The Fate of Fat By Claire Williams, Biology, 2019 It’s the beginning of a new year. Everyone has been hitting the gym and burning some fat. Or have they? No, this isn’t a question of whether or not people are upholding their New Year’s resolutions. Rather, it is a question of the process at play. Is […]

Too Late to Apologize (to Earth)? By Brian Hempe, Mechanical Engineering, 2020 Carbon dioxide (CO2) significantly contributes to the greenhouse gas effect — in which solar energy is trapped and reflected off the ozone layer back towards Earth. This has a negative effect on the Earth because it changes weather patterns, and as recently observed, raises the global

Q&A With Toyoko Orimoto By Gwen Schanker, Journalism and Biology, 2017 Toyoko Orimoto is an assistant professor in Northeastern’s physics department, and is one of four faculty members who contribute to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. Orimoto spends much of her time conducting research at Northeastern

Building with Biology By Joshua Timmons, Biology, 2016 There’s a frizzy-haired architect hunched over his keyboard at a workstation diagonal from my own in Snell. He has a colorful program open with a map of a city in two dimensions; streets, buildings, and decorations are represented by a pallet of orthogonal shapes, a gridwork of architectural

Stepping Through Stigma By Naomi Stapleton, Psychology, 2016 Over centuries, there has been progress in mental health both strikingly forwards and shockingly backwards. Depression (or as it was known in ancient times, melancholia) has a particularly turbulent history of treatment and perception. Melancholia was initially attributed to demonic possession in many civilizations. Hippocrates, hailed as “The

Revolutionizing HIV By Ololade “Lola” Akingbade, Behavioral Neuroscience, 2018 One of the largest public health crises facing our nation is HIV/AIDS. HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, is characterized by a progressive failure of the immune system, and can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. There is no current effective cure. As a global pandemic, 35.3

Genetic Counseling: When Sci-Fi Doesn’t Feel Like Fiction Anymore By Jen Obrigewitch, Biology, 2017 “It’s in my genes” is a phrase that is commonly used to describe physical and personality traits that a child shares with his or her parents. But for the general public, there was no proof of which genes were actually present in

Co-op Spotlight: Navy SEAL(ion)s By Megan Pinaire, Psychology, 2018 This summer, I did a four-month co-op with the Navy marine mammal program. I worked at the Navy base in Point Loma, California. Just across the bay from scenic Coronado island are the ocean water pens where I worked with some of the most intelligent animals

Separation Anxiety: Phone Edition In a generation filled with daily technological advancements and expanding media networks, smartphones appear to be becoming more essential than our basic human necessities. We are beyond the point of returning to the days of conducting research from those big, bulky encyclopedias, and making payphone calls using the spare change in our