“Full of strange ideas: Beppo Grillo in Bologna.” Photo by antonella.beccaria via Flickr.

In late February, something happened to the Italian government that had never happened before: a hung parliament. After 75 percent of the population turned out to vote, it took two days to tally the results. Now, almost three weeks later, the center right and center left parties remain in a steadfast gridlock. A third party–the so-called 5 Star Movement–received only marginally fewer votes. Which wouldn’t be all that exciting, except that the 5 Star Movement is just a single guy, and that guy is a comedian–Beppe Grillo–who refuses to speak on television or radio, lest his message be skewed. Instead, he blogs and he speaks in the piazzas around Italy.

The hung parliament and the comedian contender mark an odd time for Italy, which will have it’s next election in less than a year, according to people who know about Italian politics (of which I’m not one). Things are changing online and off, and the old ways of doing things are clearly not holding up. That’s even true of the polling methods that were used to predict the outcome of the election in the weeks leading up to it.

In a great article on the Daily Beast, which gives an awesomely readable and accessible account of the ever-so-complicated Italian political climate, Tim Parks recaps the final counts for the four main candidates, Luigi Bersani, Mario Monti, Silvio Berlusconi, and Grillo, respectively:

So 30 percent to grim support of the old workplace; 10 percent to the gentleman upholding the international monetary system; 30 percent to the rich, old guy inviting us all to have a good time; and 25 percent to the wild man who wants to kick ass.

How did the pollsters fair? Not great. They gave 40 percent to Bersani (the old workplace), 20 percent to Monti (the gentleman), less than 20 percent to Berlusconi (the old rich guy), and 15 percent to comedian Beppe.

Northeastern professor Alessandro Vespignani was also watching the election closely, and he and his team at the Laboratory for Modeling Biological and Socio-technical Systems made a few predictions of their own. They got all of them right except for one: Berlusconi.

How did they do it? And why were they off for the old rich guy? Well, it all goes back to that old ways thing I said earlier. Calling people on the phone seems to no longer be the easiest or most efficient way to probe society’s sentiments. In collaboration with researchers at the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Italy, Vespignani’s team tracked voter’s intentions by what they said on Twitter, instead. And actually, according to one of the project coordinators, Northeastern researcher Nicola Perra, “We did not make predictions. We just studied the raw signal, and there are biases, in geography, age, et cetera.”

On their website, TweetPolitik (it’s all in Italian), the team demonstrates results from three different types of analyses, which they performed in the weeks leading up to the election.

First, they made activity maps using geo-localization data. These show where in the country people tweeting about each of the candidates reside. “Each dot in the maps is a tweet. The transparent circles represent how intense the signal was in each census area,” said Perra. So, the map of Twitter activity about Beppe Grillo looks like this:

Activity map displaying tweets mentioning 5 Start Movement candidate, Beppe Grillo. 53% of the tweets came from the northern region of the country. Image via TweetPolitik.

While the one for Berlusconi looks like this:

Activity map showing tweets for Berlusconi. Nearly 50% of these tweets came from the North. Image via TweetPolitik.

Conversation maps show the highways of conversation on Twitter for each party. These data came from hashtags associated with the various parties and represent people in different areas tweeting about the same thing:

Conversation map showing Twitter discussions using hashtags associated with Bersani’s party, the center left. Most conversations took place between residents of large metropolitan areas, usually in the North or South of the country. Image via TweetPolitik.

Finally, (and this one is my favorite), the monitoring stream graphic shows how various discussion topics evolved over time in a ten day period surrounding the election.  On February 19th around 7 o’clock, Beppe was a popular subject:

A snapshot of twitter activity by Italian voters in the days leading up to the election on February 24. Image via TweetPolitik.

All of this is just reporting the signal that they saw in the data. The “predictions” (which weren’t really predictions, but just signals) came from the global share of activity seen for each party. This stuff isn’t presented on the site.

“In summa, some numbers were really close to the final outcome, others were not,” said Perra. “The reasons of the discrepancies are biases. We could have corrected the signals considering age distribution, Twitter penetration in different areas, but we decided not to make it about prediction, at this round.”

But this still leaves the question of why Berlusconi evaded their glance, even if it wasn’t a prediction. That has to do with social phenomena, said Vespignani. Berlusconi promised to repeal an important but hefty tax put in place by the last president, Monti (who actually took over for Berlusconi when he was obviously flailing during the height of the economic crisis). Everyone knew this was a bad idea for the country, but it was also incredibly tantalizing for each individual taxpayer. So, no one in their right mind would claim to support Berlusconi, in person or on Twitter. But behind the safe shield of a voting booth? That’s another story.

