The standard thinking at the time was that the three main classes of bactericidal antibiotics each had a unique way of killing bacterial cells—like specialized assassins each trained in a single type of weaponry. But this new research suggested that all antibiotics work the same way, by urging bacterial cells to make compounds called reactive oxygen species, or ROS, which bacteria are naturally susceptible to.

“If they were right it would have been an important finding that could have changed the way we treat patients,” said Iris Keren, a senior scientist in Lewis’ lab.

And that’s exactly how science usually works, said Lewis—through challenges to mainstream thinking. But recent results reported by Lewis, Keren, and their research  partners in an article published Friday in the journal Science suggest that this alternative hypothesis doesn’t hold up. For example, even bacteria that are incapable of making ROS are still vulnerable to antibiotics. Further, some antibiotics can work their fatal magic in both aerobic and anaerobic conditions—but reactive oxygen species can only form when there’s oxygen to fuel them.

“We chose to do the simplest and most critical experiment aimed at falsifying this hypothesis,” said Lewis. “Killing by antibiotics is unrelated to ROS production,” the authors wrote. The findings were corroborated by University of Illinois researchers in another study released on Friday .

The team treated bacterial cultures with antibiotics in both the presence and absence of oxygen. Other than the gaseous environment, the two treatments were identical. There was no difference in cell death between the two populations.

Before performing these experiments, Lewis’ team first looked at signals of a fluorescent dye, which previous researchers had used as an indicator for ROS levels. The team treated bacterial cells with a variety of antibiotics and measured the strength of this signal. Since antibiotics were presumed to increase ROS levels, one would have expected increased concentrations of antibiotics to correlate with stronger signals. However, Lewis’ group saw no such correlation.

“But there’s a difference between correlation and direct observation,” Keren said. In order to support their observations with unequivocal data, the team members physically separated the cells that had stronger fluorescent signals from those with weak signals and treated them both with the same antibiotics. Both populations suffered equivalent cell death.

“The research from Dr. Lewis’ group demonstrates that, contrary to current dogma, antibiotics apparently do not kill bacteria through induction of reactive oxygen species,” said Steven Projan, vice president for research and development at iMed and head of Infectious Diseases and Vaccines at MedImmune, both subsidiaries of AstraZeneca. “The results shown are rather clear but still leave us with the mystery as to how antibacterial drugs help infected people clear bacterial infections. At this point, we should probably dispense with the ‘one size fits all’ approach to bacterial killing by antibiotics,” said Projan, who was not involved in the research.

With these results, Lewis and Keren hope the field will be able to focus its efforts on understanding the true mechanisms of how antibiotics wipe out bacteria in order to effectively address chronic bacterial infections, one of the most pressing issues facing public health today.

“It looks like a war zone of the worst kind,” said Matthias Ruth, a professor with dual appointments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Matthias Ruth is a professor of public policy and engineering. Photo by Brooks Canaday.

Ruth is part of a team of about 20 researchers from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that has studied the aftermath of the Italian earthquake in hopes of teaching other cities how to improve their resilience to major disasters. The research team released a report of their recommendations, “Building Resilient Regions after a National Disaster,” in Rome earlier this month.

“We need to prepare ourselves,” Ruth said. “That’s the intellectual question we have to face: When we rebuild, how do we do that considering the next disaster? Now that we are given the opportunity to rethink and rebuild, how do we do this in a smarter way?”

Planners, engineers, and government officials in L’Aquila have begun rebuilding the ravaged city, Ruth said. They are looking at how to balance its existing nature—a quintessentially Italian community of winding streets, sidewalk cafes, and close quarters—with the needs of a modern city to allow for both resilience against future disasters and an infrastructure that can support a new generation of entrepreneurs and innovation. Some structures will simply not be rebuilt; others may look the same but will be built using entirely new methods and materials.

Work is underway to rebuild L’Aquila, which was devastated by a 2009 earthquake. Photo by Matthias Ruth.

“The big question is, ‘How do we use technology to continue to give the feel of an old city with its own charm and recreate the social fabric and some kind of authenticity, while also incorporating modern materials, sensors, and information technology to make the city a safer place?’” Ruth said. These issues, he said, represent the key challenges facing urban resilience projects, and they align with the larger debate of designing sustainable cities that can evolve with both environmental and social changes.

Ruth said lessons learned in L’Aquila—gathered from more than 400 in-person interviews and intensive landscape surveys and assessments—can be applied to cities in places like New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, all of which were battered by superstorm Sandy. In a sign that Ruth’s report has had far-reaching effect, some officials have announced that destroyed waterfront structures will either not be rebuilt or, in cases like beachfront boardwalks, will be rebuilt out of concrete, not wood like the previous structures.

“This is not just about Italy,” Ruth said. “This is really a piece of the groundwork to be laid for cities all around the world.”

