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 ...
Did you watch GoT last night? If not, don’t worry, the following post will not reveal a thing, I promise. Rebecca Certner, a PhD candidate in Steve Vollmer’s lab, wrote it a couple weeks ago for the Marine Science Center’s graduate research blog. If you’re a Khaleesi fan, a Joffrey hater, or just curious whether ...
Oh, what a fortnight. Here are four wonderful stories I stumbled upon between commencement program stuffing, News@Northeastern writing, and researcher interviewing: Apparently, it’s “statistically unwise” to include bowling scenes in Hollywood screenplays. A collection of glass sculptures of marine animals inspires a scientist and a movie maker to create a new documentary film. Ridiculous video ...
When the Human Genome Project wrapped in 2003, we assumed this ginormous data set would provide the much needed parts-list to fill in the blanks of human health and disease. But in the last 10 years it’s become exceedingly clear that things are just not that simple. Yes, our genes are obviously more than a ...
April 26 marked the annual Riser Lecture at the Marine Science Center to honor Doc Riser, the founding director of the MSC. I’d had the event in my book for several months, but when it finally came upon us my schedule had been overridden with other junk, precluding me from being able to make it up ...
A couple weeks ago I wrote a story about some work related to the Boston Marathon bombings that network scientists in David Lazer’s lab are working on. They’re asking Android phone users to donate a little time as well as the data from the calls and texts they made in the hours following the attacks. Researchers ...
For many civil engineers, the annual steel bridge competition might as well be the Super Bowl. It’s a big deal — university teams all over the country spend many months, and many late nights, coming up with a bridge design, fabricating the pieces, and building their own personal masterpiece. The bridges are serious, too: they ...
Civil and environmental engineering professor Philip Larese-Casanova has had a life-long love affair with metals. In his work in aquatic environmental chemistry, he looks at how metallic pollutants transform and behave in freshwater systems. “I just had an interest in the metals,” he told me in an interview last month. “Maybe it’s because I see ...
Hi friends — I’m sorry I missed last week’s webcrawl. I really have no excuse, since I was technically locked inside my house all day and should have had plenty of time to do it. But I was glued to CNN, texting my friends in Newton and Watertown, and generally trying to stay calm as ...
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 ...
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 ...