These new platforms were just starting to emerge when professor Andrea Parker began her career as computer programmer who happened to be interested in social activism. “It was very exciting, but I noticed that it sort of was being done with this implicit assumption that the opportunity to achieve a healthy lifestyle was equal for everyone,” she said.

Researchers were taking the “if we build it, they will come” approach without accounting for barriers that might be getting in the way for some underserved populations.

For instance, it’s not always just the lack of an app that prevents people from living healthfully. “In some neighborhoods parents don’t want their kids to go play outside because it’s not safe,” said Parker. “In some neighborhoods they’re not eating a balanced diet because the access to healthy foods is lower.”

As she began carving out her niche in the field, Parker realized she could use her skills to design programs that put not only the power of health in peoples’ hands, but also the power for change.

Photo by Brooks Canaday.

As a post-doctoral researcher at Georgia Tech, Parker developed tools for children to critically engage with advertising or for community members to inspire each other to eat more healthfully. Having joined the faculty at Northeastern’s College of Computer and Information Sciences this winter, Parker is reeling with ideas on how to apply the things she’s learned in new and bigger ways.

She has already begun to collaborate with Carmen Sceppa and Jessica Hoffman, both professors in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. Sceppa and Hoffman are co-investigators on Healthy Kids, Healthy Futures (HKHF), a program aimed at preventing childhood obesity by supporting health promoting environments in the home, school, and community .

One component of HKHF is called Open Gym, and it provides a safe place for kids and their parents to engage in physical activity once a week. The idea is to encourage children to be active, but also for parents to model healthy behaviors. “But how do we encourage physical activity in that whole week in between when they come to Open Gym?” Parker asked.  As you might imagine, she thinks a solution lies in interactive technologies.

One idea she has is to give kids activity monitors to wear throughout the week which will wirelessly transmit data on how active they’ve been. The more active they’ve been, the more points they get toward unlocking games back at Open Gym.

This particular situation is uniquely complicated by the fact that there are two populations who respond to pretty different motivations, said Parker. The things that get an eight year old excited aren’t always the same things that get their parents revved. But one of the approaches that Parker has taken in previous studies is to engage the community in the development process itself. Involving users in the design of technologies can not only ensure that those technologies will have the components they are seeking, but users will also be more likely to want to engage with the technologies. “It can help provide a sense of ownership over the system,” said Parker.

“Her involvement in the Healthy Kids, Healthy Futures team is exciting to us,” said Sceppa. “Her expertise in information and communication technologies will be instrumental in creating long-lasting physical activity promotion opportunities for our families and the neighborhoods HKHF serves.”

Here are a few of my favorite science stories from last week:

According to New Scientist, “The organs of the glass frog, Hyalinobatrachium colymbiphyllum, are visible through its skin.” Photo by Geoff Galice via Flickr.

• I’m sure you didn’t miss it, but a baby born with AIDS has been off medication and symptom free for one year, due to unique actions taken by the doctors attending his birth.
• Turns out Google (and other search engines) isn’t just my brain’s external hard drive. Last week, researchers at Microsoft, Columbia, and Stanford revealed they can use to identify drug side effects not already known to doctors.
• A Q&A with one of my favorite young science writers, Cristy Gelling, on the SA Incubator.
• And here’s the guy that interviewed her, Bora Zivcovic, explaining why daylight savings time is a terrible idea (I am definitely in agreement this morning, although it was pretty sweet to see the sun out so late last night).
• Denis Overbye at the New York Times had a great collection of stories on the Higgs Boson, complete with videos and animated drawings explaining what the heck it is and why scientists are looking for it.
• Another mind boggling concept in physics? Universality. Aatish Bhatia explains it all quite gracefully on his blog, Empirical Zeal.
• A team of atmospheric scientists at University of Colorado Boulder showed that volcanoes are slowing down global warming. But we might not care as much as we used to, because of our collective “green fatigue.”
• Another thing going down? the amount of energy in our “food.” A podcast on Scientific American discusses “how our greatest fuel source became our greatest health threat.”
• Cicadas keep their wings bacteria-free through nano-spikes on their surface that basically poke holes in microbial cells that land on them. It’s the only known structural antibiotic. Pretty cool.
• A “honeybee brain specialist” at Newcastle University in England showed last week that some plants use caffeine to chemically enhance bees’ learning process, luring them back again and again.
• Two independent studies showed that salt makes human and mouse T cells more pathogenic and is linked to increase autoimmune diseases, like multiple sclerosis, in mice. Salt at Fault?
• Another mouse study showed that implanting human brain cells into murine brains helps them…I forget. Oh right, improve memory.
• A genome-wide study of 60,000 people around the world revealed genetic similarities between five major psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, depression, and and ADD. It looks like this news was broken a couple weeks ago, but I just found out about it.
• And finally, three blog posts by George Johnson about Oliver Sacks’ essay, “The Twins,” about two people who could tell uncannily quickly whether very large numbers were prime. They did in a “non-algorithmic way,” suggesting our brains might look something like quantum computers.

