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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Over the weekend I watched Night at the Museum 2 with my nephew. In it, Robin Williams’ Teddy Roosevelt character says that the secret to happiness is diet and exercise. I was delighted by that line — so true…and yet so difficult. Why is that? We all know that a good diet and regular exercise ...
People have often said that the brain is the most complex thing in the universe. Of course, a statement like that spurs heated debate, but it’s still an interesting concept. The human brain consists of 100 billion neurons and several hundred trillion synapses, according to assistant professor of psychology Rebecca Shansky. In her Lab of ...
An article in the journal Body Image caught my attention recently: “Considering J.Lo and ‘Ugly Betty:’ A qualitative examination of risk factors and prevention targets for body dissatisfaction, eating disorders and obesity in young Latina women.” When I got down and dirty with the article, I was even more hooked. Deb Franko is a professor ...
In the last fifty years, pharmaceutical companies have spent tens of billions of dollars trying to find new classes of antibiotic drugs. Only one has made it into clinical practice. Seem surprising to you? Yeah, me too. At the same time, antibacterial resistance has been rising, meaning the pathogens that infect us are getting better ...
Today I met a pretty awesome person (who looks uncannily like my uncle). Professor of pharmaceutical sciences Ban-An Khaw is an immunology guy, or at least that’s how he classified himself when I asked for his background story. And what an interesting story it is! A few decades ago, Khaw figured out a way to ...
Targeted drug delivery is a hot topic these days. Chemotherapy, for example, blindly kills anything in its path — these drugs don’t distinguish between healthy cells and cancerous cells; they just kill cells. Period. Professor Vladimir Torchilin and his buddies at the Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence are developing nanoscale drug delivery technologies, which I ...
I’ve only been gone for a few months, but it feels like eons since I donned a pair of goggles and got my gloves dirty in a chem lab. Today I tagged along with a couple of fellow science communications ladies to peek around some of the labs on campus. First we stopped in to ...
I didn’t get to watch the marathon yesterday, but I did see the requisite Gatorade detritus on the side of Comm Ave as I drove back into town after a weekend away. For all of you out there recovering, congratulations and good luck. Adam Thomas from the Bouvé College of Health Sciences has a few ...
Okay, friends. Why am I so exhausted? It’s probably just the rain or maybe I’m getting sick. But what if my circadian rhythms are off!? Biology professor Fred Davis presented his work in just that subject last week as part of an interdisciplinary panel hosted by the College of Science to drum up interest in ...