Aoun met separately on Tuesday with U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren—a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—and Mo Cowan, a 1994 graduate of Northeastern’s School of Law. In his meetings with the new members of Massachusetts’ congressional delegation, Aoun highlighted a broad spectrum of higher-education topics. Among them were the importance of innovation in higher education and finding ways to expand federal funding aimed at work-study programs to also include students working on co-op—the signature program in Northeastern’s experiential-education model.

President Joseph E. Aoun (right) meets with U.S. Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

On Monday, Aoun met with U.S. Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. In their meeting, Aoun discussed federal regulation of higher education and stressed the need for Washington’s support of programs that increase student-aid funding and incentivize innovation in higher education. They also discussed the upcoming hearings and expected vote next year to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, which sets the policy in areas such as strengthening colleges and universities’ educational resources and providing financial aid to students.

The meetings come only days after sequestration—a series of automatic, across-the-board cuts to government agencies totaling an estimated $1.2 trillion over 10 years—went into effect. While the full scope of the sequester’s potential impact in areas such as research funding and financial aid programs remains unclear, Northeastern’s preparations for this fiscal reality have been underway for months.

“Accelerating our research enterprise is a top priority for the institution and our research efforts will continue even as the funding landscape becomes more challenging,” Mel Bernstein, senior vice provost for research and graduate education, wrote in a memo last week to Northeastern faculty and staff. Bernstein added that the cuts will not affect the Pell Grant program, nor will it impact the students’ financial aid for now, but that planning is underway to offset any future change.

In Washington, Aoun also chaired the American Council on Education’s annual meeting, where he concluded his one-year term as chair of the ACE board of directors. As board chair, Aoun continued his advocacy for the strength and diversity of the American system of higher education, which he has said must continue to innovate to compete globally and meet the challenges of the 21st century. Aoun will remain an active member on the ACE executive committee.

Northeastern’s president has long taken a leadership role in addressing issues critical to higher education on a national stage. Last year, Aoun was named to a new academic advisory council reporting directly to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that examines how universities can contribute to America’s national security efforts. He has also coordinated efforts with other college presidents to support critical research funding in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security budget, to preserve federal financial aid funding for students, and to urge caution on regulation of unpaid internships at the federal level.

The discrepancies don’t significantly impede our ability to understand our children and grandchildren, he said, “but accumulation of small changes over long periods of time is enough to make our English sound a lot different from Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Beowulf.”

Backed by a Google Faculty Research Award, Smith is currently studying how languages have changed over the last several hundred years. But he’s doing it in a way only recently made possible through technological developments in the digital humanities and natural language processing. In the last few decades, libraries have been working to digitize literature. Now that millions of books are available as searchable files, researchers are able to ask questions that couldn’t be asked before.

Smith and his team will use corpora like the Penn Treebank, which includes the syntactic analyses of 30,000 sentences from The Wall Street Journal, to build statistical models that automatically detect the syntax of a sentence in a digitized book.

The main challenge will be building models that work across a diverse range of texts over the last several hundred years, including newspapers, blogs, and telephone conversations. “The statistical models predict which words are connected to other words in a sentence,” Smith explained. “The problem is that over 500 years, precisely because of the very phenomenon we’re trying to model, words’ patterns of attachment change.”

Once the researchers have a computational program in place that doesn’t require human supervision, they will be able to visualize the evolution of language. It will also have a far-reaching impact on cultural and historical analyses, Smith said. “If we have a better model for language changes, we can reconstruct languages that don’t exist anymore,” he said. Further, if we understand how languages influence each other through history, we might get a better understanding of how cultures connect.

Smith’s research is primarily focused on computational linguistics, “but texts can be evidence for lots of things in the humanities,” he explained. “Not just language itself, but what people talk about with language.” His work, he said, can reveal what aspects of a culture people find interesting or how texts are evidence for communication, transportation, and social networks that are otherwise not observable.

“Training in science and STEM is really a way of thinking,” said Christos Zahopoulos, executive director of Northeastern’s Center for STEM Education. “It’s a way of approaching problems, a way of becoming a critical thinker.”

The Center for STEM Education and Boston Public Schools have collaborated for many years, said Claire Duggan, the center’s director of programs and partnerships. This year, the duo found a third partner in Science From Scientists, a local nonprofit organization that places practicing scientists in elementary– and middle-school classrooms to engage with students.

“I used to compete in science fairs all the time,” said Erika Ebbel Angle, CEO and founder of Science from Scientists. “When I think about what really made me want to be a scientist, it was those experiences I had as a kid.”

Northeastern’s Marine Science Center engaged students during the activity session. Photo by Daniel Sullivan.

“The really interesting science fair projects, in my opinion, are the ones where the students are able to identify something in their personal experiences that has affected them that they are trying to overcome or investigate further,” Sullivan said.

