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
To some, fake news may be a tweet, a Facebook post or a url on the dark web.
To Northeastern University professor Albert-László Barabási and students in the Barabási lab, fake news is hundreds of small spheres bubbling up across the walls of a darkened room, in reds, oranges, then blues and pinks, while unintelligible whispers grow louder and morph with the sound of a dripping faucet.
“It’s an animation of how (conveyors of fake news) are actually sending their messages out, and how they are effectively infecting the social network behind Twitter with their messaging,” explains Barabási, the Robert Gray Dodge professor of network science and a distinguished university professor of physics at Northeastern. “Art and the language and the medium of art offer us a way to engage with this data in a way that is different from what we normally do.”
This month, Barabási and students displayed four pieces as part of an exhibit at Harvard’s CAMLab in Cambridge. The other pieces on display in the exhibit, interestingly, were created by Kim Albrecht, a former student in Barabási’s lab who is now a professor of information design at a university in Germany.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Researchers at Northeastern University have identified two proteins abundant on drug-resistant ovarian cancer cells that become receptive to chemotherapy when treated with light.
Published in the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology, the research findings represent promising progress in the treatment of one of the most deadly forms of cancer. By targeting cancer cells with photo-sensitive antibodies and then shining light on them, researchers have made previously untreatable tumors receptive to drugs.
“The cells that are exposed to subtle doses of light, they accumulate some photo damage and become more susceptible to chemotherapy,” said Bryan Spring, associate professor of physics. “It’s a missing piece in oncology. Photo medicine is very complementary to chemo and immunotherapies.”
Spring’s co-investigators included Northeastern physics graduate students Sudip Timilsina and Anish Raju Amara and Rafay Abu, who is assistant director of Northeastern’s Mass Spectrometry Facility.
Read more from Northeastern Global News.
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Axolotls, with their signature smiles and pink gills, are the celebrities of the salamander world. But they are more than just cute: They might also hold the secret to regenerating human limbs.
Among biologists, axolotls are famous for their remarkable regenerative abilities that allow them to regrow entire limbs and even organs. Now, James Monaghan, biology chair and professor at Northeastern University, has begun to uncover the secret behind the axolotl’s superpower and how it could be used to advance human regenerative medicine.
“It could help with scar-free wound healing but also something even more ambitious, like growing back an entire finger,” Monaghan says. “It’s not out of the realm [of possibility] to think that something larger could grow back like a hand.”
In a recently published paper, Monaghan set out to answer a question that “has plagued the field for 200 years.” How does an axolotl know what body part to grow back? If it loses a hand, how does it know to just grow back a hand as opposed to an entire arm?
Read more from Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
A newly released survey from the COSMOS-Web project provides the biggest ever window into the deepest parts of our universe, including detailed views of almost 800,000 galaxies and a look at the universe when it was essentially a toddler.
The COSMOS-Web is an ongoing survey that makes use of NASA’s ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope to peer deep into the earliest days of the universe and see how galaxies form over time. COSMOS2025, the project’s most recent release of publicly available data, is the result of dozens of scientists spending hundreds of hours working with the James Webb Space Telescope’s images. It offers the clearest and largest glimpse of how galaxies like our Milky Way formed.
“There’s a very rich variety of galaxies out there in the universe –– some like our Milky Way, some a little larger, most much smaller –– and they change over cosmic time,” says Jacqueline McCleary, an assistant professor of physics at Northeastern University who assisted on the survey. “They’re not fixed: They grow, they evolve, they die. This process is complicated and mysterious, and the COSMOS project was an attempt to get a handle on this.”
Read more from Northeastern Global News.
Photo credit: NASA
The salt marshes that are vitally important in protecting shorelines from erosion are increasingly threatened with death by drowning, scientists say.
Sea level rise and human activities such as dredging mean that “ponds” or standing pools of water that submerge and kill salt marsh plants and grass are becoming more common, says Jennifer Bowen, a Northeastern University professor of marine and environmental sciences.
Bowen says that’s bad news for coastal environments that depend on salt marshes to slow erosion, act as buffers against storm surges, remove carbon from the atmosphere and take up nitrogen before it can pollute waterways.
Enter the runnel.
Shallow, man-made channels that tend to run no deeper than 12 inches, runnels snake away from the standing pools or ponds of water and connect to natural channels or deep ditches dug decades ago for mosquito control.
Read more from Northeastern Global News.
Illustration by Renee Zhang
A study led by Northeastern University professor Jonathan Peelle with researchers from across the globe has confirmed that people’s ability to detect background sounds varies from person to person, and is influenced by the noise that came before the sounds.
