In the last fifty years, pharmaceutical companies have spent tens of billions of dollars trying to find new classes of antibiotic drugs. Only one has made it into clinical practice. Seem surprising to you? Yeah, me too. At the same time, antibacterial resistance has been rising, meaning the pathogens that infect us are getting better ...
I wrote a story for today’s news email about civil and environmental engineering chair Jerry Hajjar‘s new NSF grant to develop building design methods that take eventual deconstruction into account. Here is a graphic of the clamping system he discussed in the article: Image courtesy of Mark Webster for Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, Inc. Tweet
May 24, 2012 UPDATE: It looks like our guys were right! Last night, Phillip Phillips was crowned the 2012 American Idol winner. According to the US twitter data, that’s exactly what Sternberg Distinguished Professor Alessandro Vespignani and his team over at Northeastern’s MoBS-lab predicted. This means a couple of things: 1) Apparently international voting isn’t ...
A couple weeks ago I attended the pharmaceutical sciences research expo, where, as you might imagine, a bunch of pharmaceutical scientists got together to present their current work. Among a slew of other cool things I learned, I discovered that we have something called the Center for Translational Neuro-Imaging on campus. If you want to ...
Last week I told you about work from Bruno Gonçalves, at the Laboratory of for the modeling of biological and socio-techical systems, about the Twitter behaviors of politically-minded social media users. Today I got an email from Alessandro Vespignani, who directs the laboratory, about another electoral study that his group is working on. Instead of ...
Here’s another Twitter-analysis post for all you network science junkies out there. And although I’m a bit late to the table (New Scientist reported on this a week ago) I couldn’t resist. Bruno Gonçalves, a postdoc in Alessandro Vespignani‘s research group here at Northeastern, and three colleagues at Indiana University expanded their research on partisan ...
I spoke to yet another beneficiary of the provost’s tier 1 interdisciplinary research seed grant program yesterday. Elizabeth Dillon’s work is a bit different from most of the people I talk to these days — she’s an English professor. But she’s doing incredible things combining the humanities and computation, mining historical texts for the prevalence ...
Chemical engineering professor Ron Willey may tell you he’s a stoic, but it’s clear he is passionate about at least one thing: the well being of his fellow chemical engineers. “My interest is in getting safety into chemical engineering education and creating material to communicate about accidents so we can learn from them,” he said ...
Henry Molaison, HM for short, wanted to be a brain surgeon as a kid. Instead he spent his life as a research subject after an experimental surgery on his own brain left him incapable of forming new memories. Over the weekend I got to see the last performance of Yesterday Happened: Remembering HM at the ...
While the two images to the left remind me quite a bit of fried eggs died blue, they are in fact computational representations of cells. They come from the cover of of a new book, “Computational Methods in Cell Biology,” co-edited by chemical engineering professor Anand Asthagiri. Okay, so it may not be beach reading, ...
What are those wonky line drawings to the left, you ask? They are visual representations of four molecules that Professor Richard Deth (rhymes with teeth) and his grad student, Malav Trivedi, think might hold the key to autism. The one on the far left you’re probably familiar with…although hopefully not too familiar. BCM-7 is a ...
I’m about halfway through physics professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book, Bursts. I’ll be writing about “bursty behavior” for the news at northeastern soon, but for today’s blog purposes suffice to say that humans behave in a “bursty” pattern instead of uniformly across time. For example, you probably don’t write an email once every twenty minutes all ...