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From the ground up
Nanotechnology is a huge field. When I worked at a nanomaterials start-up my dad would often ask me about developments in nanomedicine and I had no clue what to say. Nanotechnology enables new...
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Boots made for walkin’
Of the 700,000 new stroke cases each year, only 37% regain the ability to walk. That means more the 440,000 people requiring mobility assistance are added to the overburdened healthcare system annually...
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Nanowire Hay Bales
This week at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, a group of Northeastern scientists will present the Monet painting of the future. This pile of hay bales is not a close up of a lost...
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Radio waves for crowd protection
The death toll in Jos, Nigeria after the most recent suicide bomb has climbed to 19. In our jaded world, that doesn’t seem so high. But nearly 13,000 individuals died from suicide attacks between 2003...
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Capping off the capstones
I got to go on another field trip on Wednesday (have I mentioned recently how much I love my job?). Not only did it mean navigating the infamous tunnels for the first time, but I also got to meet some...
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Putting renewable back into renewable energy
Salem Zahmi grew up under a very hot sun. So it’s no wonder that this graduate student from the United Arab Emirates is studying solar energy. He hopes to contribute to a growing research campaign in...
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Design for Deconstruction
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....
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Capstones in high school
On Monday, 33 STEM high school teachers from around New England converged on Northestern’s campus for the third annual CAPSULE workshop. Under the direction of principal investigator Ibrahim Zeid,...
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Human-machine interactions, the natural way
When mechanical and industrial engineering professor Yingzi Lin was pursuing her PhD in vehicle engineering, one of the driver test subjects became so distracted by the sensing equipment in the vehicle...
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Academic Minute: Carey Rappaport
Academic Minute is a radio podcast that features researchers from colleges and universities around the world, keeping listeners abreast of what’s new and exciting in the academy. In June, electrical...
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A new strategy for landmine detection
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...
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Beware the squeamish: an alternative surgical tool for uterine fibroids
Photo by Hey Paul Studios via Flickr. Uterine fibroids. Not something most of us like to talk about. What are they? Calcified deposits stuck to the lining of a woman’s uterus. Are they common? Yes. Are...
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Auroop Ganguly, NSF movie star
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...
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A new wave for antennas
Photo by Brooks Canaday. From solar panels to high-resolution imaging, a host of advanced technologies relies on the manipulation of light waves. Engineers have traditionally bent light beams toward a...
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Dainty flower is relentless cancer killer in disguise
Photo courtesy of Carolyn Lee-Parsons. When I was in high school I read a book called Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice that I thought was going to define the rest of my life (I’ve always been kind of...
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Paper towels that pack a punch against bacteria
Photo courtesy of Thinkstock. Of the three ways we can dry our hands after scrubbing down, the paper towel method tends to be the most hygienic. When I asked chemical engineering professor and chair...
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Alert 101: Airport Screening Technologies
Here’s a great video produced by the DHS Center of Excellence, ALERT, or Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats (what is it about engineers and acronyms?!). ALERT 101 is a new series...
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Stronger than Kevlar, light as a tee-shirt, and cheap all over
Image courtesy of Marilyn Minus. Click for larger view. Forty years ago, Dupont Company revolutionized protective gear when they introduced Kevlar, a fiber made of super-strong, rigid polymer molecules...
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A radar for emotion
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...
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Metallic personalities
Image via Thinkstock. 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...
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The Super Bowl of civil engineering
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...
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Drive it to break it
Photo provided by Dalton Colen. Recent mechanical engineering graduate Andy Benn isn’t used to having time on his hands. Spending an afternoon playing tennis and eating lobster rolls, is well,...
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Alert 101: Video Analytics
I took a different route to work this morning which had me pass by the Harvard School of Public Health. Big windows along the street revealed a giant television screen with dozens of smaller frames and...
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Don’t delay: Early engineering intro pays off
Photo via Thinkstock. When Mohit Bhardwaj was a freshman in high school he traveled from his home in Lusaka, Zambia to Boston. with Lead America. For nine days, he and a group of 19 other students from...
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The new American hamburger…?
Photo by Victoria Henderson via Flickr. Twenty six billion pounds. That’s roughly how much beef Americans consume each year. We get it from some 33 million cows that are largely raised in centralized,...
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