NIU Today

Mars might be farther than 140 million miles away, but that won’t stop kids from using LEGO Robotics to explore the red planet at NIU this fall. STEM Outreach is again offering its interactive, hands-on STEM Saturday classes to help students in fourth-grade and older explore concepts and careers in science, technology, engineering and math....

Learning is happening year-round at NIU. Over the summer, the next generation of innovators explored career options at NIU’s STEM summer camps. “Starting as early as middle school, students begin defining their career possibilities,” says Pati Sievert, director of NIU STEM Outreach. “Research shows that serious career interests motivate students to work harder in middle...

Everyone knows that football is a physical game, but few people stop to think about the actual physics behind it. Newton’s laws describe football players on the field just as well as carts on a track or balls rolling down ramps. And what better way to gain an understanding of bodies in motion than to...

Looking for a spectacular summer show? Look no further than the night sky. In mid-August, the annual Perseid meteor shower will radiate from the Perseus constellation and appear throughout the sky and NIU’s STEM Café will once again be there to watch it. From 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 12, STEM Café will present...

Are you smarter than your smart phone? Can you outdrive a self-driving car? The technology we rely on is becoming more and more sophisticated. Could humanity survive if that technology turned evil? Daniel H. Wilson, who explores the possibility of a machine uprising in his novel “Robopocalypse,” will visit NIU and the Sycamore Public Library this...

The 2014 Bright Futures program – the Science of Music – is staging its grand finale Tuesday, June 10, at Hopkins Park Shelter prior to the first DeKalb Municipal Band concert of the season. Sponsored by NIU STEM Outreach, DeKalb County libraries and the DeKalb Municipal Band, the Bright Futures Fair offers a night of free...

From Heartbleed to cyberbullying to the recent security breaches at Target, the Internet can be a dangerous place for people and data. Experts estimate that cyber crime accounts for losses of $100 billion to $3 trillion every year. At the next STEM Café, Raimund Ege, associate professor in NIU’s Department of Computer Science, will lead...

For storm chasers, the coming of spring means one thing: tornadoes. Recent tornado-related disasters have led experts to wonder how climate change is affecting the frequency and intensity of these destructive storms. At the next STEM Café, NIU STEM Outreach will present “Chasing the Storm: Tornadoes in a Warming World.” This free presentation and discussion...

Imagine waking up in the heart of a vast maze with no memory except your name. Every day, you have to run the maze, searching for a way out. Every night, the maze fills with robotic monsters and its walls change positions. That’s the chilling premise of James Dashner’s best-selling young adult novel “The Maze...

Northern Illinois University physics professor Dhiman Chakraborty is preparing to reprise his popular talk on the mysterious Higgs boson for the DeKalb community. For decades, the Higgs boson was the holy grail of particle physics. Its detection confirms the existence of the Higgs field, which permeates the universe and gives particles mass. Without the Higgs...

Imagine that while walking through your neighborhood you could remember everything about your house – the address, the color, the reflecting ball in your garden – but you couldn’t remember how to get home. This neurological impairment is called spatial disorientation, and it’s the reason that people with Alzheimer’s disease frequently get lost in their...

Famously dubbed the “God particle,” the Higgs boson took thousands of scientists nearly five decades to discover, at a cost that one journalist estimated at $13.25 billion. Over the past 18 months, there has been plenty of hype about “the Higgs,” beginning with the boson’s discovery in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN...