Title
Topic
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‘Photolytic Activation of Ni(II)X2L Explains How Ni-Mediated Cross Coupling Begins’
“Nickel photocatalysis has recently become vital to organic synthesis, but how the Ni(II)X2L pre-catalyst (X = Cl, Br; L = bidentate ligand) becomes activated to Ni(I)XL has remained puzzling and is typically addressed on a case-by-case basis. Here, we reveal a general mechanism where light induces photolysis of the Ni(II)-X bond, either via direct excitation or triplet energy transfer.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Long-Lived Zone-Boundary Magnons in an Antiferromagnet’
“Antiferromagnetic (AFM) insulators exhibit many desirable features for spintronic applications such as fast dynamics in the THz range and robustness to fluctuating external fields. However, large damping typically associated with THz magnons presents a serious challenge for THz magnonic applications. Here, we report long-lived short-wavelength zone boundary magnons in the honeycomb AFM insulator CoTiO3, recently found to host topological magnons. We find that its zone-boundary THz magnons exhibit longer lifetimes than its zone-center magnons.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Why the Ethical Use of AI Matters for Your Career’
“In the contemporary digital era, innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) are profoundly transforming the business landscape. … Yet, amidst these advantages lies an ethical conundrum. Customers cherish genuine human interaction and can become quickly disillusioned when they realise they’re communicating with a bot, not a person (Ciechanowski, Przegalinska, Magnuski & Gloor, 2019). Balancing this desire for authenticity with the allure of operational efficiency poses a challenge, making it tempting for businesses to deceive customers by blurring the lines between human and machine.” Find the paper and full list of authors in European Business Review.
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Furth wins Exceptional Paper Award
“Civil and environmental engineering professor Peter Furth and his former student Milad Tahmasebi, PhD’24, civil engineering, won the Exceptional Paper Award at the 104th Annual Transportation Research Board Meeting for ‘Reducing Speeding by Removing Speeding Opportunities: Field Test of Safe Waves Traffic Signal Timing.'”
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‘Multiple Paleofire Proxy Metrics From Tropical Lake Sediment and Soil in the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem’
“Black carbon is a paleofire proxy that has been measured from glacial ice, snow, soils and lake sediments, though relatively few comparisons have been made with other fire indicators in sedimentary geoarchives. … This research explores the down-profile patterns across three paleofire proxies (refractory black carbon, microscopic and macroscopic charcoal) and potential paleofire interpretations from a sediment core dating to the last centuries from Speke Gulf, Lake Victoria, and a young soil profile from a kopje located in the surrounding watershed in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania.” Find the paper and full list of authors in The Holocene.
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‘A Twist on Heterotic Little String Duality’
“In this work, we significantly expand the web of T-dualities among heterotic NS5-brane theories with eight supercharges. This is achieved by introducing twists involving outer automorphisms of discrete gauge/flavor factors and tensor multiplet permutations along the compactification circle. We assemble field theory data that we propose as invariants across T-dual theories, comprised of twisted Coulomb branch dimensions, higher group structures and flavor symmetry ranks.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
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‘Pseudouridine Reprogramming in the Human T Cell Epitranscriptome: From Primary to Immortalized States’
“Immortalized cell lines are commonly used as proxies for primary cells in human biology research. … The analysis of the 13% of sites unique to each cell type reveals that Jurkat cells contained transcripts linked to immune activation and oncogenesis, while primary T cells contained transcripts associated with calcium signaling and intracellular trafficking. We provide a list of these genes, which should be considered when using immortalized cells to study RNA modifications in immunology contexts.” Find the paper and full list of authors in RNA.
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‘Galvanotactic Directionality of Cell Groups Depends on Group Size’
“Motile cells migrate directionally in electric fields. This behavior—galvanotaxis—is important in many physiological phenomena. Individual fish keratocytes migrate to the cathode, while inhibition of PI3-Kinase (PI3K) reverses single cells to the anode. Uninhibited cell groups move to the cathode. Surprisingly, groups of PI3K-inhibited cells exhibit bidirectional behavior: Large groups move to the cathode, while small groups move to the anode. A mechanical model suggests that a tug-of-war between the outer and inner cells directs the cell groups.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Cell Biology.
