A little over a year ago, Justin Dowd’s boss bought a pack of colored chalk to write the day’s specials on the wall. Little did he know, that chalk would change Dowd’s life forever. The Northeastern undergraduate, then a third-year studying physics, told me he’d always had a penchant for doodling and a minor love affair ...
When economists talk about producers and consumers—the people that make stuff and the people that use it—they’re usually thinking about commodities like coffee, wheat, or oil. Not knowledge. That’s because knowledge hasn’t really been quantifiable before. But today, in this era of the “data deluge,” it is. For the first time in history, we can ...
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 ...
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 ...
Since you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably heard of network science and big data by now. It’s the field of research in which scientists leverage the amazing amounts of data we have these days to understand the world’s myriad networks, be they social, genetic or even transportation-based (ie., the network of airline flights across the ...
I know it looks like I’ve been slacking off lately. And from the perspective of the blogosphere, I suppose that might be accurate. But it’s been a busy couple of weeks, what with the NSF engineering conference and President Aoun’s keynote address. I did have one wonderful conversation yesterday afternoon with microbiologist Slava Epstein. My ...
What is a topological insulator? This is what I have written at the top of my notes from a conversation a couple weeks ago with theoretical condensed matter physics professor Arun Bansil, who has just published two new articles about topological insulators in Nature Magazine. But it took about three pages of frantically scribbled notes ...
I’ve written quite a bit about Network Science both here and for the News@Northeastern. And since learning the term less than a year ago, I’ve come to believe that it will be critical in the way we approach many scientific questions going forward. Nonetheless, it remains a somewhat elusive subject. Most people (including myself) initially ...
Tomorrow Venus will pass between the sun and the earth for the first time since 2004 and for the last time until 2117. Because the rotations of the earth and Venus around the sun are so similar — 365 and 225 days, respectively — it takes a while to catch up with Venus in this ...
I’m about halfway through physics professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book, Bursts. I’ll be writing about “bursty behavior” for the news at northeastern soon, but for today’s blog purposes suffice to say that humans behave in a “bursty” pattern instead of uniformly across time. For example, you probably don’t write an email once every twenty minutes all ...
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 ...
I’ve only been gone for a few months, but it feels like eons since I donned a pair of goggles and got my gloves dirty in a chem lab. Today I tagged along with a couple of fellow science communications ladies to peek around some of the labs on campus. First we stopped in to ...