NOVA Two weeks under the sea Six miles off the coast of Key Largo and 63 feet below the ocean surface sits the world’s only undersea marine laboratory—the FIU Aquarius Reef Base. There, researchers from Florida International University, Northeastern University, and MIT recently joined documentarian Fabien Cousteau for Mission 31. The month-long project aimed to study the effects of global warming […]
Researchers try to map social contacts after bombings In the minutes after the Marathon bombings, phones began to ring and buzz as people checked on family members, friends, and distant relations in Boston. R U OK?, they texted. What happened, they asked. Researchers at Northeastern University are asking residents and visitors who used their cellphones to keep in touch with their social network […]
5 surprising ways mindfulness can change you One series of studies from Paul Condon and colleagues at Northeastern University provides some compelling evidence that practicing mindfulness can indeed increase empathy and lead people to act more altruistically. In a clever experiment, a group of study participants were asked to wait in a waiting room while the researchers were preparing their session, and […]
Live feed from Fabien Cousteau’s Mission 31 slated for Tuesday The live feed to Nahant from Fabien Cousteau’s Mission 31 is scheduled for next Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Northeastern University Marine Science Center on Nahant Road as part of the Summer Cinema by the Sea series. Previous announcements had it scheduled on a different day. A number of faculty and students from the […]
Google flu trends: the limits of big data Google Flu Trends, once a poster child for the power of big-data analysis, seems to be under attack. This month, in a Science magazine article, four quantitatively adept social scientists reported that Google’s flu-tracking service not only wildly overestimated the number of flu cases in the United States in the 2012-13 flu season — a […]