Someone once told me that being a science writer is like being in school forever. Over the past year, my first at Northeastern, I have found that to be absolutely true. I have learned about the Higgs Boson from a particle physicist and the neurology of emotion from a psychologist. I have played video games ...
When Dan Shea was an undergraduate at Northeastern’s College of Science, he spent much of his time hanging out with a plant. Or parts of a plant, anyway: Cell cultures from the California poppy. The plant produces a group of molecules called BPAs, not to be confused with the polymers plaguing water bottles and microwave ...
A debate has emerged in the last few years about the importance of early interactions with nature. Kids these days tend to spend more time inside in front of screens and less time outside wandering around aimlessly. As a result, parents and researchers alike are curious about the impacts of such a change. There’s even ...
Earlier this month the Affective Science Institute hosted another great event called Reading the Face: Translating Science to Security. Three emotion scientists, including Northeastern’s Lisa Feldman Barrett, discussed their unique research approaches to studying the human ability to detect a person’s emotion by looking at his or her face. In the wake of 9/11, large-scale ...
When I was in high school I read a book called Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice that I thought was going to define the rest of my life (I’ve always been kind of dramatic like that). It was about discovering the chemical compounds found in plants that cultures have been using for centuries, even millennia, ...
“Living in panama and working on the reefs I would watch white band disease sweep through the population,” said assistant professor of earth and environmental science Steve Vollmer. He pursued post-doctoral research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Islan. The disease he’s talking about is one of 22 that affect coral reefs. ...