Saturday night at Town Hall in New York, the Nor’easters of Northeastern University in Boston were crowned national champions at the International Competition of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA), the entirely real battle dramatized in last summer’s surprise hit Pitch Perfect. On the same night, the organizers announced from the stage that 19 Entertainment, which produces American Idol, […]

With a nod to Earth Day, the Princeton Review has released its guide to 322 of the greenest colleges in the United States, with help from the Center for Green Schools at at the U.S. Green Building Council. Robert Franek, senior vice president of publishing, said in a release that students have increasingly considered colleges’ environmental footprints before […]

Cellular function requires biomolecules to undergo dynamic transitions that include folding, conformational rearrangements, and large-scale assembly. The result is a highly interdependent network of processes that is maintained by a balance of thermodynamic and kinetic factors. In molecular machines, each constituent biopolymer (i.e., a chain of residues) first folds to a low energy configuration/ensemble. These ordered polymers can then assemble into sophisticated architectures, […]

One piece of evidence comes from the relationship between job openings and unemployment. Normally these two numbers move inversely: the more job openings, the fewer Americans out of work. And this traditional relationship remains true if we look at short-term unemployment. But as William Dickens and Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University recently showed, the relationship has broken […]

By all accounts, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of two brothers suspected of having perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings, was a good kid, a bright young man and hardly the type of angry malcontent you’d expect of a terrorist. He graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin where he starred on the varsity wrestling team, and earned a city-funded $2,500 […]

On GPS this Sunday at 10 a.m. and repeated at 1 p.m., a special live show with expert analysis and discussion of the lessons and implications of this week’s terrorist attack in Boston. First, Fareed speaks with New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. Also on the show: Stephen Flynn, founding co-director of the George J. […]

Like most everyone else in Watertown, Jennifer Rivera, a twenty-eight-year-old accountant and volunteer E.M.T., felt a mixture of relief and apprehension on Friday when, at around 6P.M., Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick lifted the “shelter-in-place” order that had kept her cooped up with her roommates all day. “I mean, I know everyone had cabin fever. But […]

Criminologist James Alan Fox says the uncle’s intuition is justified. In cases like this, he says, it is highly unusual for the younger participant — in this case, a sibling — to be the leader. “I would be surprised,” says Fox, a professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Boston’s Northeastern University. “Very surprised.” […]

While the younger brother has been described as good student and warm-hearted, his behavior may have been influenced by his older brother, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University, one of the Boston colleges that remained closed on Friday. “It’s not just an anti-American or Islamic jihadist ideology, it’s […]

Resilience is partly a matter of character, but it is also one of policy. Stephen Flynn, a scholar at Northeastern University who has written widely about this, argues that, despite the billions spent, we have never made it a priority. George W. Bush often explained, “We fight the terrorists overseas so that we don’t have […]

But the rush to assist using crowdsourced, amateur sleuthing, also risked tarring innocent people, based on little evidence. A day before the FBI’s announcement, a social media research team at Northeastern University shuttered plans for a crowdsourcing investigation, amidst fears that it would be unable to prevent the wrong people from being implicated in the attack. The […]

Ammonium nitrate may be the more likely candidate in the explosion. In small quantities, the white pellets won’t detonate, notes Ronald Willey, a chemical engineering professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Many drugstore cold packs use the compound because, when water is also put in the packs, the mixture absorbs heat from its surroundings. But the compound begins […]