Civil and environmental engineering professor Philip Larese-Casanova has had a life-long love affair with metals. In his work in aquatic environmental chemistry, he looks at how metallic pollutants transform and behave in freshwater systems. “I just had an interest in the metals,” he told me in an interview last month. “Maybe it’s because I see ...
Last week I went to an interesting event hosted by Northeastern’s College of Engineering that opened my eyes a little wider to the problem of biofilms. These are colonies of bacterial cells that stick to all kinds of surfaces–from the bones in your spinal cord to paper towels in a trash can. It wasn’t until the ...
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 ...
Here are two problems our planet needs help with: 1. Getting rid of all the trash we pile on top of it 2. Making electricity for us in a healthy, sustainable way Mechanical and Industrial engineering professor Yiannis Levendis has it covered. He recently filed a patent for a reactor that efficiently turns plastics and ...
Sixty million people are expected to tune in on Wednesday night to watch the first presidential debate of this election season. While the debates themselves may not determine the outcome of an election, the voters watching them do. So, wouldn’t it be nice if we could crawl into the minds of those voters and catch ...
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 ...
There’s a great story in the News@Northeastern today about Laura Lewis‘ ARPA-E grant — a $3.5million award from the Department of Energy, which Lewis’ team will use to identify new, super-strong magnetic materials. As Matt Collette explains in the article, China has a hold on the rare earth industry, currently the main element used to ...
This week at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, a group of Northeastern scientists will present the Monet painting of the future. This pile of hay bales is not a close up of a lost classic from the impressionist master’s late-nineteenth century haystack series. Instead, it’s a close-up of magnetic nanowires. Pegah M. ...
Nanotechnology is a huge field. When I worked at a nanomaterials start-up my dad would often ask me about developments in nanomedicine and I had no clue what to say. Nanotechnology enables new applications in medicine, electronics, materials — pretty much anything you can imagine. But, fundamentally, it’s pretty simple: It’s about making things so ...