Today’s post comes all the way from Nahant, where graduate student Daniel Blustein is pursuing adventures in both robotics and science communications at Northeastern’s Marine Sciences Center. He was invited to participate in a panel discussion at Monday’s science communication training session at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. In our first ...
If I were to ask you how to protect yourself from osteoporosis, what would you say? Probably something like, “drink more milk,” or “take a calcium or vitamin D supplement,” right? I recently met with Katherine Tucker, professor of nutritional epidemiology in the department of health sciences, and she said that while calcium and vitamin ...
The mobile internet is booming. For example, when was the last time you had a question and a cell phone at the same time and not looked up the answer immediately? We are fiends for immediate information. Likewise, we are fiends for sharing information with others. I went hiking this weekend and have already uploaded ...
On Wednesday I met physical therapy clinical professor David Nolan, who recently presented research at the American Physical Therapy Association’s annual conference. Nolan has a joint appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital, which just opened the Orthopaedics Sports Performance Center. This place is the definition of cool. It’s a huge room with force plates embedded in ...
Well…it’s official. I’ve made it to the triple digits. To commemorate this momentous occasion I would simply like to quote a student I overhead speaking to her friend this morning outside of Robinson Hall: “I know how to make double bonds.”
When mechanical and industrial engineering professor Yingzi Lin was pursuing her PhD in vehicle engineering, one of the driver test subjects became so distracted by the sensing equipment in the vehicle (the researchers were collecting data about his physiological state while driving), that he got into an accident. This experience got Lin thinking, “how could ...
On Monday, 33 STEM high school teachers from around New England converged on Northestern’s campus for the third annual CAPSULE workshop. Under the direction of principal investigator Ibrahim Zeid, mechanical engineering professor, and co-PI Claire Duggan, director of programs and partnerships at the Center for STEM education, the NSF funded CAPSULE program, or CAPStone Unique ...
I’ve written previously about biology professor Günther Zupanc’s work with teleost fish both here and on the News@northeastern site. The word teleost can be used to describe 20,000 different kinds of fish, but all of them have retained, in adult stages of life, the ability to regrow peripheral organs like hearts, fins and even portions ...
I know it looks like I’ve been slacking off lately. And from the perspective of the blogosphere, I suppose that might be accurate. But it’s been a busy couple of weeks, what with the NSF engineering conference and President Aoun’s keynote address. I did have one wonderful conversation yesterday afternoon with microbiologist Slava Epstein. My ...
What is a topological insulator? This is what I have written at the top of my notes from a conversation a couple weeks ago with theoretical condensed matter physics professor Arun Bansil, who has just published two new articles about topological insulators in Nature Magazine. But it took about three pages of frantically scribbled notes ...
“Corals are analogous to trees in tropical rain forests,” said Steve Vollmer, assistant professor at Northeastern’s Marine Sciences Center. “They provide the essential habitat for the unprecedented diversity of organisms that exist on reefs. If we lose the corals, we will lose our coral reefs.” So results published by Vollmer and his colleagues in Science ...
One of the big ideas in healthcare today is preventative medicine. Treat the causes instead of the symptoms, proponents say, and you’ll keep people healthy and avoid expensive procedures down the road. I wholeheartedly agree with this approach. To me, continuously investing in newer, better treatment strategies should be accompanied by a parallel efforts in ...