NIU Today

Wondering what to do with those old electronic toys that keep counting, beeping and singing from the bottom of the toy box? Try rewiring them to create new electronic sound machines. This practice is called circuit bending, and it’s the subject of a free hands-on lab hosted Saturday, May 17, by the STEM Outreach Bright...

Summer is just around the corner. What are your young Einsteins going to do to keep their minds engaged? This June, July and August, NIU STEM Outreach and other STEM departments are offering more camp experiences than ever before. Whether students want to learn how roller coasters work, design their own video games, create scientifically...

Summer is just around the corner. Do you know where your kids will be burning daylight this year? At Northern Illinois University’s summer camps, your children can learn to write the great American novel, become the next Indiana Jones, sharpen their soccer skills, create video games, design roller coasters or even prevent future wars between...

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...

Until we find that goose laying golden eggs, we are all going to have to learn to manage credit and debt wisely. Luckily, NIU’s Center for Economic Education and STEM Outreach are offering a workshop for educators and a STEM Café for the general public to help people learn about financial literacy. And, in the...

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...

What wacky contraption would you create to keep snakes from slithering onto your head? Children got the chance to answer that question Feb. 7 at the “I <3 Engineering” event at the DuPage Children’s Museum in Naperville. NIU STEM Read partnered with DuPage Children’s Museum and author Andrea Beaty to present a night of hands-on...

Using parasitic wasps to fight the fly population might sound like something out of the latest sci-fi film, but entomologists are actually researching this bug battle to find environmentally friendly solutions for pest control. At the next STEM Café, NIU professor Bethia King and Ph.D. candidate Ted Burgess from NIU’s Department of Biological Sciences will...

Warning: Brainiac alert! The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), among the largest yearly gatherings of scientists in the world, will be held this week in Chicago, and NIU expects to be well-represented. NIU students, faculty and outreach staff will be attending various events at the meeting, held Thursday,...

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...