Peelle’s large-scale replication of a 10-year-old study involved 25 labs across 10 countries and included 149 participants. The findings will be published in the scientific journal Royal Society Open Science.
About a decade ago, a research paper suggested that some people are better at picking out background sounds than others, and that this ability depends on the surrounding noise. But the study’s findings were based on data from just five participants, each completing a five-hour task.
Peelle, a professor of communication sciences and disorders at Northeastern, wanted to see if he could expand this study and understand how listeners understand speech in noise.
“This was a fundamental part of hearing and how we perceive the world,” said Peelle, who studies how people understand speech in noise. “The fact that people’s perception is affected by that was really intriguing and tied into a whole bunch of other ideas about how we hear and understand speech.”
Read more from Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
On May 7, 2025, Northeastern University’s Boston campus hosted the inaugural NU Cross-College Magnetics Center Workshop in the Raytheon Amphitheatre at the Egan Research Center. The event brought together approximately 60 participants from NU’s Boston, Burlington, and Portland campuses.
The NU Cross-College Magnetics Center, composed of 22 members from the College of Science, the College of Engineering, the Kostas Research Institute, and the Roux Institute, is dedicated to advancing magnetic science and technology through interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.
The workshop featured four insightful tutorials by Laura Lewis, Ryan Koppes, Alberto De la Torre Duran, and George Hadjipanayis, along with two engaging technical talks from Xufeng Zhang and Paul Stevenson. A total of 29 posters were showcased across two sessions, with six Best Poster Awards selected by a panel of five judges.
A lively and thought-provoking career panel, moderated by Kin Chung Fong, featured discussions with panelists Greg Fiete, Zac Perry, Paul Stevenson, and Srinivas Tadigadapa.
This successful event was made possible through the generous support of the College of Science, the College of Engineering, AJA International, Quantum Design, and the Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials.
Northeastern University astrophysicist Jonathan Blazek attributes his interest in the universe to his father, a native of rural Montana who loved that Big Sky country allowed him to simply look up at night and observe the stars, planets and galaxy.
Blazek “didn’t have quite the same night sky.”
“I grew up in Chicago,” Blazek says, wryly.
Is it any wonder then that Blazek’s work involves studying 95% of the universe that we cannot see?
“All the stars, all the gas, all the dust, all the galaxies are made up of this 5% that we can see, and we have to use that to infer the rest,” says Blazek, assistant professor of physics at Northeastern. “My research is focused on making this connection. How do we take the galaxies that we see and the properties of the galaxies that we see and use that to study the universe as a whole?”
Most recently, Blazek has focused on two main research questions: Where do galaxies form? And what are their shapes?
Read more from Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
After a decade of testing, Northeastern researchers have uncovered a “light smog” of microplastics drifting below the surface of the world’s oceans — revealing far more plastic pollution in deep-sea waters than previously known.
Published in Nature, the study combines data from nearly 2,000 ocean sampling stations collected between 2014 and 2024. The findings show that microplastics are not just floating on the surface but are spread throughout the ocean’s depths.
The research is not a global analysis. Sampling for microplastics occurs the most in northern ocean waters, where there is more land and people fringing the water. But in those areas, data shows that plastics are accumulating rapidly.
“Plastics are more or less everywhere,” said Aron Stubbins, professor of marine and environmental sciences, civil and environmental engineering, and chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern. “We’re finding them deposited in the Antarctic, in the Himalayas, carried by the wind, but to find them well-distributed throughout the ocean is surprising.”
Read more from Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
An avalanche is caused by a chain reaction of events. A loud noise or a change in terrain can have a cascading and devastating impact.
A similar process may happen when living tissues are subject to being pushed or pulled, according to new research published by Northeastern University doctoral student Anh Nguyen and supervised by Northeastern physics professor Max Bi.
As theoretical physicists, Bi and Nguyen use computational modeling and mathematics to understand the mechanical processes that organisms undergo on a cellular level. With this more recent work, they have observed that when subjected to sufficient stress, tissues can “suddenly and dramatically rearrange themselves,” similar to how avalanches are formed in the wild.
This observation challenges the notion that mechanical responses in tissues are entirely localized, suggesting instead that stress redistribution can lead to coordinated rearrangements across larger regions, explains Bi.
“What Anh has found in these computational simulations is that these [cells] are actually talking mechanically, meaning that if rearrangement happens with four cells, the energy that gets released from these four cells is enough to trigger other cells to undergo rearrangement.”
Read more from Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University