The New Yorker The Loch Ness monster of mollusks “My freshman microbiology professor liked to say, ‘If it wasn’t for shipworms, we’d be speaking Spanish today,’ ” Daniel Distel, a marine biologist and the director of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center, at Northeastern University, told me recently. Distel is a shipworm scientist, and earlier this week he and an international team of colleagues announced […]
VIBE New freestyle rap card game claims ‘anybody can rap’ Northeastern University entrepreneurship student Jerry Spatch has invented a new game that might help novice rappers perfect their flow. Vers, a freestyle rap card game, is giving people the tools to turn any gathering into a cypher. Spatch says that his experience freestyling with friends at college parties is what inspired him to create the […]
Aaron Hernandez’s suicide: Were there warning signs? Richard Melloni Jr., a psychology professor and director of behavioral neuroscience at Northeastern University, said he was struck by video showing Hernandez’s rare display of tears last week when he was acquitted in the double murders. “Maybe his emotion was a sign of depression that was starting to rear its head,” said Melloni, who was […]
Even death is powerless to halt double standard When it comes to weighing morally reprehensible behavior, winning matters way too much. “Winning has superseded everything else, to the point where we’ve lost the moral rudder,” says Dan Lebowitz, executive director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University.
Two-thirds of Americans support gun limits in public places – study The new findings by researchers at Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Johns Hopkins University are the latest in a set of studies that are painting the most definitive portrait of American gun ownership in two decades. The authors asked nearly 4,000 respondents whether they thought people should be allowed to bring firearms into nine public […]
New freestyle rap card game is bringing hip-hop culture to your tabletop If you’ve ever watched a rap cypher, you’ve probably wondered how someone can string together a substantive narrative of rhymes while also ethering someone or offering a sociopolitical analysis of some form. Who really knows? But new freestyle rap-based game Vers, developed by 21-year-old Northeastern University entrepreneurship student Jerry Spatch, is offering people a chance […]
Tons of $80,000 entry-level cybersecurity jobs are sitting empty To make matters worse, cybersecurity suffers from an image problem. The field pays well, but many computer science students would rather create new products and technologies for Apple or Google. “Computer science is sexy. Cyber isn’t,” said P.K. Agarwal, regional dean of Northeastern University’s Silicon Valley campuses, which teach cybersecurity. The field offers high-stress jobs […]
WGBH Implications of Aaron Hernandez’s death Five days after being acquitted on double murder charges, convicted murder and former Patriots player Aaron Hernandez was found hanging inside his state prison cell and was pronounced dead shortly after in what prison officials say appears to have been a suicide. Hernandez was serving a life sentence for the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd, […]
Officers rue the return of US ‘war on drugs’ But according to Leo Beletsky, a public health and drug policy expert from Northeastern University, the drop in violent crime had “absolutely zero” to do with the war on drugs. States which declined to lock up thousands of low level drug criminals saw a similar decline, he said.
Mashable Scientists find horrifying jet black sea worm in the Philippines Hidden beneath its tusk-like shell is a jet-black, slippery and slimy sea creature that looks like it came off the set of Alien. Scientists said on Monday that they’ve discovered the first living specimen of a giant shipworm in a Philippine bay. People have known of the huge mollusk for hundreds of years, by the […]
NECN Northeastern University professor pioneers new security technology The haunting images from the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings still remain with Northeastern University professor Jose Martinez. Four years later, it’s one of the reasons he’s motivated to stop the next one. “How can I as a scientist, help us avoid situations like that,” asked Martinez. His team at the university are developing a new […]
Scientists find giant, elusive clam known as ‘the unicorn of mollusks’ “For me, it is like a finding a mythical creature,” said Daniel L. Distel, a research professor at Northeastern, who has been studying mollusks since the late 1980s and had long dreamed of finding a giant shipworm. “You know it’s something no one has ever seen. It’s like coming across a living dinosaur.”