Speaking, Cooking, and Singing in Zulu
Innovative African language program boosted by federal By: Susan Seligson Xhosa, the most common of the official languages of South Africa, is among the languages taught in BU’s African Studies Center language program, which recently received major funding from the US Department of Education. Photo by Flickr Contributor Meredith Nutting. The daughter of missionaries, Beth […]
NSF CAREER Award Goes to ENG Prof
Thin rod study has potential for smart needles, robotic arms ENG’s Douglas Holmes will receive $500,000 over the next five years to study the mechanics of how thin rods move through tissue and other soft, fragile media. Photo courtesy of the College of Engineering. Thin rods and other active materials that can bend and fold […]
Astronomy: New Vision of the Final Frontier
Astronomer boldly redraws boundary at solar system’s end By: Kate Becker Women at the edge of STEM: Merav Opher, on the left, is the only female investigator on the Voyager team, shown here at a meeting in 2014. Suzanne R. Dodd, in middle, is program manager. Photo courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. […]
Beating the Binge
Alzheimer’s drug may reduce urge to eat compulsively BU professors Pietro Cottone and Valentina Sabino hope their research could eventually lead to new treatment for the disorder. Photo by Michael D. Spencer. Binge-eating disorder affects nearly 10 million American adults, by some estimates. It’s a vicious condition in which people repeatedly eat huge amounts of […]
Making TB the Next Polio
BU team lands $21 million NIH grant to study the disease When Jerrold Ellner started working in infectious disease, schistosomiasis was a greater concern to international health professionals than tuberculosis. Fast forward a few decades and TB is now among the greatest public health threats worldwide. There are nine million new cases and three million […]
Queen Anne Reconsidered
James Winn’s book examines flowering of arts during short 18th-century reign As a young man, James A. Winn was often advised that he would have to choose. He could be a serious literary scholar or a professional flutist; it was not possible to be both. Winn proved them wrong. He is now a William Fairfield Warren […]
Higher Alcohol Taxes May Lead to Less Binge Drinking
BU public health study finds strong correlation between price and alcohol consumption Study lead author Ziming Xuan of SPH says researchers’ findings are “really significant for public health,” because binge drinking causes more than half of nearly 90,000 alcohol-attributable deaths in the United States. In 2010, Tennessee, which has the country’s highest combined taxes on […]
The Search for Ancient Ice
Understanding what happened to the climate millions of years ago may tell us a lot about what will happen next Antarctica researcher studies past climate change to learn about the future. High in the Transantarctic Mountains, the McMurdo Dry Valleys are the largest part of Antarctica not covered with ice. Instead, a seemingly endless carpet […]
Workshop: Introduction to Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI)
The Office of the Vice President and Associate Provost for Research hosted an informational workshop about the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) on January 29, 2015. Jean Slutsky, PA, MSPH, and Chief Engagement and Dissemination Officer at PCORI, introduced the Institute and its mission and research and discussed its proposal review and award processes. Watch the […]
Mission to Mars
BU physicist John Clarke looks to the red planet for clues about Earth’s future John T. Clarke, director of BU’s Center for Space Physics, was part of the team that proposed MAVEN and is now a scientific co-investigator on the mission. Photo by Rob Timko. At this moment, a NASA satellite called MAVEN is circling Mars, and it’s covered […]