New faculty members Randall Hughes and David Kimbro set up shop at the Marine Science Center this winter after spending several years at Florida State University studying oyster reefs. During their time in Tallahassee, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastated the region, dumping nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the ocean over a period of 87 days. The tragedy ...
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 ...
It’s that time of year again, when all the budding researchers around Northeastern’s campus emerge from their underground tunnel labs, blinking at the light of day as they make their way to Cabot Cage on Friday for RISE:2013, the Research, Innovation and Scholarship Expo, hosted by the Center for Research Innovation. This year nearly 400 ...
Engineers are good at tracking things. That’s according to Northeastern graduate student, Sarah Brown. As a fellow of Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Brown is collaborating with researchers at both Draper and Northeastern to track something that has never really been tracked before: emotion. Well, let me rephrase that. Emotion has been tracked before, but not ...
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 ...
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 ...
“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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
Debate season is an exciting time for professor David Lazer’s lab, and I’m delighted to be able to bring you more analysis from their team. This time, research assistant professor Yu-Ru Lin explains what their Twitter-meter had to say about Tuesday night’s presidential debate. Together with Drew Margolin, Lin led a team from the Lazer ...
This month’s issue of the National Science Foundation newsletter, Current, highlights civil and environmental engineering professor Auroop Ganguly. The article talks about Ganguly’s work modeling future water availability using various scenarios of population growth and climate change. The article also references a video of Ganguly being interviewed for Live Science in collaboration with the NSF. ...