Throughout the 179th annual meeting of the Amer­ican Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence, North­eastern fac­ulty led pre­sen­ta­tions high­lighting their work to address real-​​world chal­lenges in areas ranging from health to tech­nology to sus­tain­ability.

Just as the name implies, com­plex sys­tems are dif­fi­cult to tease apart. An organism’s genome, a bio­chem­ical reac­tion, or even a social net­work all con­tain many inter­de­pen­dent components—and changing any one of them can have per­va­sive effects on all the others.

Sometimes it's easier to just see something rather than have someone try to explain it.

As news of the latest outbreak is upon us, Vespignani and his colleagues recently pub­lished an article in the journal BMC Med­i­cine that offers defin­i­tive proof of a strong agree­ment between the pre­dic­tions and the real-​​life sur­veil­lance data col­lected in 2009.

Some people are not making plans for the New Year. From hiding in bomb shel­ters to sharp­ening their sur­vival skills, doomsday the­o­rists are preparing for judg­ment day, which the Mayan cal­endar pre­dicts will take place on Friday.

The elec­trical out­puts of the brain con­tain mas­sive amounts of infor­ma­tion that could be a pow­erful resource if we could fully tap into it.

Mathew Chamberlain, a fifth year senior, chose to attend Northeastern University because of its co-op program, and he’s participated in two exciting opportunities because of it.

The sci­ence of com­plex sys­tems was born in the mid-​​20th cen­tury, but it has only recently begun to mature into a research field with real-​​world rel­e­vance.

All around and inside us, an elab­o­rate dance of mol­e­c­ular vibra­tions is con­stantly taking place.

We heat up when we’re working hard. Com­puters do, too. And as big data con­tinues to get bigger, we’re asking these machines to work even harder, which means they require more energy than ever.

Seven years ago, physics pro­fessor Latika Mennon’s first grad­uate stu­dent said he wanted to “change the world.”

Northeastern University physics Prof. Meni Wanunu has received an $825,000 award from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)—an organization that supports the development of technologies to dramatically reduce the cost of DNA sequencing in an effort to broaden the applications of genomic information in medical research and health care.