Marvin Nauman/FEMA photo

When disaster strikes, we rely on our social networks for support. During hurricane Sandy, neighbors helped neighbors by sharing electrical power with those who’d lost it or removing tree limbs from each other’s rooftops. In many cases, the help we get during emergencies comes from whomever happens to be nearby, but more and more our cell phones—if they still work—connect us to more distant resources.

Northeastern professor David Lazer hopes to understand how people behave during disasters through an app he and his team developed for mobile phones, which archive much of that behavior in call and text logs.

The Sandy app is available through the website Volunteer Science, which Lazer and Drew Margolin, a post-doc in his lab, recently launched. It allows users like you and me to participate in research in the form games and apps like the one for Sandy. They hope to eventually see a huge flow of people through the site, playing these sorts of games for fun. After all, the question of how people behaved during Sandy is just one of a limitless number that researchers could ask using this approach.

But back to the Sandy app. Once downloaded, it will ask volunteers to answer questions about their situation during the storm, what resources they needed or provided to others, and how they connected with those they did. It will then reach into the archives, choose ten random calls, and ask questions like “How is this person related to you?” and “Did you get what you needed from this person?”

Post-disaster interviewing is standard protocol for emergency organizations like the Red Cross, but these rely entirely on people’s memories, which are often skewed during times of stress. The new app is “not meant to substitute for other methods, it’s just adding a powerful complement,” said Lazer.

“We think of it as the 21^st century improvement over the interview,” said Margolin, who is leading the project. The method will add valuable data that interviewing alone cannot. For instance, people who had a flood of inbound calls during the storm may have been support-hubs without realizing it.

Previous research has looked at static call detail records, provided by the phone company, which includes things like the cell tower that was accessed and the number that was called. Those studies have revealed distinctive patterns of behavior. For example, the number of calls between people 20 years apart in age increases during emergency situations, suggesting more calls between parents and children.

“But the problem is we can’t ask those people questions about their context,” said Lazer. They can’t ask whether the older person someone called was in fact their parent. “In some ways it’s like one hand clapping. Here we’re trying to supply the context and make a little bit more noise.”

While the app will provide invaluable new information for emergency relief efforts, it will also provide an improvement over current network science research methods. “Trying to build a bridge between the observational data, the massive passive data that’s being created about all of us every day and deeper sociological constructs,” said Lazer. That’s the goal for the whole Volunteer Science platform, he said.

Readers can participate in the Sandy study and encourage New York and New Jersey area friends to do the same by visiting www.volunteerscience.com. The app is currently only available for Android phones.

Photo via Thinkstock.

I went grocery shopping over the weekend and if you knew anything about my normal eating habits, you would have been rather surprised by the things I brought home with me: tons of fruits and vegetables, a huge bag of potatoes, shrimp, haddock, whole grain bread, nuts galore, yogurt, and even a little granola. I don’t think there was a single stick of butter in the entire lot. This all happened because I was drastically impressed by a conversation I had with Northeastern professor of nutrition, Katherine Tucker.

I asked her to talk to me about the results of a new study from her colleagues at the University of Navarra in Spain, which, as you probably heard from significant reporting on the subject last week, validated the positive health effects of the so-called “Mediterranean diet.” They published their results in the New England Journal of Medicine, putting a signed, sealed, and delivered stamp on something we’ve been pretty sure about for a while.

“What’s unique about it is that it’s a real, sufficiently powered longitudinal study,” said Tucker. “It’s not just observational, but a randomized trial.” The study authors randomly assigned people from a range of demographics to one of three groups — the participants either ate a low fat diet or a traditional mediterranean diet for a period of eight years. Both groups were provided considerable support from nutrition counselors. The Mediterranean diet group was split further into two groups, one that ate more nuts than the others and one that used more olive oil. The study authors did this in order to tease out the effects of different beneficial compounds found in the two ingredients. Both of the MeDiet groups (as the researchers called them) had significantly fewer cardiovascular events than the low-fat group.

“It’s a big deal,” said Tucker. “It’s just stronger scientific evidence that the Mediterranean diet is important and that it does work.” So what kind of data did we have before? The observational kind that Tucker mentioned above. In studies like her own Puerto Rican Health Study, researchers have tracked the eating patterns of large cohorts of people over long periods of time. They’ve noticed that those who follow the traditional diet eaten in places like Spain, Italy, and Greece have overall better health. They get less cancer, they have better cognitive function, and have fewer heart attacks. But these studies aren’t controlled or randomized, meaning that a lot of other factors — like exercise or genetic makeup — could be playing a role in the outcomes. This is the first time those observations were backed up by a randomized trial, considered by many to be the gold standard for research.

It’s also notable that the low-fat group had a much harder time sticking to the protocol. So much so that the study authors had to reconfigure the design. But the MeDiet groups had much better compliance. Why? Because everything in the Mediterranean diet is so delicious! You get to eat bread dripping in olive oil with a nice glass of Sangiovese to wash it down.

“It is based on good quality, whole foods and a balanced dietary pattern that evolved over the millennia. And it seems to agree with our bodies,” said Tucker. “It’s anti-inflammatory, it has a balance of nutrients, it doesn’t include too many refined carbohydrates, it’s not too high in saturated fat. It’s just a real balanced diet.”

So it turns out that part of the solution to the biggest health challenge of our time has been staring us in the face for centuries. Low fat diets aren’t the answer, said Tucker, because they’re so hard to stick to and they don’t provide all the nutrients we need. Same goes for any other kind of diet the excludes a major subset of nutrients that our body needs to be healthy, like high protein or low carb diets.

Tucker is on the advisory committee for the African Heritage & Health program of Oldways, a nonprofit food and nutrition education organization whose mission is to guide people to good health through heritage. The group has long touted the benefits of traditional diets, including those of both Mediterranean and African heritage among others.

Photo via Thinkstock.

Last spring, four members of the Husky Environmental Action Team, or HEAT, got down and dirty with campus trash. For the last 20 years, building services director Mark Boulter has organized the annual “dumpster dive” to get a sense of what the Northeastern community is throwing away. This was the first time students got to take part in the fun.

“They wanted to see what is in the general waste stream of the university and find out what are we doing well, what are we not doing so well,” said Boulter. Based on the results of a campus-wide audit, the community is generally pretty good: the waste stream contains less than 5 percent contaminants, or recyclable products that get thrown in the trash. This is great compared to the national norm of about 15 to 20 percent, Boulter said.

“A lot of times you throw something out and you don’t think about where it has to go,” said HEAT co-president Sarah Sanchez, who participated in the dive. “Someone else picks it up and it goes somewhere else, and that’s sort of not your problem. But part of sustainability and helping educate students and ourselves is remembering that is has to go somewhere, that it builds up.”

For the 2012 dive, Boulter chose the Ell Student Center compactor, which provides a good cross section of campus waste. All of the trash from the tunnel system below several Northeastern buildings gets funneled to this location. While it doesn’t include residential waste, it paints a good picture of waste disposal from the academic buildings, including both the sciences (where you might find a lot of plastic pipette tips) and the humanities (where you might find more paper).

Northeastern students Alyssa Pandolfi, Sarah Sanchez, Jessica Feldish, and Chris Lau waded through campus trash to get a better sense of the community’s waste stream. Photo courtesy of Mark Boulter.

The compactor was taken to a transfer station with the HEAT students, Boulter, and other members of the facilities team hot on its trail, ready to dive in. The contents of the compactor were dumped onto the floor of the transfer station and, donning safety goggles, hard hats, and rubber gloves, the group took the plunge. They ripped open plastic garbage bags (which Boulter said are made from 100 percent post-consumer materials) and sifted through the debris. They didn’t find anything too exciting, but that’s a good thing.

In the 20 years Boulter has been organizing the exercise, he said he’s seen many changes. There used to be a lot of cardboard and paper, and now those materials have all but disappeared. “It’s nice to see that the programs we’re running are actually working,” he said.

Boulter is himself a graduate of Northeastern, where he studied business administration. But before he even made it to college, he was already being groomed for a life of sustainability. “My grandfather was into recycling. He was a little Italian gentleman. I’d call him Pop, and he’d call me Marco. He’d say, Marco, let’s go shopping. And shopping meant we’re going to the dump.”

