Recent mechanical engineering graduate Andy Benn isn’t used to having time on his hands. Spending an afternoon playing tennis and eating lobster rolls, is well, unprecedented for the former Baja team captain who said he was clocking 80 to 100 hours a week in the auto shop in the basement of Richards Hall before graduating ...
For many civil engineers, the annual steel bridge competition might as well be the Super Bowl. It’s a big deal — university teams all over the country spend many months, and many late nights, coming up with a bridge design, fabricating the pieces, and building their own personal masterpiece. The bridges are serious, too: they ...
Today kicked off my the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Today’s agenda included several sessions on communicating science to the public. The first addressed the growing concern that science journalism is going down the tubes in the age of the internet, but I think we all walked away believing ...
Hurricane Sandy has laid bare the frailty of an urban infrastructure not accustomed to large-scale natural disasters. As others have recently explained, climate change modeling suggests that the frequency of this kind of catastrophe will only rise in the coming decades. These frailties have lead to enormous and unexpected financial losses. But what if we ...
Just about every kid within a 50-mile radius of Boston’s Museum of Science visits that place at some point in his or her early education or scouting career. If they’re lucky, they might even get to do an overnight, sleeping under the life-size dinosaur model on the first floor. I remember my visit well and ...
Biologist Leroy Hood sees humans as walking clouds of data, ripe for the taking when it comes to the future of medicine. Hood, who will address the Northeastern community on Monday at 5 p.m. as part of the Profiles in Innovation Presidential Speaker Series, is the president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology ...
You’ve just rounded the corner of a dark and musty basement. In front of you, chained to a stone wall amid a pile of femur bones and skulls, a young girl is pleadingly mouthing the words “help me,” as a ghoulish figure paces the room. Realizing there’s nothing you can do for her, you move ...
This morning Northeastern’s government relations team and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences hosted a talk by Griffin Rodgers, the director of the NIH Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. I wrote a story about the event this afternoon, which will appear on the News@Northeastern tomorrow morning. But in the mean time I ...
I love starting the week off with a bang. The topic of this morning’s symposium, hosted by the Institute on Urban Health Research, just totally gets my engines going. Four experts in personal health technology came from all over the country to talk shop. As IUHR Interim Director Alisa Lincoln said, there were people from ...
Okay, admittedly this is not a research post…but bear with me. We pride ourselves on being sustainable here at Northeastern. But are we putting our money where our mouth is…so to speak? I know there are probably a million things I personally could be doing better — I’m a paper fiend, for instance. I recycle ...
Justin Dowd is a fourth year physics and math major here at Northeastern. This phenomenal “chalkimation” video about Einstein’s daydream discovery of relativity won him a ticket to outer space (yeah…outer space) through the Metro’s Race for Space competition. Not only is Dowd brilliant enough to explain relativity in simple terms, he’s also an artist ...