Many of the students participating in this year’s fair are graduates of Northeastern’s Exxon Mobil Bernard Harris
Summer STEM Program for Middle School Students, a two-week academic camp aimed at stimulating students’ interest in science and engineering as a potential career path.

“The thing I love about science is the whole experimenting thing,” said Ina Beinborn, an 8thgrader at Boston Latin School and a camp graduate. “You can find out something that was unknown to you before, and it just gives you experience, and more knowledge.” Beinborn’s project on the effects of moving air versus still air on melting ice won her second place in the competition’s junior division.

The science fair approach allows students to get their hands dirty, to ask questions of their world, and do “the whole experimenting thing” until they find answers, said Pam Pelletier, senior program director for science at BPS.

“They have to wrestle with ideas and discrepancies between what they thought, what they know, what they’re seeing,” Pelletier said. “Science is messy—and that’s what we want kids to know.”

“Somebody comes in with another frequency,” said Hossein Mosallaei, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, “they’ll get it like that.” He snapped his fingers.

It’s a problem of bandwidth, he said. But in a paper recently published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, Mosallaei and his team overcome that problem.

New materials like those that enable cloaking, as well as a host of other applications, are called metamaterials: collections of so-called “inclusions”—metal rings, for example, or wires—that are organized so that the whole affords unique properties not found in nature.

One of these properties—called permeability, or the magnetic polarization of the atoms within—is only found in materials with low excitation frequencies. But the miniature devices that have come to define our technological culture operate at high frequencies. Metamaterials developed in labs like Mosallaei’s have been able to achieve the uncommon feat of permeability at high excitation frequencies.

But, still, a problem remained: The materials only retained those properties at a single frequency, just like the aforementioned cloaking material. Researchers have theorized dozens of new applications with novel combinations of permeability and its sister property, permittivity (the electric polarization of the atoms in a material). From miniaturized antennas to cloaking to extremely high-resolution imaging to concepts we can’t yet fathom, almost none of these will be of great use until metamaterials become operable at a wide range of frequencies.

In the recent paper, Mosallaei’s team incorporated active electronic circuits into the metamaterials as yet another “inclusion.” Just like permeability, the circuit components want to operate at specific frequencies. Forcing them together into the confined space of the metamaterials has the effect of canceling out this frequency dependency. The bandwidth problem disappears. This is achieved in the microwave spectrum where work is currently in progress to exploit the similar concept in higher frequencies and in the visible band.

The new approach could have implications for a variety of applications. Invisibility cloaking, Mosallaei said, is just the beginning.

“Oxidation inexorably moves us along toward an oxidized state,” said pharmaceutical sciences professor Richard Deth. “You have to deal with it progressively.”

One option is to slow down the synthesis of new proteins, a process that requires energy. Indeed, as we age, we produce fewer new proteins, which explains why our capacity for learning and healing suffer as we grow old.

Since every protein originates from instructions in the DNA, protein synthesis can be slowed down by turning off particular genes. A process called epigenetic regulation accomplishes the task by adding molecular tags on top of the genome. The protein methionine synthase regulates this process. But what regulates methionine synthase? Oxidation.

“This enzyme is the most easily oxidized molecule in the body,” said Deth, whose research on the subject was recently published in the journal PLOS ONE. The senior author for the study, Christina Muratore, received her doctorate in pharmaceutical sciences from Northeastern in 2010.

Whenever the body is under oxidative stress, Deth explained, methionine synthase, or MS, stops working. He and his team hypothesized that MS plays an important regulatory role in aging and that it might be impaired in autism, which Deth has connected to unchecked oxidative stress in previous research.

To examine their hypothesis, the researchers looked at postmortem human brain samples across the lifespan, with subjects as young as 28 weeks of fetal development to as old as 84 years. They measured the levels of a molecule called MS mRNA, which transcribes the genetic code for methionine synthase into actual protein.

As the subjects aged, their brain tissue showed lower levels of MS mRNA. But, surprisingly, the levels of the protein itself remained constant across the lifespan.

Deth and his colleagues suspect that this observed decrease in MS mRNA over our lives may act as a check in the system to save energy that we no longer have in plentiful supply and to slow down oxidative stress. “One way that the system can guard against too much protein synthesis is to restrict the amount of mRNA,” Deth said.

The team also compared MS protein and mRNA levels between brain tissue samples from autistic and normally developing subjects. Autistic brains had markedly less MS mRNA than the control samples but similar protein levels. Additionally, the age-dependent trend seen in normally developing brains was not mimicked among the autistic sample.

If decreased MS mRNA does mean decreased protein production, it’s no big deal for adults who don’t need to make new proteins as often. But for the developing brain, new proteins are critical. “Your capacity for learning might be prematurely reduced because metabolically you can’t afford it,” Deth suggested.

