It is a known fact that there are six primary emotions everybody is capable of feeling. Those are happiness, fear, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust. Subsequently, we express each of these emotions using more or less the same set of facial movements. It makes recognising these emotions very easy. The person’s background and credentials then hardly matter. Lisa Feldman Barrett, however, begs to differ. She is...
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Every writer has a different style of writing. The content which a person creates, describes and elaborates snippets of his or her personality. In a lecture hosted by the college of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Northeastern University, Lisa Emerson spoke about a Mathematician Professor who described his house in a technical manner: he stated the number of windows, doors, and more quantitative facts....
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In a world of science and research today, surprising and obscure facts pop up daily on our notifications. One such amazing fact you were probably oblivious about is that you lip-read while trying to converse with someone. A research conducted by David Lewkowicz, a psychologist who worked on infants, stands as evidence for the above statement. The research that his collaborators and Lewkowicz himself conducted on...
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E-cigarettes is mankind's safer options to the addiction of cigarettes. Marketed as the new and easier way to smoke, it still doesn’t promise a safer experience. Scientists are not so sure about its long term health hazards. This consequently leads us to understand that we should regard it with wariness. E-cigarettes created in the early 2000s has the obvious aim of helping smokers without them...
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Tommaso Melodia, a Northeastern Engineering professor is trying to develop miniature implantable devices that can sense and communicate via sound waves. Bionet Sonar, the director of Northeastern’s Institute for the wireless internet of things believes that the technology will be able to treat a broad range of ailments which includes diabetes, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and even heart conditions. Whereas, the traditional pacemakers or any other wireless...
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We judge people’s facial expressions in social interactions, but we also do it as jurors in the courtroom when deciding whether a defendant is guilty or remorseful. Assumptions about people’s feelings based on their facial movements influences treatment plans for people living with autism and other brain disorders. It has also shaped the direction of research in various scientific fields, including neuroscience and psychiatry. “Gauging a...
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Shipworms are a group of wood-boring and wood-feeding bivalves of extraordinary economic, ecological and historical importance. They usually complete their life cycle in wood and most are thought to use wood as a primary source of nutrition. Recently, a new species of shipworms was discovered that bores into carbonate limestone rocks rather than into woody substrates. Researchers from Northeastern University’s Ocean Genome Legacy Center discovered the...
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Getting old is really just a mind game. The secret ingredients for longer lifespans actually seem to be stress, starvation, and other hostile living conditions. This is true at least when it comes to worms. This might seem contrary to conventional wisdom, but scientists have known for years that things like limited food supplies and unfavorable temperatures increase the lifespan of a species of worm...
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Would you take medicines if you were told that it has been tested only on men and male animals and never on women? Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston thinks you might not. Nonscientific audiences are blown away when she tells them that researchers don't study female animals, most of the time. An obvious thing to a normal person but apparently not so...
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Particle physics is a branch of physics that studies the elementary constituents of matter and radiation, and the interactions between them. Many of these elementary particles do not occur under normal circumstances in nature. They have to be created and detected during energetic collisions of other particles, as is done in particle accelerators. Modern particle physics research is focused on subatomic particles. In an average day,...
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