You’ve just rounded the corner of a dark and musty basement. In front of you, chained to a stone wall amid a pile of femur bones and skulls, a young girl is pleadingly mouthing the words “help me,” as a ghoulish figure paces the room. Realizing there’s nothing you can do for her, you move ...
Every year the National Association of Science Writers picks a city upon which to descend. This year that city is Raleigh and on Friday, nearly 500 science writers congregated in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina to talk shop. My plan coming into the conference was to blog each day, but that proved ...
I’m excited to introduce today’s guest blogger: Lori Lennon, science communications diva. That’s not her official title, just what I like to call her. Really, she’s the communications coordinator for the College of Science and she had the good fortune of attending IDEAS Boston at UMass Boston yesterday to hear psychology David DeSteno talk about ...
This morning Northeastern’s government relations team and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences hosted a talk by Griffin Rodgers, the director of the NIH Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. I wrote a story about the event this afternoon, which will appear on the News@Northeastern tomorrow morning. But in the mean time I ...
Earlier this month, more than 1000 teams across the globe tried to hack their way to a spot at the biggest cybersecurity education conference around. Fifteen teams were finalists, earning travel grants to Cybersecurity Awareness Week (CSAW) and the chance to participate in the event’s Capture the Flag Competition in November. With the guidance of ...
So let’s pretend that your car wasn’t built by human hands, but just kind of landed in your driveway one day, after a morning drive through outer space. You, and auto-mechanics everywhere, have no idea how it works and getting around that is made particularly difficult because you can only get under the hood when ...
Debate season is an exciting time for professor David Lazer’s lab, and I’m delighted to be able to bring you more analysis from their team. This time, research assistant professor Yu-Ru Lin explains what their Twitter-meter had to say about Tuesday night’s presidential debate. Together with Drew Margolin, Lin led a team from the Lazer ...
This month’s issue of the National Science Foundation newsletter, Current, highlights civil and environmental engineering professor Auroop Ganguly. The article talks about Ganguly’s work modeling future water availability using various scenarios of population growth and climate change. The article also references a video of Ganguly being interviewed for Live Science in collaboration with the NSF. ...
My favorite days are the ones when I get to take field trips to labs. Last week, I was lucky enough to have two such experiences in one day. In one, I even got to play scientist again by decking out in head-to-toe clean-room garb. My reason for visiting the Center for High Rate Nanomanufacturing ...
As expected, last night’s VP debate was engaging, to say the least. David Lazer‘s lab was at it again, analyzing real-time Twitter data to gauge the public’s response to the event. Below, Lazer explains their Twitter “winning index,” which fluctuated across the two candidates’ performances. Twitter allows real-time calculation of audience responses to the debate. ...
According to the World Health Organization, more than 600,000 people died from malaria in 2010, with a majority of those deaths occurring among African children. The infection is caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum and is transmitted via mosquito bites. As you might imagine, where there are more mosquitos—and fewer dollars for public health programs—there ...
Thursday night’s vice presidential debate is bound to be a good one. If it weren’t for the silence rules, I bet we’d be hearing lots of Hoorays and Boos from the crowd — those age-old auditory cues signaling sentiment. Those same cues accompany David Lazer’s newest visualization, which portrays the way money is spent by ...