Boulter and his Pop would collect old bicycles, lawnmowers, you name it. “We’d take them back and we’d work on them and fix them up, make them useable and new again.”

Boulter graduated in 1983 and has been working at the university ever since, spearheading the campus recycling program as well as other sustainability initiatives.

But none of it would be possible without the help of students like Sanchez, he said. “Everybody has to buy in. The university can mandate certain things, but if the whole university community doesn’t buy in on it, it’ll never succeed.” Many of the programs have the support of student groups like HEAT to thank for their success.

“Every choice that you make every day, what you buy, how you use it, how you get rid of it, it all adds up,” said Sanchez.

Cover photo via Thinkstock.

First, watch this and swoon:

via Wired.

This video reminds me of two things:

1. The world is a beautiful place that deserves our attention, exploration, and educated protection.
2. Politics are a lot like the seasons, which wax and wane between periods of desolation and periods of abundance.

Sequestration will have a profound effect on science, cutting by billions of dollars the primary funding supply of the majority of research programs around the country. But, hopefully, this too will pass…?

In my blog post about sequestration a couple weeks ago, Northeastern professor Woody Kay said that science policy’s biggest problem is that politicians and scientists live in different time frames and use different languages. So, science communication becomes an integral piece of bridging the gap that has gotten us in this sorry situation. There were some great posts about this topic this week:

• For Scientists: this is where news comes from: My friend Jessica Stoller-Conrad blogs about the seemingly-mystifying process of getting your work recognized by popular media on Figure One.
• Out of the comfort zone and into the fire: Flame Challenge organizer Christine O’Connell describes her first experiences learning how to communicate science to a broad audience, while at the same time issuing a plea to scientists to describe the concept of time to 11 year olds (or, perhaps, politicians?) in 300 words or less.
• We’re all Jonah Lehrer except me: Ruined science writer Jonah Leherer’s biggest crime was telling stories. But is this something all science writers are guilty of on some level? How do we ensure our narratives don’t bely scientific truth?
• Annals of amplification in journalism: A continuation of the above point, how do we ensure that media don’t run wild with scientific results, delivering to the masses false fear of things like cell phone use and egg yolks?
• The adventures of Dr. Watson, science writer: Last Word on Nothing blogger Michelle Nijhuis reminds us of both the wonder of Holmes and the challenges Watson had in dealing with him.

Speaking of wonder, isn’t that what it’s all about, this science thing? A deep curiosity of the world and universe?

Maybe that’s not enough to warrant big bucks from taxpayers, but with sequestration, what do we risk forgoing? Some great scientific discoveries and research pursuits reported this week:

• Invisible motion detector shows a sleeping baby’s pulse just by looking at her through a video camera
• Lost continent discovered under the Indian Ocean
• 5 psychiatric disorders share genetic risk factors
• Tongue eating fish microbe isn’t as bad as it sounds
• Do rat brains linked via wires foreshadow a future in which keyboards and telephones are no longer required for communication?
• Autopsy of a dead social network

And what message do we send to the next generation of scientists, thinkers, and deciders about the value of science by cutting our commitment to it? Do we inadvertantly squelch their curiosity and inspiration?

Today is a sad day for science (and many other important national programs), but perhaps it’s just a wintry stop on our journey toward some enduring spring. I think we all have a duty to get the train rolling again.

Northeastern graduate student Sarah Brown is building computational models of emotion using physiological signals like EKG. Photo via Thinkstock.

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 over long periods of time and only using big expensive equipment like MRI machines. In conjunction with psychophysiologist Andrea Webb, Brown is attempting to build computational models of emotion using easy to collect data like pupil diameter, heart rate, and skin conductance.

Through her own research, Webb has collected an impressive data set, which, Brown says “is half the battle” for a computationally-inclined graduate student. Webb’s team asked participants to view collections of pictures and digital sound files while hooked up to heart rate monitors and other physiological recording devices. The pictures and sounds used for the tests come from standard psychology paradigms and correlate to particular emotional states. The original idea, Brown said, was to look for simple correlations between physiology and the stimuli, but it didn’t go so well. That’s when the team joined up with signal processing expert S.R. Prakash, Brown’s research advisor at Draper. Now, with Brown’s help, they’re attempting to build algorithms that can model emotional state based on physiological outputs.

