Central vision loss from macular degeneration affects millions of people, mainly older adults.
So why is a Northeastern researcher and colleagues simulating vision loss in young and healthy people with nearly perfect eyesight?
Professor Aaron Seitz says the idea is that training young adults with excellent vision in how to use their peripheral vision can establish a working model to help people who actually experience central vision loss compensate for their disability.
There currently is no “gold standard” for rehabilitation services for people with macular degeneration, according to a paper in Jove, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, co-authored by Seitz, a professor of physical therapy, human movement and rehabilitation sciences.
“A growing body of research” is using guided eye tracking and other measures to simulate central vision loss in individuals with intact vision to develop frameworks on which to train people with vision impairment, the study says.
Read more at Northeastern Global News
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
A new discovery from researchers at Northeastern University has uncovered previously unknown aspects of plant evolution, with major implications for creating new lifesaving drugs.
The researchers’ breakthrough traced, for the first time, the genetic and molecular path a particular plant, Canadian moonseed, took to be able to perform a chemical reaction that was previously thought impossible for a plant to do naturally: adding a chlorine atom to a molecule. The findings, recently published in Science Advances, point to opportunities for creating new, more efficient methods of developing pharmaceuticals.
The work provides closure on “a molecular detective story millions of years in the making,” says Jing-Ke Weng, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and bioengineering at Northeastern whose Weng Lab led this project.
“To understand what has happened in the past that leads to the current state of things in terms of cultures, countries and many other things, we rely on archaeology,” Weng says. “The work we took here is essentially molecular archaeology.”
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Early exposure to general anesthetics accelerates learning in infants, according to Northeastern University research, a finding that raises questions about the use of such drugs during critical periods of brain development.
“This opens up our ability to think about complicated forms of learning in early life,” says Laurel Gabard-Durnam, an assistant professor of psychology and director of the Plasticity in Neurodevelopment Lab at Northeastern University. “It’s going to help us understand why some learning outcomes or developmental outcomes may be happening and start to figure out what better support might look like in terms of timing, in terms of type of support, and in terms of interventions.”
The research — published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — focuses on the chemical gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA).
GABA is the main inhibitory chemical in the brain, and animal studies have shown it is particularly active during what Gabard-Durnam calls “windows of learning,” when the brain develops intensely to learn and retain new information.
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Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Ever wish you had insight on whether the plants in your home garden are really thriving?
A group of Northeastern University researchers recently developed sensors that change color to indicate the health status of plants. This can be used not only for your basic house plant, but could be used to help small farms monitor their crops in the face of environmental stressors like weather shifts, pollution and disease.
“It’s filling a gap,” said Josie Cicero, a master’s student in marine biology at Northeastern and one of the co-authors on the research.
Current methods for checking plant health are very expensive, Cicero said.
“[They] take a long time to process, and aren’t accessible for a lot of people,” Cicero said, “whereas this device allows you to do an assessment on the stress level of plants in a couple minutes in the field instead of having to collect samples, send them off and spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to get the results a week later.”
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Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
A Northeastern University researcher has identified a way to target two of the deadliest cancer types, melanoma and triple negative breast cancer, with chemotherapy drugs but without the harms associated with chemotherapy.
Both cancers are typically resistant to chemotherapy, says Fleury Augustin Nsole Biteghe, a lecturer in biotechnology, chemistry and chemical biology. But by attaching a light-sensitive drug to a protein called MTf — which appears abundantly in both cancers — and bathing the drug-infused protein in near-infrared light, cancer cells die.
Using antibodies to target cancer proteins is typically performed by using multiple drugs at once, Nsole Biteghe says. But this approach stimulates the immune system so much that it can end up attacking healthy body tissues, he says.
“The antibody is like a key and we know what the lock is,” he says.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
One of the best ways to learn how Antarctic sea spiders thrive under extreme conditions is to squeeze their guts out through their legs.
That’s what a Northeastern University biologist is doing to understand the otherworldly life cycle of the enormous marine arthropods that breathe, reproduce and digest through legs as long as a small cat.
Assistant teaching professor Connie Phong wants to know how an animal adapted to live in a highly specialized environment — just below the freezing point for seawater — responds to warming oceans. And by warming Phong means a 10th of a degree.
“The first question is, how does life even survive at these very cold temperatures?” Phong says. “And then, what happens when it starts to get very warm?”
Animals used to a narrow range of temperatures, cold or hot, have a harder time adapting to even slight change, Phong says. By studying life “at the edge of what can possibly be,” she says, we get a glimpse of the biodiversity we stand to lose as the climate warms.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Getty Images
Since the Human Genome Project first produced the genetic instructions for a human being by sequencing DNA 22 years ago, scientists have been focused on roughly 2% of the genome producing proteins.
But what about the rest?
Northeastern University professor Sudhakaran Prabakaran says this “dark genome” is not only actively making “dark proteins,” but its secrets could provide the future for the pharmaceutical industry and modern medicine.
“If biology and evolution are known to keep things simple and efficient, if it is just using 1% or so of the genome, why would it keep the remaining 98%? There must be some reasons for it,” says Prabakaran, associate professor of biotechnology and chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern. “Now we are discovering those reasons.”
