In a letter to his close friend geologist Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin once wrote, “I care more about the Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world.” He had become obsessed with the carniverous plant, which wraps when it receives signal from its tentacles that nitrogen is nearby. A fly or a ...
At yesterday afternoon’s Profiles in Innovation lecture, IBM Watson creator David Ferrucci explained (very quickly I might add — that man talks fast) how the supercomputer came to think like a human and beat Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings at the TV quiz show last year. Okay, maybe “think” isn’t quite the right word. But this ...
There are approximately 5 nonillion bacteria on earth (where a million has six zeros after the one, a nonillion has 30 zeroes). The microorganisms that live in the environment and in animal “microbiomes” (the collection of all the bacteria that call an animal home) represent the most diverse group of species around. They can be ...
Last week’s Meet the Author lecture at Snell Library featured science photographer Felice Frankel of MIT. The lecture was connected to the Places and Spaces exhibit currently on display on Snell’s first and second floors. Places and Spaces opened my eyes to an entire way of thinking that I hadn’t previously considered. And as you ...
On Friday we ran a story in the News@Northeastern about psychology professor Iris Berent’s research with infants on language acquisition. One of her main research questions is whether we are born with the innate ability to recognize linguistic rules. For instance, the word “blog” sounds okay to our ear as adults, but “bnog” does not. ...
One of my first conversations here at Northeastern was with Chemistry professor Sanjeev Mukerjee who has one ultimate goal for his research: “to replace all combustion related power sources with an electrochemical energy conversion storage system, which are cleaner, more efficient, and very silent.” Mukerjee’s team at the Center for Renewable Energy Technology(NUCRET) explores how ...
Okay, people, you’re going to have to forgive me today. Here’s the issue: I have incredibly shaky hands. This means that when I try to take videos and photographs they almost always come out blurry. But I still think that my “footage” (if you can call it that) from the Marine Science Center, which I ...
Yesterday I got to visit a chemical engineering classroom for the first time ever. It reminded me a lot of my old workplace, which was full of homemade reactors for synthesizing fullerenes and carbon nanotubes. I worked in the lab, not the plant, and was always in awe of those enormous, high temperature contraptions. My ...
I woke up in the middle of a peaceful sleep last night only to begin fretting about the fact that I completely undersold Isabel Merielles’ show in yesterday’s post. Remember when I said the posters she chose were beautiful? Well why the heck wouldn’t I want to share them with you?! Very sorry. Here you ...
By now you may know that I’ve become minorly obsessed with data visualization and network science as a result of my various adventures around campus. Of course, obsessed is a relative term and there are definitely some other folks here who have me beat in that department. Isabel Meirelles would be one of them. We ...
This may not be news to the rest of the world…but it’s news to me and might be news to you. I learned this morning from Professor Günther Zupanc that a teleost fish can grow a new backbone if you cut it in half. I used to do this to earth worms in my sandbox ...
I’ve always been a video game skeptic. For one thing I’m not very good at them, but I was also sufficiently indoctrinated by my Montessori education to think that they will rot my brain….although I do have that little solitaire problem I mentioned a few weeks ago. Anyway, yesterday I met a woman who came ...