Earlier this month, the Obama administration announced its plan to put $100 million toward building a network map of the human brain. World leading network scientist and Northeastern Distinguished Professor Albert-László Barabási is excited about the new project, but says the so-called “connectome” of neural interactions in the brain is but one network of many ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
“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. ...
A few months ago incoming faculty member Brian Helmuth saw a camel on the side of a river in the East Hammar Marsh in Basra, Iraq. “At first I thought, ‘oh yeah you know that’s cool,’” he recalled. “And then I realized, yeah — camels don’t belong in marshes.” The Hammar Marsh, seated at the ...
I’m excited to introduce today’s guest blogger: Lori Lennon, science communications diva. That’s not her official title, just what I like to call her. Really, she’s the communications coordinator for the College of Science and she had the good fortune of attending IDEAS Boston at UMass Boston yesterday to hear psychology David DeSteno talk about ...
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 ...
If you happened to find yourself on Fermilab’s homepage today, you would find there a handy link to today’s “University Profile,” which highlights Northeastern. One of 118 universities that rely on Fermilab to perform research, Northeastern’s research team focuses on the detection of two types of sub-atomic particle: the muon and the photon. Fermilab was ...
How are you feeling right now? Can you pinpoint the specific emotions? Maybe a little excited that it’s almost the weekend, but also sad because it’s raining outside and you won’t be able to bike home like you’d hoped. Or maybe you can’t get that level of differentiation and all you can say is “unpleasant” ...
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 ...
“Visualize the ball.” I’m sure most of you have heard the phrase at some point in your life — for me it was probably as long ago as 9th grade gym class and had more to do with not getting hit by it than trying to catch it, but still — we’ve all heard the ...