Jordan Hu College of Science and Liberal Arts

We all know how bad smoking is for you, but what about vaping? A new study at New Jersey Institute of technology (NJIT) led by forensic anthropologist and biochemist Sara Zapico is exploring the potential long-term health risks of e-cigarettes and how they might manifest in young adults at the genetic level, which up until now isn't fully understood. With funding from the New Jersey Health Foundation, Zapico is investigating how vaping may alter patterns in gene expression in Gen Z and young Millennial users — insights from which could reveal early warning signs of cancer and...

Goldwater Scholarships, among the most prestigious awards for undergraduate students pursuing STEM degrees, are going to two juniors at NJIT.  The recipients are: Dev Doshi, a biomedical engineering major in the Newark College of Engineering; and Brock Shahinian, an environmental science major in the Jordan Hu College of Science and Liberal Arts. The NJIT Goldwater Scholars represent two of 11 statewide, and 441 total across the United States. They were selected from an estimated pool of over 5,000 college sophomores and juniors nominated by 445 academic institutions. This is the...

The NJIT Rocketry Club is experimenting with a model that autonomously lands itself standing up, a la SpaceX, but accomplished through novel methods. SpaceX rockets fire their liquid fuel thrusters while descending. Other hobbyists have already tried to duplicate that method, so the Highlanders devised a unique approach: next year, they want to make the nose cone of their Project Lotus rocket unfold like flower petals, revealing a drone that takes control. It’s a new path in model rocketry, where nose cones typically pop open to expose a simple parachute. Hobbyists have done it this way...

Plenty of researchers already study how to tell if online writing bears the traits of artificial intelligence — but Michael Laudenbach, in the humanities and social sciences department at NJIT’s Jordan Hu College of Science and Liberal Arts, is studying what traits indicate that digital prose was crafted by analog humans. The risk of not knowing the difference is that if instructors and business managers too openly adopt AI writing tools, then children and college students might wrongly learn that AI writing is good writing, Laudenbach said. Even though some people are bad writers, at...