Oh, Spotify Wrapped.

If we didn’t love you so much, we might be sorta creeped out.

The popular music streaming platform digs around in our playlists, exposing the long hours we spent listening to true crime podcasts while unearthing sappy pop tunes played on repeat during a tough breakup.

While Congress and private users continue to rail against the deep data mining practices of tech companies such as Facebook and Google, Spotify hasn’t faced the same scrutiny.

For any customer that cares about data privacy, Spotify Wrapped serves as an unfortunate reminder that anytime you interact with an app like Spotify, you’re sharing data about your preferences that can be used to send you ads or for other purposes,” says Yakov Bart, who teaches marketing and business administration at Northeastern.

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Catalyst showcases how the passion of our faculty, paired with the generosity of our community, is having a profoundly positive impact on our College, particularly for our students. Thank you for being a part of the College of Science community. Take a look at our Fall 2021 issue of Catalyst Magazine.

Read our Spring 2021 issue featured on our Alumni page.

Researchers at Northeastern and neighboring colleges say they’ve made a landmark discovery that takes a deeper look at the metabolic and biochemical origins of a debilitating genetic disease known to cause a range of symptoms and health problems.

A new study, published Wednesday, focused on a severe neurodevelopmental disorder referred to as 16p11.2 Deletion Syndrome, a condition often associated with autism, intellectual disability, language impairments, seizures, obesity and movement disorders, among a range of other health problems. People with the condition are missing a region of genetic material in chromosome 16 responsible for coding proteins in the body.

Researchers were able to show that genetic disruptions affecting the way fats and proteins bind to each other inside the cells of those with the condition resulted in abnormalities in nerve cell, or neuron, function, which in turn led to behavioral changes and other symptoms, says Hazel Sive, dean of the College of Science and professor of biology at Northeastern.

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Pro surfer Kohl Christensen was at home in North Shore Oahu when he got the call. He was supposed to be surfing 30-foot waves at Maverick’s, the mythical Northern California big wave break, but a snowboarding injury the week before had relegated him to the couch. Now, a fellow surfer was on the line with tragic news: Pro surfer Sion Milosky, Christensen’s friend since childhood, was dead, drowned after two gigantic waves held him under water, washing him nearly a mile down the coast.

Christensen’s world stopped. Milosky was surfing better than anyone in the world and had, months before, paddled into the tallest wave ever recorded. He thought of Milosky’s daughters. How could this happen?

As more details of the accident emerged, grief’s knife twisted deeper. There were barely any jet skis — often the first line of life-saving in big wave surfing — on site due to California government regulations. Only one person on the beach knew and administered CPR. Milosky was pronounced dead more than an hour after the accident.

Read more at Experience Magazine