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 ...
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 ...
There’s always a story behind the story. When I talk to researchers about new papers or grants, I ask way more questions than I can possibly cover in the body of a News@Northeastern article. One of my favorite questions to ask is “how did you get interested in this line of work?” It almost always ...
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 ...
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, ...
Well, I had a wonderful day, how about you? Not only is it Friday, which is awesome, but I got to spend most of it with a bunch of middle schoolers learning about some of the science research taking place here at Northeastern. Each year the Driscoll Middle School in Brookline holds an event called ...