Title
Topic
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‘Microstructural Pattern Formation During Far-From-Equilibrium Alloy Solidification’
“We introduce a new phase-field formulation of rapid alloy solidification that quantitatively incorporates nonequilibrium effects at the solid-liquid interface over a very wide range of interface velocities. Simulations identify a new dynamical instability of dendrite tip growth driven by solute trapping at velocities approaching the absolute stability limit.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at Physical Review Letters.
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Associate professor John Bai, in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, writing with Anya Mkrtchyan from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, uses “rich microdata” from the United States Census Bureau to examine the “relative performance” of new CEOs within a company, comparing CEOs promoted internally with those who are hired externally. Ultimately, their findings “suggest that inside successors might benefit from adopting an outside perspective, demonstrating a sensitivity to change, and challenging legacies and relationships that might diminish their effectiveness.” Read “What Do Outside CEOs Really Do? Evidence from Plant-Level Data” at the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.
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Breaking through the COVID-19 virus’ shell
A result of a collaboration between labs in Northeastern University’s departments of physics and chemistry, this paper expands on our understanding of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Using optical tweezers, researchers gained “direct measurements” of the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein, the “N” protein. These new observations on the virus’s binding process set the stage for future attempts at disrupting the process entirely, targeting the nucleocapsid protein and striking at the virus’s interior. See the full list of authors and read their research, “Structural domains of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein coordinate to compact long nucleic acid substrates,” in Nucleic Acids Research.
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Phonological knowledge shared by signers and non-signers
In this article, professor of psychology Iris Berent, with professor Judit Gervain from the University of Padua and Université Paris Cité, argues that the knowledge of sign language and of a non-sign language can mutually inform one another. “Informed by recent findings from adults and infants,” they write, “we argue that the phonological system is partly amodal. We show that hearing infants use a shared brain network to extract phonological rules from speech and sign.” Read this discussion paper, “Speakers aren’t blank slates (with respect to sign-language phonology)!” in Cognition.
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‘Optimal Recursive Expert-Enabled Inference in Regulatory Networks’
“Accurate inference of biological systems, such as gene regulatory networks and microbial communities, is a key to a deep understanding of their underlying mechanisms. Despite several advances in the inference of regulatory networks in recent years, the existing techniques cannot incorporate expert knowledge into the inference process. … This letter models the regulatory networks using Boolean network with perturbation. We develop an expert-enabled inference method for inferring the unknown parameters of the network model using expert-acquired data.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
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‘Towards a Unified Drag Coefficient Formula for Quantifying Wave Energy Reduction by Salt Marshes’
“Coastal regions are susceptible to increasing flood risks amid climate change. Coastal wetlands play an important role in mitigating coastal hazards. Vegetation exerts a drag force to the flow and dampens storm surges and wind waves…. As wave height increases, highly flexible vegetation causes reduced wave attenuation, whereas relatively rigid vegetation induces increased wave attenuation. The leaf contribution to wave attenuation is highly dependent on the leaf rigidity. It is recommended that leaf properties, especially its Young’s modulus be collected in future field experiments.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Coastal Engineering.
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A virtual home for Antarctic samples around the world
Antarctica provides a remarkable source of biodiversity and serve as “a major sink” of human-made carbon emissions. In “The Time is Right for an Antarctic Biorepository Network,” the authors, from numerous institutions around the United States, argue that there is “an extensive, largely untapped wealth of Antarctic specimens” around the world. “The majority of Antarctic biological specimens are invisible and inaccessible.” With a virtual “biorepository network of Antarctic specimens,” scientists could better address “the most critical questions in Antarctic science, [including] improving human welfare, and mitigating the impacts of climate change.” Find the paper and the full list of authors…
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‘Leveraging Structure for Improved Classification of Grouped Biased Data’
“We consider semi-supervised binary classification for applications in which data points are naturally grouped (e.g., survey responses grouped by state) and the labeled data is biased (e.g., survey respondents are not representative of the population). The groups overlap in the feature space and consequently the input-output patterns are related across the groups. To model the inherent structure in such data, we assume the partition-projected class-conditional invariance across groups, defined in terms of the group-agnostic feature space.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Calibration of Computational Tools for Missense Variant Pathogenicity Classification’
“Recommendations from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics and the Association for Molecular Pathology for interpreting sequence variants specify the use of computational predictors as ‘supporting’ level of evidence for pathogenicity. … Previously, we described a probabilistic framework that quantified the strengths of evidence … within ACMG/AMP recommendations. We have extended this framework to computational predictors and introduce a new standard that converts a tool’s scores to PP3 and BP4 evidence strengths.” Read “Calibration of computational tools for missense variant pathogenicity classification and ClinGen recommendations for PP3/BP4 criteria” and see the full list of authors in AJHG.
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‘The Birth of a Relativistic Jet Following the Disruption of a Star by a Cosmological Black Hole’
This highly collaborative, multi-institutional effort models black holes when they become relativistic jets “after… tidally disrupt[ing] a star.” These events, when they point toward Earth, “have the potential to unveil cosmological… quiescent black holes and are ideal test beds.” The results of their modeling “implies a beamed, highly relativistic jet akin to blazars… and challenges our theoretical understanding of jets.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at Nature Astronomy.
