As a young woman, I was told more than once that my severe respiratory symptoms were perhaps “psychosomatic,” caused by stress or anxiety. Being sick enough to be in the intensive care unit was challenging enough; having my credibility called into question while I was struggling simply to breathe made the situation that much harder. […]

After three weeks of basketball bliss, Louisville and Michigan are suiting up for the Championship Game of the 2013 March Madness tournament tonight. Yet, as they’ve battled their way to the final round of the men’s NCAA tournament, students here in the Hub have been duking it out to see who’s out innovating whom in our accompanying Campus […]

Brian Helmuth is a professor in the Department of Marine and Environmental Science and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, and directs the university’s Sustainability Science and Policy Initiative. Climate change produces winners and losers, globally and locally, and science can help to predict which is which. Often the winners are […]

Legal scholar Paul Butler and criminologist Jack Levin will headline “The Pursuit of Justice,” a three-day conference featuring nationally and internationally recognized scholars April 18-20 at Gonzaga University. Its theme is “Understanding Hatred, Confronting Intolerance, Eliminating Inequality.” Butler, an award-winning Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor, is a well-known figure on race and the criminal justice […]

“The big story in Massachusetts in the last 10 years is the increase in the foreign-born population,” said Len Albright, an assistant professor of sociology and public policy at Northeastern University. Without immigrants, the state’s population would have fallen over the past decade, he said. Boston’s population in 1990 was about 20 percent foreign born; […]

So your dad’s birthday totally slipped your mind and you haven’t had a chance to call your college roommate to see how her new job is going. It happens—but it may happen less often if you take time to just breathe:Meditating may help make you a more compassionate person, according to a study published in […]

“It’s taking them longer to go from oyster spat to oyster adult,” said Luke Dodd, a doctoral candidate at UNC who put the crabs in a tank with oysters. “When you’re a baby, there’s tons of predators that want to eat you up.” But when they put mud crabs and oysters together in the tanks […]

In 1998, when new laws were passed, 65 murders were committed with firearms. In 2010, the latest figure available, it was almost twice as many: 122, an increase of 88 percent. The reason, says criminology Professor James Fox from Northeastern University, is inconsistent gun laws. “Each state, to some extent, is at the mercy of […]

Years ago, Rice’s behavior might have been shrugged off by many as “tough love,” but this time, “there was a certain sense of outrage” expressed by everyone from sports commentators to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, says Dan Lebowitz, executive director of Northeastern University’s Sport in Society, which advocates for social responsibility in sports.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survives,” Charles Darwin once observed, “but the one most responsive to change.” If only it were true in higher education. It’s interesting to observe, isn’t it, how much higher education is still driven by a “brute force” model of delivery? As much as we might wish it […]

Scientists have mostly focused on the benefits of meditation for the brain and the body, but a recent study has revealed that it also increases compassionate behavior. Several religious traditions have suggested that mediation does just that, but there has been no scientific proof until now. In this study, a team of researchers fromNortheastern University and Harvard Universityexamined the […]

Being first at anything is hard, but being first at college is a bewildering and sometimes terrifying experience. I work with a scholarship program at Northeastern University that funds students from underprivileged backgrounds; all are first-generation college attendees, most are from poor families, and with a few exceptions, either they or their parents are recent […]