Another mass shooting. Another mass shooting at Fort Hood in Killeen, Tex. An unstable Iraq veteran killed three people and wounded 16 before killing himself. Does the madness never cease? Why does it seem to be occurring more frequently? Four blunt points: 1. It’s not occurring more frequently. “Over the past 30 years, there has […]

This page is part of the WBUR Oral History Project, which features voices of survivors, first responders and others reflecting on the bombings at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon. These reflections are a collaboration with Northeastern University’s “Our Marathon: Boston Bombing Digital Archive.” This page will be updated with new voices daily […]

Patience — it’s good, but notoriously hard, to have. Now, a new study shows a potential way to increase it: Have gratitude. Published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers from Northeastern University, the University of California, Riverside, and Harvard University found that feelings of gratitude are associated with increased patience in the context of a […]

Northeastern University has received its highest number of undergraduate applications – a 5.2 percent increase in applications for the incoming freshman class compared to last year, the university has announced. All told, Northeastern received 49,822 applications for 2,800 seats for the Fall 2014 freshman class, according to Northeastern. The average SAT of admitted students rose […]

Is this just the promise of an idealistic social worker? In some ways I fit that stereotype. Shapeless dresses, check. Chunky jewelry, check. Optimist, check. But idealist? No, I shed that mantle long ago. I work with women who have perinatal emotional complications, so I no longer have the luxury of being an idealist. (Perinatal […]

Last December, more than 1,000 customers at a Starbucks drive-thru window in Newington, Conn., did something irrational. They paid for the order of the person behind them in line. The money-saving move would be to break the chain: Gratefully acknowledge that the person ahead of you in line paid for your order, then drive off […]

The ability to link human brains to machines, create new life forms and build Star Trek-style disease detectors will be the focus of a new Defense Department office soon. The new office, named the Biological Technology Office, or BTO, will serve as a clearinghouse for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, programs into brain […]

How were you feeling the day you had to turn in the form telling your benefits department what percent of your salary you wanted to set aside for your 401K? Or the time you were deciding to rack up $5,000 in credit card debt so you and your spouse could take a two-week cycling vacation […]

The “Iliad” may be a giant of Western literature, yet its plot hinges on a human impulse normally thought petty: spite. Achilles holds a festering grudge against Agamemnon (“He cheated me, wronged me … He can go to hell…”) turning down gifts, homage, even the return of his stolen consort Briseis just to prolong the […]

Leading scientific thinkers of their time, such as Aristotle, Rene Descartes, Guillaume Duchenne, and Charles Darwin, have long promoted the idea that there are a handful of basic emotions that people express. In recent decades, that group has crystalized into six core emotions: happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. But there are clearly many […]

Marc Kadis was piping mad as he stormed away from the parking counter in City Hall recently. He had been feuding with the city of Boston over a pair of tickets totalling $95 and had come with pictures on his smartphone to prove that he was not in violation. After much wrangling with a parking […]

Google Flu Trends, once a poster child for the power of big-data analysis, seems to be under attack. This month, in a Science magazine article, four quantitatively adept social scientists reported that Google’s flu-tracking service not only wildly overestimated the number of flu cases in the United States in the 2012-13 flu season — a […]