The same way that radar can be used to scan through noisy data to home in on an object’s exact location, Brown hopes her computational models will allow clinicians to scan simple signals for information on emotional states. With radar you have a pretty easy way to check whether your model works: your eyeballs. But emotion isn’t nearly so concrete as some hidden physical object. If her model says a person is feeling sad, how can Brown check the results?

Well, I suppose she could just ask, “hey, were you feeling sad just then?” but self-reported data brings a slew of limitations with it. “This is a whole other aspect of the research, developing performance measures,” said Brown.

Now in her second year of grad school, she has completed an extensive literature review of machine learning and signal processing techniques. Next she plans to use existing algorithms on the data set as a jumping off point. From there, she will tweak the current models and build new ones specifically designed for her purpose.

Perhaps the most important challenge will be choosing the right pieces of the data to focus on. For instance an EKG signal, which tracks electrical activity of the heart, contains lots of numbers on the backend. Some of those numbers will prove valuable for her needs, others will not. Brown will need to determine exactly the right numbers to focus on–maybe the distance between two signal peaks, for example–rather than inefficiently processing all of the information in one hulking algorithm.

Now, you might ask why we’d want a computational model of emotion in the first place. “There are lots of reasons,” said Brown. “A specific motivator of this work is to be able to provide clinicians with a quantitative assessment of emotional state, which could assist with diagnosis of psychopathologies,” she explained.

In the early 2000′s, Sitkvosky made an important discovery for immunology, which has come to inform his research in cancer biology. He found that a particular kind of receptor on the surface of immune cells is responsible for putting those cells to sleep. The receptor is called the adenosine A2A receptor and Sitkovsky told me that if his middle name wasn’t Vladimirovich, he’d like it to be A2A: “Michail ‘A2A’ Sitkovsky,” he chuckled.

But aside from being a great character, he’s also a great story teller. I thought this story, which he told me to explain how A2A receptors are involved in immune cell inhibition, was delightful. So how could I not share it with you?

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Photo courtesy of NASA / SDO.

Hi friends. This week’s Webcrawl is coming in a little late, but it’s been no less raucous a science party than usual. Wind down your weekend with the following lovely reads:

• Jane Goodall has written a new book, but this one is about plants rather than chimps. Here’s a fabulous interview at the Smithsonian. If you read only one thing from this week’s webcrawl, let it be this.
• My mentor George Johnson has a new blog at Discover and this week, in addition to a series on fluoride in New Mexican water, he had a post on the mathematics of rock and roll. This was also the subject of a recent arXiv paper on the emergent behavior of moshers, which reminded me of this study about the attractiveness of Mick Jagger’s hips from a couple weeks ago.
• Carl Zimmer had a great post about the possible shapes brains can take on National Geographic Phenomena, where Ed Yong had his on great piece on the news that bees can sense electric fields
• PLOS blogged about a recent study in ONE that suggests reading fiction gives us a boost in our power for empathy.
• Here’s a wonderful video of a 3D printer making an implantable ear.
• Mesmerizing: plasma shower on the sun
• What does the future hold for fusion research? Take a tour of a nuclear fusion lab for some context.
• Chagas disease is an infectious disease that doesn’t get much attention, but turns out it’s costing us more than we may realize.
• Secret video cameras reveal the secret lives of animals while researchers wonder whether dolphins call each other by name.
• Weekly Canine Science Update: dogs recognize other dogs in a crowd and, surprise, steal food when no one’s looking.
• US kids are finally eating fewer calories but our current calorie counting methods may not be quite right.
• The US government made a big step toward open source science and PLOS approves.
• Time Magazine published the longest story by a single author this week, by Steven Brill about the cost of healthcare. Here are David Dobbs’ and Paul Raeburn’s responses.
• Northeastern network scientists’ work was recognized in Scientific American and the Economist in two great pieces this week: Influential Few Predict Behavior of the Many and Dr. Seldon, I presume.
• Along those lines, the Internet is approaching its limit. What are we to do?
• The most wonderful underwater photography  you’ve ever seen. It’s not only fun and hilarious, but also educational.
• A sad period in science history
• I knew it! Men and women see color differently
• When I was in college, one of my English professors confessed to hypnotizing his girlfriend. It was a funny, if discomfiting, story. But if you don’t want to hypnotize, perhaps you’d be interested in implanting false memories into the minds of your friends and loved ones?
• Three-year-olds know better
• A Scientific American writer has been living on Mars time for a few weeks now. These are her hilarious posts on the experience.