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Why fishers distrust what the science says when it comes to protecting fish stocks
In collaboration with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, this paper looks at why “Fishers commonly disagree with stock assessment results, particularly when a stock declines and strict harvest controls become necessary.” This counterintuitive effect, which leads to “distrust in scientific advice,” was explored through “a scientific-industry cooperative trawl survey and a telephone survey of fisher perceptions.” Read “Lost in Translation: Understanding Divergent Perspectives on a Depleted Fish Stock” and see the full list of authors in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.
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Story map demonstrates how to rebuild Massachusetts cod stocks
Professor of marine and environmental science Jon Grabowski, along with recent Northeastern PhD. Micah Dean, have had their research featured in an interactive story map from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (MADMF). The MADMF coordinated surveys and studies across the fisheries, employing both scientists and commercial fishermen. Their work is “already being applied at multiple levels to improve fishery management and stock assessments.”
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Emerging countries and the global legal economic order
“Emerging countries have been able to make use of the liberal trade and investment regime to support their development strategies without having to adopt the full gamut of neoliberal prescriptions… Recent research explores how different emerging countries are positioned in regards to trade and investment law, how tensions develop between development policies and the demands of trade and investment legal frameworks, and how alternative visions will be driven by pragmatism and strategic self-interest rather than neoliberal orthodoxy.” Read “Reshaping the Global Legal Economic Order” in the Insights @ Center for Emerging Markets.
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Professor Yun Raymond Fu awarded patent for ‘Multi-Person Pose Estimation Using Skeleton Prediction’
The patent offers “Embodiments [that] provide functionality for identifying joints and limbs in images.”
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Topology, symmetry and quantum band theory
In this review, “Topology and Symmetry in Quantum Materials,” the authors present an overview of “band theory,” and “presents a cross section through the recent work on understanding the role of geometry and topology in generating topological states and their responses to external stimuli, and as a basis for connecting theory and experiment within the band theory framework.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at Advanced Materials.
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Modeling floodplain lakes after extreme flooding
This study of floodplain lakes—which accumulate “sediments, organic matter, and pollutants”—adds to our understanding of their evolution, especially after flooding events. While pre-existing models of floodplain lake evolution exist, they are “not well suited to guide the interpretation of individual flood events in sedimentary records.” This paper “combine[s] sediment samples collected in and around a floodplain lake with hydraulic modelling simulations to examine inundation, flow velocity, and sedimentation patterns,” especially helpful after “extreme” flood events. Read “A Hydraulic Modelling Approach to Study Flood Sediment Deposition in Floodplain Lakes” and find the full list of authors in Earth Surface Processes and…
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‘Quench Dynamics in the One-Dimensional Mass-Imbalanced Ionic Hubbard Model’
“Using the time-dependent Lanczos method, we study the non-equilibrium dynamics of the one-dimensional ionic-mass imbalanced Hubbard chain driven by a quantum quench of the on-site Coulomb interaction, where the system is prepared in the ground state of the Hamiltonian with a different Hubbard interaction. A full exact diagonalization is adopted to study the zero temperature phase diagram in equilibrium, which is shown to be in good agreement with previous studies using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG).” See the full list of authors and read their research in ArXiv.
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Music is good for the brain, and not just among professionals
This study, “Musical Experience Relates to Insula-Based Functional Connectivity in Older Adults,” a collaboration between the department of physical therapy, the department of music and the department of psychology at Northeastern University, in addition to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, looked at “general musical experiences” across a subject’s lifespan, particularly in older adults. Their findings show that “older adults with more musical experience showed greater functional connectivity” between insulae and various regions of the brain. “Sensorimotor function and cognitive control” especially seem to benefit. See the full list of authors and read their research in Brain Sciences.
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Advances made against trypanosomiasis, ‘sleeping sickness’
Researchers compared the perturbations of proteins in response to two treatments to human African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness. The workflow identified the differences between NEU-4438 (“a lead for the development of drugs against Trypanosoma brucei,” the parasite responsible for sleeping sickness) and acoziborole, a more common treatment. See the full list of authors and read their research paper at iScience: “Hypothesis-generating proteome perturbation to identify NEU-4438 and acoziborole modes of action in the African Trypanosome.”
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Photography for the past and present at San Francisco subway station
Mills photography professor Catherine Wagner installation “Arc Cycle” was on display at the Yerba Buena/Moscone Subway Station in San Francisco. The work “aims to reflect San Francisco’s past and present.” Professor Wagner was interviewed about the installation in the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook.
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‘Scaling Laws for Two-Dimensional Dendritic Crystal Growth in a Narrow Channel’
“We investigate analytically and computationally the dynamics of 2D needle crystal growth from the melt in a narrow channel. Our analytical theory predicts that, in the low supersaturation limit, the growth velocity V decreases in time t as a power law V∼t−2/3, which we validate by phase-field and dendritic-needle-network simulations.” See the full list of authors and read this pre-print at ArXiv.