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 ...
Talk about making complex topics accessible to the general public — this video from PhD candidate Margery Hines does such a good job explaining ground penetrating radar (GPR) for landmine detection, it won the Judges’ Choice Award at the 2012 NSF IGERT Online Video & Poster competition. Cover photo via Flickr.
Here’s a statistic for you: From internet and mobile phone use to credit card transactions and voting records, we now generate more socio-economic data each 1.2 years than we did during all of previous human history combined. That’s according to a McKinsey Global Institute Study cited in the first pages of the new open-access online ...
A few years ago chemistry and chemical biology professor Mike Pollastri met a researcher name Larry Ruben at a conference. Ruben was presenting a poster on an enzyme that is important to the survival trypanosoma brucei, the culprit parasite in the neglected tropical disease known as African sleeping sickness, or human African trypanosomiasis. The poster ...
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 ...
The mobile internet is booming. For example, when was the last time you had a question and a cell phone at the same time and not looked up the answer immediately? We are fiends for immediate information. Likewise, we are fiends for sharing information with others. I went hiking this weekend and have already uploaded ...
People have often said that the brain is the most complex thing in the universe. Of course, a statement like that spurs heated debate, but it’s still an interesting concept. The human brain consists of 100 billion neurons and several hundred trillion synapses, according to assistant professor of psychology Rebecca Shansky. In her Lab of ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
I wrote a story for today’s news email about civil and environmental engineering chair Jerry Hajjar‘s new NSF grant to develop building design methods that take eventual deconstruction into account. Here is a graphic of the clamping system he discussed in the article: Image courtesy of Mark Webster for Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, Inc.
Here’s another Twitter-analysis post for all you network science junkies out there. And although I’m a bit late to the table (New Scientist reported on this a week ago) I couldn’t resist. Bruno Gonçalves, a postdoc in Alessandro Vespignani‘s research group here at Northeastern, and three colleagues at Indiana University expanded their research on partisan ...