophylactic antibiotic use in the dairy industry. The majority of new infections are associated with the dry period, during which the udders are temporarily engorged with milk that often leaks from the teat ends. Furthermore, the three major agencies of the U.S. ...

Lameness in dairy cows is a growing and severe problem. Current methods to detect lameness are inadequate for all but the smallest herds and suffer from high levels of subjectivity. At this point, no device is able to constantly monitor dairy cows for lameness using an automated, non-invasive, objective method.The 3D StepMetrix system being validated in Phase II will correctly identify sound and l ...

Medigen successfully designed and tested a conceptually novel VLP design as a vaccine for avian influenza (AI). This vaccine isnot dependent on egg production and allows protection against multiple AI viruses by using a single preparation of VLP vaccine. For example, we demonstrated that co-expression of H5, H7, and H9 HA proteins along with other influenza proteins resulted in a triple-HA H5/H7/H ...

In response to recent spinach and tomato/pepper recalls, the produce industry launched the Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI) to institute electronic traceability standards. PTI created standards for marking produce cases which includes embedding a Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), lot/batch, and/or harvest date within a barcode. These new standards present challenges for adoption within the ind ...