Posts by Jon Reed

For centuries, philosophers and scientists have debated whether the human mind is born with ideas and concepts, or instead, as John Locke famously put it, arrives in the world like a blank slate. Now new experiments have uncovered something even more remarkable: that we not only have innate ideas, but that some of those ideas…

For centuries, creative works and technical innovations have been protected by intellectual property laws, which grant exclusive rights to creators and innovators. But this system has been challenged by the internet, revealing many fundamental problems and tensions within IP law, leading us to ask whether the traditional concept of intellectual property truly benefits everyone in…

On this episode we talk to Summer Harvey, Davoud Hejazi, and Theresa Fuller, the winners of Northeastern Graduate Women in Science and Engineering’s Three Minute Thesis Competition. These graduate students not only are doing incredible, creative work but they have been recognized in this competition for their ability to explain their research to a general…

Americans now recognize inequality as one of the greatest challenges we face. While the news often focuses on the obvious aspects of inequality, such as large disparities in income and wealth, inequality has more hidden, but just as insidious, impacts on other critical aspects of the lives of millions. Although mental health and mental illness…

Vision is a miraculous sense that most of us with sight take for granted, and yet it consists of an incredible array of perceptive skills that nearly instantaneously work together to present our mind with a sense of the world and the objects within it. On this episode, we deconstruct human vision and then reassemble…

In the farmland at the border of France and Switzerland, the massive Large Hadron Collider smashes subatomic particles together at the speed of light, and physicists then interpret the wreckage of those high-speed collisions. This has led to discoveries both strange and wonderful about the building blocks of our universe. Now the Large Hadron Collider…

Wearable technology like smartwatches and the related digital devices that now populate our homes and workplaces are starting to change the face of medicine, as they produce data that help us diagnose health issues, and capabilities to help treat them. On this episode, we look at the rise of personal health informatics and computational approaches…

Factories and the global supply chain have become increasingly automated in the last few decades, changing the way billions of people work and live. But this process is largely hidden from us unless it is disrupted by the unexpected, by politics or weather—or by revelations about working conditions or the effects of massive corporations on…

On The Magic of Human Motion, we give the question of how our brain controls our muscles a second and maybe even a third thought, looking at how we manage to move and acquire new skills. We’re joined by Dagmar Sternad, who is a Professor in the Departments of Biology, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and…

Recently the hidden inner workings of internet giants like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon have been exposed to scrutiny by academics, the press, the public, and now legislators. Northeastern researchers have found clever ways to expose the major problems and biases that are encoded into these systems and are starting to think about how their…