Prabakaran is the author of the upcoming book “Eclipsed Horizons: Unveiling the Dark Genome,” an account of the scientific investigations into the so-called “junk” or non-coding DNA of the human genome. He has also recently reviewed the scientific literature in this field in new research.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
When was the last time you sat down and tried to learn something? How did you approach it? Did you make flashcards for hard-to-remember terms and concepts, ask a friend to quiz you on the subject or simply jump into the deep end with a new project?
New research from Northeastern University psychology professor Aaron Seitz suggests that whenever we learn something new — if we’re successful — what we’ve actually done is tricked our brains into a learnable state. He calls this “incidental learning.”
“‘Incidental learning’ typically refers to what we learn without explicit intention,” Seitz says. A good example of this comes from “statistical regularity” in one’s surroundings, he says.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
People often turn to therapy for answers about themselves, their lives or their relationships, but one psychologist says we need to get more comfortable with saying, “I don’t know” –– and that includes therapists too.
Aaron B. Daniels, an associate teaching professor at Northeastern University with a decade plus of experience as a practicing therapist, wants to know what happens when we encounter something that seems unknowable. Do we retreat from that feeling and look for easy answers? Do we dive headfirst into the unknown and change in the process? Most of all, what would it mean for therapists and clients to embrace the unknown, “the inscrutably alien” as he calls it, and dare to be a little more ignorant?
In the new essay collection, “A Phenomenology of the Alien,” Daniels and his collaborators wrestle with all of these questions, citing Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as much as they do movies like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the books of cosmic horror author H.P. Lovecraft.
Through science fiction, real accounts of alien abductions and even smart houses, the authors want to get us thinking about how the strange, truly mysterious moments in our lives might defy explanation and seem meaningless until we give them meaning.
The collection was also produced with copyediting by students in Daniels’ Psychological Humanities at Northeastern University workgroup.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Scientists sometimes compare predicting the course of epidemics to forecasting the weather.
But there’s a major difference — the impact of human behavior — says Alessandro Vespignani, director of Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute.
Consider what happens during a downpour, he says. “If we all open an umbrella, it will rain anyway.”
“In epidemics, if we all open the umbrella in the sense that we behave differently, the epidemic will spread differently,” Vespignani says. “If we are more risk averse, we might avoid places. We might wash our hands more and so on and so forth.”
That makes modeling the interplay between human behavior and infectious disease transmission one of the remaining key challenges in epidemiology, according to a paper Vespignani and colleagues published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“It’s very difficult to integrate behavior in the models,” especially since existing behavioral models often lack real-world data calibration, says Vespignani, Northeastern’s Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor.
But now, thanks to what they learned during COVID-19, researchers say they have found a solution.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Northeastern University astrophysicist Jonathan C. Blazek knew to expect stunning views of galaxies when the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile released its first images of the night sky on June 23.
And the sights were extraordinary. With a telescope as wide as a tennis court and the world’s largest digital camera, the observatory captured more than 10 million galaxies in one image.
Planetary defense
What surprised Blazek, an expert in observational and theoretical astronomy, was the observatory’s detection of 2,104 new asteroids, including seven near-Earth objects.
“Seeing those asteroids was amazing. In several nights, they discovered thousands of asteroids that have never been seen before. I was not expecting that,” he says.
Asteroid detection is just part of the observatory’s overall mission, but it can play an important role in planetary defense, Blazek says.
“The fact that we’ve been around for a long time as a species means we don’t get hit by big things that often,” he says. “But it’s possible, and this is by far the best tool we’ve ever had to find asteroids that might be a problem.”
“There’s also an intermediate category of objects which are not necessarily planet killers” but could still cause destruction, Blazek says. He cites the example of the Tunguska asteroid that exploded over a sparsely populated area in Siberia on June 30, 1908, flattening millions of trees and setting off massive forest fires.
“If that happened now in a populated area, you would want to have some warning to get people out of the way,” or to use asteroid-redirecting technology, he says. “This gives you that warning.”
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory
Researchers at Northeastern University have discovered how to change the electronic state of matter on demand, a breakthrough that could make electronics 1,000 times faster and more efficient.
By switching from insulating to conducting and vice versa, the discovery creates the potential to replace silicon components in electronics with exponentially smaller and faster quantum materials.
“Processors work in gigahertz right now,” said Alberto de la Torre, assistant professor of physics and lead author of the research. “The speed of change that this would enable would allow you to go to terahertz.”
Via controlled heating and cooling, a technique they call “thermal quenching,” researchers are able to make a quantum material switch between a metal conductive state and an insulating state. These states can be reversed instantly using the same technique.
Published in the journal Nature Physics, the research findings represent a breakthrough for materials scientists and the future of electronics: instant control over whether a material conducts or insulates electricity.
The effect is like a transistor switching electronic signals. And just as transistors allowed computers to become smaller — from the huge machines the size of rooms to the phone in your pocket — control over quantum materials has the potential to transform electronics, says Gregory Fiete, a professor of physics at Northeastern who worked with de la Torre to interpret the findings.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University