Like all humans, scientists come in every shape, size and color imaginable. Every now and then I run into a real character. That is most certainly the case with the subject of my story on the News@Northeastern today. Professor Michail Sitkovsky is a burly man with a mutinous brow and thick accent that makes everything ...
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 ...
“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. ...
So let’s pretend that your car wasn’t built by human hands, but just kind of landed in your driveway one day, after a morning drive through outer space. You, and auto-mechanics everywhere, have no idea how it works and getting around that is made particularly difficult because you can only get under the hood when ...
How many things in this world take pride in being bad at their job? It’s certainly not something humans like to brag about, but zoom in to the microscopic level and you’ll find that a tiny little piece of us is constantly cheer-leading its own bad behavior. It’s an enzyme called an error-prone or repair ...
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 ...
Last week we had a couple of visitors to the communications office — a colleague out on maternity leave and her beautiful new baby girl. When they arrived sounds of “ooohs” and “ahhs” started echoing through the halls and one by one we filtered out of our offices to see the youngest species-member on the ...
I’ve been on a space kick lately, ever since I got a telescope for my birthday and looked up close at the moon for the first time in my life. So the image on the left calls to my mind nebulae and distant galaxies…a sort of map of the universe, that infinitely large entity. But ...
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 ...