While the results are preliminary and will benefit from repeated studies and more investigation, Deth’s findings add to a growing body of evidence linking both aging and autism to oxidative stress.

Aquino, president of the SWA Group, an internationally recognized landscape architecture, urban design, and planning firm based in California, served as the keynote speaker on Tuesday at Northeastern at the university’s City Design and Sustainability Symposium, held in the Curry Student Center Ballroom. He explained that building successful cities of the future depends on whether many factors at play in urban design—business, science, politics, culture, just to name a few—are flowing in unison and supplementing each other. This approach, he said, allows cities to develop multifaceted infrastructure that addresses current objectives and can adapt over time to meet the needs of an evolving populace.

Gerdo Aquino, president of SWA, a landscape architecture, planning, and urban design firm, gives the keynote address at the City Design and Sustainability Symposium.

“We’re trying to get a point where all those factors are moving at the same pace,” Aquino said. “When that occurs, great design happens and great planning happens.” He pointed to several case studies from his firm’s work around the globe, including green roof buildings in California and an urban forest project in Shanghai.

The symposium—sponsored by the College of Arts, Media and Design and the Northeastern Center for the Arts—drew interdisciplinary experts from academia and the public and private sectors for a daylong conversation focused on how to design sustainable cities for the future. Jane Amidon, professor and director of Northeastern’s urban landscape program, organized the inaugural event.

“As jobs and industries change, we see economies change and new lifestyles emerge, and we see the building blocks of the city start to evolve,” Amidon said in opening remarks. She added that design thinkers must bring their individual expertise to forums like this one to develop interdisciplinary solutions for sustainable urban landscapes.

Xavier Costa, founding dean of the College of Arts, Media and Design, noted that the event aligns with the university’s effort to trumpet sustainability initiatives across disciplines through innovative faculty research, student projects, and guest speakers. Sustainability is one of the university’s top research themes, along with health and security.

Throughout the day, panel discussions addressed many of the complex issues related to designing sustainable cities from three angles: science of design, policy of design, and business of design. All three panels were moderated by Northeastern faculty: Amidon; Brian Helmuth, professor of environmental science and public policy; and George Thrush, director of the School of Architecture. The lectures can be viewed here.

In the first panel, participants discussed the effect of science, technology, and the environment on the urban landscape. Climate change, panelists noted, presents significant challenges with regard to air quality and rising temperatures and sea levels. Nigel Jacob, who co-founded the city of Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, which serves as a civic innovation incubator, discussed the intersection of civic life and city services. He noted, for example, how a mobile app, Citizens Connect, brings residents to the conversation.

Panelist Matthew Eckelman, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, further noted that the pace of urbanism presents both great opportunities and problems for engineers. He recently read that by 2030, the amount of new city space being added around the world will equal roughly the size of Mongolia.

“The big push on engineering, and many other disciplines, now is understanding the systemic effects, trying to couple all of the engineering systems that need to take place in a city like this and understand how they interact with the natural systems around them,” Eckelman said.

Addressing more than three dozen of Washington state’s leaders in research, healthcare, higher education, and government, Aoun spoke of the “social compact” between universities and their communities: In return for community support, universities must devote their academic mission to the growth and betterment of their communities.

That is the promise Northeastern is making to Seattle, Aoun said. “Our graduate campus here is a 50-year investment,” he said, referring to the university’s commitment to a long-term partnership.

The outlines of that partnership are identical in Seattle and in Charlotte, N.C., the university’s first graduate campus location: graduate degree programs in high-demand fields and thoughtful research and educational collaborations, all aimed at helping advance regional economic development goals.

Research partnerships topped the agenda at the Feb. 19 event. The speakers—including U.S. Sen. Patty Murray; Dr. Larry Corey, president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; and Elson S. Floyd and Michael K. Young, the presidents, respectively, of Washington State University and the University of Washington—affirmed the Puget Sound region’s need for more research and educational capacity and recognized Northeastern’s value in both spheres.

The areas for potential partnership—in Big Data computing, the life sciences and biotechnology, and global health—are dynamic fields that are markers of the world’s rapid transition to a digital economy, Aoun said.

They are also challenges for the region and its higher education community, said Tayloe Washburn, dean and CEO of Northeastern’s Seattle graduate campus, to ensure that the state has a workforce prepared to thrive in those emerging fields.

This was the third of three events that the campus hosted to mark its opening in Seattle’s vibrant South Lake Union neighborhood.

In mid-January, Northeastern’s graduate campus in Seattle welcomed more than 600 visitors at an open house to showcase the 28 graduate degree programs it is offering through a hybrid model that merges online and on-campus learning.

In December, the campus hosted representatives from 50 top area businesses to network and explore co-op employer relationships and collaborations with Northeastern’s career services office.