At some point in the future, humanity will venture into outer space to settle on distant planets. But before that can happen, governments, scientists and experts around the world must figure out how to make life on those alien worlds safe and sustainable.
As lovers of sci-fi can already attest, the key to achieving civilization in space lies in biotechnology. A group of Northeastern professors, collaborating under the auspices of the Center for International Affairs & World Cultures, have come together to produce a report exploring that very idea.
“After we came together, it became clear that this is actually a very pressing issue at the forefront of new technological advancements that are occurring — both simultaneously in space and in biotech,” says Mai’a Cross, dean’s professor of political science, international affairs and diplomacy, who spearheaded the collaborative study.
The report, titled “A Policy Framework for International Cooperation in Space Biotechnology,” is the result of a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and published by the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. The project convened a series of expert meetings to explore the ethical, policy and scientific dimensions of international space cooperation, with the goal of articulating a set of principles that would help steer future biotech research and policymaking in space.
The group includes Cross; John Basl, a philosophy professor who specializes in AI and data ethics; Gokce Altin Yavuzarslan, an assistant professor whose focus is in novel materials and 3D printing; Brian Helmuth, a professor of marine and environmental science; Ryan Morhard, affiliated faculty with the Center for International Affairs & World Cultures; and Anncy Thresher, an assistant professor of public policy and urban affairs and religion and philosophy.
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he eyes of every astronomer widened this year when an interstellar traveler was discovered in our solar system.
Despite some suggestions that it could be an alien spacecraft, observations from some of the most powerful telescopes quickly revealed it to be a comet rocketing our way. It might not be aliens making first contact, yet 3I/Atlas, as only the third documented interstellar object to pass through the solar system, still has plenty to teach us, says Jacqueline McCleary, an assistant professor of physics at Northeastern University.
“Interstellar objects, which all seem to be comets, are the only things that we’ve ever gotten physical observations for within our solar system that originated outside our solar system,” McCleary says. “This is sort of like a messenger afar.”
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Obesity rates have climbed over the last several decades, as have mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression. This is especially the case among children, but this particular population has not been closely researched when it comes to these issues.
A new study from Northeastern University researchers looked into this and found there is a relationship between lower body fat and higher aerobic fitness and decreased symptoms of anxiety and depression in children.
“The purpose of this analysis was to look at the implications of body composition and physical fitness,” said Lauren Raine, an assistant professor of physical therapy, movement and rehabilitation and medical sciences at Northeastern University and one of the authors on the paper. “It turns out that aerobic fitness and lean mass were both protective against negative mental health outcomes.”
The research, published in JAMA Network, began in 2019 and continued through 2023. The research team had over 200 healthy children between the ages of 8 and 11 answer standardized questionnaires about their mental health, particularly when it came to feelings of anxiety and depression. The answers were self-reported by the children to encourage honest answers.
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Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Scientists who study the brain strive to detect very specific signals from among the billions of neurotransmitter molecules present. Precise and sensitive imaging methods are crucial because some signals are very small.
Northeastern University’s NeuroPRISM lab, led by assistant psychology professor Stephanie Noble, makes tools that pave the way for reliable and reproducible neuroimaging of the brain’s deepest recesses.
“The focus of the lab is both on developing these tools and then showing the community what sort of knowledge can be gained from them,” Noble says. After developing algorithms to help researchers estimate how precise their study findings will be, the lab is now building tools to sharpen precision even further. “This is the most comprehensive version of this, where we can show lots of different people how different types of studies can be improved.”
The lab is focused on “precision neuroscience,” a kind of meta-research to help scientists publish results that other scientists can duplicate. Their data-driven tools can enhance signals collected during functional MRIs — imaging that is like a movie of blood flow in the brain. More broadly, the lab’s work aims to help all neuroscientists do more rigorous research.
“We want our work to both help address problems with reproducibility that are widely acknowledged in the field,” Noble says, “and also to better characterize the individual so we can get closer to personalized ‘precision medicine’ solutions.”
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Researchers at Northeastern University can predict the emergence of a dengue fever outbreak with 80% accuracy — a breakthrough for public health officials tasked with preparing careworkers to handle spikes in the disease.
Almost half of the world’s population lives in places where mosquito-borne dengue fever can break out, and cases worldwide are on the rise, having doubled from 2023 to 2024.
About 40,000 people die from the virus every year, according to U.S. national data.
“We wanted to reduce the cognitive load for decision-makers who want to extract the best predictions from multiple mathematical models,” says Mauricio Santillana, a professor of physics and director of Northeastern’s Machine Intelligence Group for the Betterment of Health and the Environment. “There are computational models called ensemble methods to do this.”
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University