COS News

Science and religion are typically thought to be at odds with one another, but Francis Collins doesn’t see it that way. The former director of both the National Institutes of Health and National Human Genome Research Institute, Collins is also a man of devout faith. Looking at the distrust and increasingly fractious divide between scientific […]

The Create ceramics studio in Boston’s Roslindale neighborhood is a tapestry of gentle, sturdy neutrals. Earthenware pots, bowls and teacups awaiting paint jobs rest on light gray shelves; white drop cloths and stone potter’s wheels take up most of the wood floor, all of it bathed in low afternoon sunlight gushing through storefront windows. But […]

Touchscreens have long been integral to our everyday life — humans use them to work, play, talk with loved ones and snag Lightning Deals on Prime Day. In recent years, they’ve shown potential for the animal kingdom as well, leading to a growing body of academic researchand a proliferation of consumer products promising to leverage […]

A new offering for the spring 2024 semester, PSYC-4660 is a seminar in cognition, a subset of psychology that covers how people encode, represent and process information from the environment in the brain, according to Coley, a psychology professor with a dual appointment in environmental science. Humans & Nature zeros in on how those things […]

Tell us about yourself. I am a third-year behavioral neuroscience student from a rural area called Perrysburg, about an hour south of Buffalo, NY. I love being outdoors. I grew up in the middle of nowhere and still find so much peace in places with more trees than people. I went to Iceland on dialogue […]

Looking for a creative way to give back?  Community Palette is a new club on campus that aims to serve individuals in underprivileged, clinical, and community settings in Boston through creative and visual arts initiatives. To learn more about this organization, I interviewed the founder and president, Seher Abbasi.  Can you tell me a bit […]

Chelsea Pe Benito always knew she would be a dancer. But in her mind, it didn’t look quite like this. Pe Benito trained for 15 years as a ballerina growing up in central New Jersey, studying at the prestigious Princeton Ballet School through high school, dancing in standards like “Swan Lake” and even touring in […]

Jack Groothuis’ life was at risk from the moment he was born to two Jewish parents during the Holocaust. To protect her son, his mother, Helen, placed him into hiding with a Christian family in Vught, a town about 59 miles southeast of Amsterdam. Jack spent the first two years of his life being raised […]

In 2022, Sade Iriah was pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience at Northeastern University when she seized the opportunity to embed herself in industry research at Takeda Pharmaceutical, a Japanese multinational biopharmaceutical company. Iriah worked with the imaging team at Takeda and says the experience was “amazing.” “They really allowed me to be involved with the […]

When Ashleigh Chiwaya was a freshman at an all-girls boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, she realized that Black students there had a unique challenge — limited access to hair care products.

Some people begin playing Christmas music the moment the clock strikes 12 on Dec. 1 (or on Nov. 1 if they’re really spirited). Usually included on that playlist? Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

In a paper published in Nature Mental Health, Northeastern psychology professor Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli advises policy makers to consider turning to the low-cost, readily available practice of mindfulness meditation to change brain activity associated with mental illness.