According to associate professor Edmund Yeh of the electrical engineering department, the US loses about $100 billion each year due to blackouts in the energy grid. When the power goes out, so does the economy. The current grid is based on predictable sources of energy, but unpredictable blackouts still occur. Renewable energy — like wind ...
Just had a chat with a network science dude and he told me about this cool website where you can visualize where people are moving to and from. It was created for Forbes magazine in 2008 around the beginning of the recession to give people a sense of the migration implications of the changing economic ...
The biggest challenge to killing cancer cells is the “protective armor” or shield around a tumor — that’s according to Professor Mansoor Amiji of the Bouve College of Health Sciences‘ School of Pharmacy. Amiji’s lab is trying to find ways to break through that barrier using nanomedicine. Cancer cells grow in acidic, oxygen-deprived environments — ...
The other day I interviewed Emanuela Barberis of the physics department about her work with two other physics professors, Darien Wood and George Alverson, at CERN (the European Center for Particle Physics). We were chatting about muons and leptons and quarks, stuff I’m (definitely not) totally familiar with. I was basically getting my own personal ...
What you see to the left may look like a giant dehydryated cocroach overgrown with some form of alien kudzoo, but in fact it’s a microbe only a few microns long. That’s a fraction of the thickness of a human hair. Slava Epstein of the the department of biology found this little guy in the ...
Mechanical Engineering grad student Samira Faegh is attempting to revolutionize biosensor technology, which can be used in a variety of settings to detect anything from pathogens to blood glucose levels to molecular indicators of cancer. I sat down with her last week to talk about her research, which she’s been working on for about a ...
Before joining Northeastern’s fabulous (if I do say so myself) news team about a month ago, I worked at a start-up chemical company in Westwood, MA where I was surrounded by Erlenemeyer flasks and flat-bottomed evaporation vessels containing a slew of organic nano-materials dissolved in toluene, xylene or, my personal favorite, decahydronaphthalene. These solutions, which ...