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‘Pulcherriminic Acid is a Signal Involved in Gene Regulation in Bacillus subtilis Biofilms’
“Biofilms are ubiquitous in nature and represent a key adaptive behavior among bacteria in response to environmental changes. … During biofilm development, B. subtilis produces pulcherriminic acid, a cyclic dipeptide that chelates ferric iron extracellularly, leading to the production of pulcherrimin, a reddish pigment. While pulcherrimin has been shown to have bacteriostatic effects against other microbes by reducing iron availability, the functions of its precursor, pulcherriminic acid, remain under-studied. In this project, we investigate the role of pulcherriminic acid as a potential signal for gene regulation in B. subtilis biofilms.” Find the paper and authors list in Journal of Biological…
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‘Constrained Liquidity Provision in Currency Markets
“We devise a simple model of liquidity demand and supply to study dealers’ liquidity provision in currency markets. Drawing on a globally representative data set of currency trading volumes, we show that at times when dealers’ intermediation capacity is constrained the cost of liquidity provision increases disproportionately relative to dealer-intermediated volume. … Using various econometric approaches, we show that this nonlinear effect of dealer constraints on market liquidity primarily stems from a reduction in the elasticity of liquidity supply, rather than changes in liquidity demand.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Journal of Financial Economics.
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‘Atomistic Characterization of Hydration-Dependent Fuel Cell Ionomer Nanostructure’
“The development of Nafion alternatives for fuel cells and electrolyzers requires a fundamental understanding of hydration-dependent ion-exchange site acid/base chemistry. We present here reactive force field (ReaxFF) molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of Nafion at varying molar water/ion-exchange-site ratios (λ), which we correlate to our experimental and density functional theory-based vibrational spectra.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Journal of Materials Chemistry A.
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‘Superclustering with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and Dark Energy Survey. II. Anisotropic Large-scale Coherence in Hot Gas, Galaxies, and Dark Matter’
“Statistics that capture the directional dependence of the baryon distribution in the cosmic web enable unique tests of cosmology and astrophysical feedback. We use constrained oriented stacking of thermal Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (tSZ) maps to measure the anisotropic distribution of hot gas 2.5–40 Mpc away from galaxy clusters embedded in massive filaments and superclusters.” Find the paper and full list of authors in The Astrophysical Journal.
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‘Topological Characteristics and Bulk-Boundary Correspondence in the Orbital Hall Effect’
“The orbital Hall effect (OHE) is attracting interest due to its fundamental science implications and potential applications in orbitronics and spintronics. Unlike the spin Hall effect, the connection between the OHE and band topology is not well understood. Here we present an approach for understanding the OHE based on analyzing the projected orbital angular momentum (POAM) spectrum.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Physical Review B.
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Hajjar receives 2025 BSCES College Educator Award
“Civil and environmental engineering Professor Jerome Hajjar was selected to receive the 2025 BSCES College Educator Award from the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers for contributions to the Northeastern University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and support of the students of Northeastern University.”
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‘Age-Related Changes in Mesopic Reading Vision Across Adulthood’
“Reading is indispensable for daily activities such as reading books, menus, and food labels, occurring under a wide range of luminance conditions from mesopic (dim light) to photopic (daylight). Despite its significance, there has been limited attention on age-related changes in mesopic reading vision. The current study aims to investigate how mesopic reading vision changes across adulthood.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science.
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‘What Makes a Theory of Consciousness Unscientific?’
“Theories of consciousness have a long and controversial history. One well-known proposal — integrated information theory — has recently been labeled as ‘pseudoscience’, which has caused a heated open debate. Here we discuss the case and argue that the theory is indeed unscientific because its core claims are untestable even in principle.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Neuroscience.
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‘A Phosphorylation Signal Activates Genome-Wide Transcriptional Control by BfmR’
“The nosocomial pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii is a major threat to human health. The sensor kinase-response regulator system, BfmS-BfmR, is essential to multidrug resistance and virulence in the bacterium and represents a potential antimicrobial target. Important questions remain about how the system controls resistance and pathogenesis. Although BfmR knockout alters expression of >1000 genes, its direct regulon is undefined. Moreover, how phosphorylation controls the regulator is unclear. Here, we address these problems by combining mutagenesis, ChIP-seq, and in vitro phosphorylation to study the functions of phospho-BfmR.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nucleic Acids Research.
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‘Binuclear Ruthenium Complex Linker Length Tunes DNA Threading Intercalation Kinetics’
“Binuclear ruthenium complexes have been investigated for potential DNA-targeted therapeutic and diagnostic applications. Studies of DNA threading intercalation, in which DNA basepairs must be broken for intercalation, have revealed means of optimizing a model binuclear ruthenium complex to obtain reversible DNA-ligand assemblies with the desired properties of high affinity and slow kinetics. Here, we used single-molecule force spectroscopy to study a binuclear ruthenium complex with a longer semirigid linker relative to the model complex.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Biophysical Journal.
