Between 1969 and 1972, 12 people (all of them men) walked on the moon, took an afternoon stroll 240,000 miles away. Around this same time, Sylvia Earle, the first chief scientist for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, was just learning to dive deep below the surface of the sea. Back then the tempertature of ...
Recent mechanical engineering graduate Andy Benn isn’t used to having time on his hands. Spending an afternoon playing tennis and eating lobster rolls, is well, unprecedented for the former Baja team captain who said he was clocking 80 to 100 hours a week in the auto shop in the basement of Richards Hall before graduating ...
New faculty members Randall Hughes and David Kimbro set up shop at the Marine Science Center this winter after spending several years at Florida State University studying oyster reefs. During their time in Tallahassee, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastated the region, dumping nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the ocean over a period of 87 days. The tragedy ...
Did you watch GoT last night? If not, don’t worry, the following post will not reveal a thing, I promise. Rebecca Certner, a PhD candidate in Steve Vollmer’s lab, wrote it a couple weeks ago for the Marine Science Center’s graduate research blog. If you’re a Khaleesi fan, a Joffrey hater, or just curious whether ...
Oh, what a fortnight. Here are four wonderful stories I stumbled upon between commencement program stuffing, News@Northeastern writing, and researcher interviewing: Apparently, it’s “statistically unwise” to include bowling scenes in Hollywood screenplays. A collection of glass sculptures of marine animals inspires a scientist and a movie maker to create a new documentary film. Ridiculous video ...
When the Human Genome Project wrapped in 2003, we assumed this ginormous data set would provide the much needed parts-list to fill in the blanks of human health and disease. But in the last 10 years it’s become exceedingly clear that things are just not that simple. Yes, our genes are obviously more than a ...
April 26 marked the annual Riser Lecture at the Marine Science Center to honor Doc Riser, the founding director of the MSC. I’d had the event in my book for several months, but when it finally came upon us my schedule had been overridden with other junk, precluding me from being able to make it up ...
A couple weeks ago I wrote a story about some work related to the Boston Marathon bombings that network scientists in David Lazer’s lab are working on. They’re asking Android phone users to donate a little time as well as the data from the calls and texts they made in the hours following the attacks. Researchers ...
For many civil engineers, the annual steel bridge competition might as well be the Super Bowl. It’s a big deal — university teams all over the country spend many months, and many late nights, coming up with a bridge design, fabricating the pieces, and building their own personal masterpiece. The bridges are serious, too: they ...
Civil and environmental engineering professor Philip Larese-Casanova has had a life-long love affair with metals. In his work in aquatic environmental chemistry, he looks at how metallic pollutants transform and behave in freshwater systems. “I just had an interest in the metals,” he told me in an interview last month. “Maybe it’s because I see ...
Hi friends — I’m sorry I missed last week’s webcrawl. I really have no excuse, since I was technically locked inside my house all day and should have had plenty of time to do it. But I was glued to CNN, texting my friends in Newton and Watertown, and generally trying to stay calm as ...
Earlier this month, the Obama administration announced its plan to put $100 million toward building a network map of the human brain. World leading network scientist and Northeastern Distinguished Professor Albert-László Barabási is excited about the new project, but says the so-called “connectome” of neural interactions in the brain is but one network of many ...