I’ve written a lot about the ways technology can improve healthcare since coming to Northeastern. We have a great new graduate program dedicated to the subject and a slew of brilliant researchers here are looking at it from a unique, patient-facing angle. But there’s another side to technology and health that I just got my ...
Forty years ago, Dupont Company revolutionized protective gear when they introduced Kevlar, a fiber made of super-strong, rigid polymer molecules belonging to a small class called aramids. Since then, improvements to strong textile fibers have been incremental. That’s because most flexible polymers are inherently flimsy. When you look at their micro-structures it’s easy to see ...
Phew! It’s been a busy week in the sclogosphere (that’s my new term for the science blog world). Here are some highlights: The NIH moved to retire the majority of chimps from research programs, going from 450 animals to 50. Also this week: an Expeditions post from Maureen McCarthy, who studies the behavioral ecology and genetics of chimps living ...
In the wake of Lance Armstrong’s long-awaited admission of doping, cheating has been on many peoples’ minds of late. Katie Couric was one of them. Last Friday Northeastern professor David DeSteno appeared on her show to discuss the psychology behind why we cheat. You can watch his segment in the video below. And for even ...
Last week I met with associate professor of political science W. D. Kay, hoping for a primer on the federal budget. I keep hearing terms like sequestration and appropriations and wanted to find out exactly how they will affect the future of science research. Before we got into it, he pointed me to this petition, ...
Time for the second installment of my Weekly Webcrawl series. It was a busy week in science news. Here are a few highlights: If you’re ever feeling lonely, just visit this website and Hawaiian whales will sing to you in real time. It was a good news week for animal sex: Giant-squid were filmed in ...
Here’s a great video produced by the DHS Center of Excellence, ALERT, or Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats (what is it about engineers and acronyms?!). ALERT 101 is a new series featuring the center’s unique technologies and research areas. This one explains millimeter wave and back scatter airport screening systems. For more info on ...
I’m pretty much the world’s worst decision maker. This is especially true at restaurants. The other day I made the waiter save me for last and then, after six other orders, I still needed him to walk me through the menu like a private tutor. I was vaguely pleased with my final choice, but I ...
Persistence — it’s what keeps us all surviving. If it weren’t for this lovely quality, we’d just give up and crawl under a rock somewhere because it’s all just so darn difficult out there in the world. Same’s true for every bacterial infection we know of, the chronic ones in particular. Persistence is paramount. Think ...
Welcome to a new series that I will be bringing your way every Friday. In no particular order, my favorite science things this week, brought to you by the interwebs: Last week professors around the country were in a tizzy when their profession was called out as the least stressful job of 2013. This week, ...
“It totally blew my mind.” That’s what graduate student Laura Pfeifer Vardoulakis said of her encounter with work taking place in Timothy Bickmore’s lab in the College of Computer and Information Science. Bickmore is one of the few researchers starting to develop medical technologies that target patients and individuals instead of clinicians. “When I came ...
I’ve written about Dagmar Sternad‘s work a few times, here and here and most recently here, when she had a bunch of middle schoolers come hang out in her lab for an afternoon. Her team uses robotic machines to capture data on simple movement tasks, such as carrying a cup of coffee or bouncing a ...