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‘Evolution of High-Order Van Hove Singularities Away From Cupratelike Band Dispersions and its Implications for Cuprate Superconductivity’
“We discuss the evolution of high-order Van Hove singularities (hoVHSs) that carry faster-than logarithmic divergences over a wide range of parameters in cupratelike electronic band dispersions. Numerical and analytic results give insight into the quantized value of the VHS power-law exponent 𝑝𝑉 and the transition between hoVHSs with different values of 𝑝𝑉. … Our study supports the idea that superconductivity in the cuprates occurs near a crossover between two different competing orders (antiferromagnetism and the density wave associated with the hoVHS), which is why high-temperature superconductivity is so rare.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Physical Review…
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‘Inglorious Sufferers: Motivational Factors and Moral Foundations Shape Compassionate and Helping Reactions Toward Suffering Norm Transgressors’
“While previous research shows that people’s reactions to others’ suffering can vary, it remains unclear how these responses differ for targets who have previously transgressed, and which factors drive these changes. In two studies (total N = 899), this paper experimentally investigates how compassionate and helping reactions toward a suffering transgressor change depending upon: (a) the target’s motivation (altruistic vs egoistic vs control) for the transgression (Study 1); (b) the nature of the transgression in terms of moral foundation (Care vs Fairness) of the disrespected (vs respected) norm (Study 2).” Find the paper and full list of authors in Motivation and Emotion.
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‘Holographic View of Mixed-State Symmetry-Protected Topological Phases in Open Quantum Systems’
“We establish a holographic duality between -dimensional mixed-state symmetry-protected topological (mSPT) phases and -dimensional subsystem symmetry-protected topological (SSPT) states. Specifically, we show that the reduced density matrix of the boundary layer of a -dimensional SSPT state with subsystem symmetry and global symmetry corresponds to a -dimensional mSPT phase with strong and weak symmetries. Conversely, we demonstrate that the wave function of an SSPT state can be constructed by replicating the density matrix of the corresponding lower-dimensional mSPT phase.” Find the paper and full list of authors in PRX Quantum.
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Patent for efficient computation
“Electrical and computer engineering professor Edmund Yeh was awarded a patent for ‘Network and Method for Servicing a Computation Request.'”
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‘Affective Abstraction Predicts Variation in Alexithymia, Depression, and Autism Spectrum Quotient’
“Affective abstraction refers to how people conceptualize affective states in terms of category-level representations that generalize across specific situations (e.g., “fear” as evoked by heights, predators, and haunted houses). Here, we develop a novel task for assessing affective abstraction and test its relations with trait alexithymia, depression, and autism spectrum quotient. In a preregistered online study, participants completed a set of tasks in which they matched a cue image with one of two probe images based on similarity of affective experience.” Find the paper and full list of authors in APA PsycNet.
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‘Classification of Infant Sleep-Wake States From Natural Overnight In-Crib Sleep Videos’
“Infant sleep is critical for healthy development, and disruptions in sleep patterns can have profound implications for infant brain maturation and overall well-being. Traditional methods for monitoring infant sleep often rely on intrusive equipment or time-intensive manual annotations, which hinder their scalability in clinical and research applications. We present our dataset, SmallSleeps, which includes 152 hours of overnight recordings of 17 infants aged 4–11 months captured in real-world home environments.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 2025 IEEE Winter Applications and Computer Vision Workshops.
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‘Mental Models Matter: Conceptualizations of the Human–Nature Relationship Predict Pro-Environmental Attitudes’
“Mental models—internal, dynamic, incomplete representations of the external world that people use to guide cognitive processes…—have practical implications for predicting attitudes and behaviors across various domains. This study examines how mental models of the human–nature relationship predict pro-environmental behavioral intentions directly and indirectly as mediated through anthropocentric and biocentric environmental attitudes. To address these aims, participants were asked about mental model components of the human–nature relationship (human exceptionalism, beliefs about human impact on nature and beliefs about nature’s impact on humans), pro-environmental attitudes (biocentric and anthropocentric) and their pro-environmental behavioral intentions (protection and investment).”
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Patent for hybrid nanopore technology
“College of science and bioengineering professor Meni Wanunu received a patent for ‘Lipid-Free Anchoring of Thermophilic Bacteriophage G20c Portal Adapter Into Solid-State Nanopores.'”