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 […]

“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.”

In a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Daniel Distel, a microbiologist at Northeastern University, and colleagues described a live one for first time. Its symbiotic relationship with bacteria provides clues to how the giant shipworm evolved its strange way of eating, and may enrich our understanding of infection in […]

Today marks the end of the time period imposed by the Supreme Judicial Court in January requiring prosecutors to make final decisions about the estimated 24,000 Massachusetts criminal drug cases tainted by the misconduct of Annie Dookhan, a state chemist whose fraudulent activity at the Hinton Crime Lab in Jamaica Plain came to light more […]

The field pays well, but many computer-science students would rather create new products and technologies for Apple and Google than design and operate systems that spot, resist and mitigate a widening variety of attacks. “Computer science is sexy. Cyber isn’t,” said P.K. Agarwal, regional dean of Northeastern University’s Silicon Valley campuses, which teach cybersecurity. “Cybersecurity […]

The seemingly irrational decision to broadcast footage of himself committing a heinous crime lines up with a familiar psychological profile, said James Alan Fox, a well-known criminologist who teaches at Northeastern University and has consulted on major murder investigations. “There are offenders who feel proud of their crimes, their conquests — and oftentimes they’re people […]

Team leader Daniel Distel, a marine biologist at Northeastern University in Boston, plucked a specimen from the stink and packed it into a section of white PVC pipe, transporting it live several thousand miles to the lab of University of Utah medicinal chemist Margo Haygood. “Seeing Kuphus for the first time was a highlight of […]

The researchers, led by Northeastern University’s Daniel Distel, have adventurous eaters to thank for the discovery: previous efforts to track down living Kuphus polythalamia in areas where shells had historically been found proved fruitless. The scientists knew the worms had to be out there—in the Philippines, their tusk-like shells were sold at top dollar to […]

Although the giant shipworm was first categorized as a species more than 200 years ago, no living specimen had been examined by scientists and almost nothing had been known about it. That changed when Daniel Distel, a researcher at Northeastern University, and colleagues got their hands on a handful of the creatures during a research […]

New species are discovered frequently, but this creature is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Called the giant shipworm, it lives inside a long shell where it consumes noxious chemicals at the bottom of muddy lagoons. An international team of scientists are now the first to study this elusive animal in the flesh, but after taking […]

“I’ve been studying shipworms since 1989 and in all that time I had never seen a living specimen of Kuphus polythalamia,” Daniel Distel, a co-author of the new study and the director of Northeastern University’s Ocean Genome Legacy Center, wrote in an email. “It was pretty spectacular to lift that tube out of its container […]

“Regional and local newspapers have been decimated,” Northeastern University’s Dan Kennedy wrote last week. Digital reporting outlets and local TV stations do good work but, as Kennedy noted, research has shown that “some 85 percent of accountability journalism is produced by newspapers.”