At Northeastern, Sean Casto said students from across the campus — from architecture to engineering — constantly talk about start-ups. He started his mobile-app company, PreApps.com, while in school and, with a small amount of seed funding, is running it out of a small Newbury Street office with two part-time employees and five college interns. Casto, […]

Neuroscientists are racing to perfect brain-computer interfaces and as they do, the line between sci-fi and reality blurs. Iron Man exoskeletons, Matrix-style brain downloads and Vulcan mind-melds feel within reach. “I think nothing is impossible up front,” said Deniz Erdogmus, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University specializing in noninvasive brain-computer […]

Justice Department lawyers will soon decide whether to seek the death penalty in the case of alleged Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. They will focus on the crime, and perhaps the youth of the criminal (the United States apparently hasn’t executed a teenager in over 100 years) and not on the randomness or value of capital […]

Former Northeastern guard Jonathan Lee made another trip to the Celtics’ practice facility in Waltham Tuesday for his second pre-draft workout with the team. The 6-foot-2-inch guard is pegged to go somewhere in the second round in the June 27 NBA draft. The Celtics have only the No. 16 pick in the first round, but the team […]

Northeastern University civil and environmental engineering professor Ming Wang went with me to visually inspect the Charlestown Bridge, a rusty truss bridge that crosses the Charles River, connecting Charlestown to Boston’s North End. The bridge has six lanes, but two of them are blocked off and there’s a sign posted that reads “No Trucks”. Wang […]

Patricia Illingworth, an editor of Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy, believes that naming rights are a mixed blessing from an ethical standpoint. To some degree, “the arts seem to be a place where people from all walks of life and all social classes can gather together in solidarity,” she noted. “So if billionaires are branding […]

Revolutions in computing and communications have produced a relentless flood of information about our world and ourselves—right down to our DNA. Today, Boston’s research and technology sectors generate, process and interpret huge amounts of data across industries, from global business to personal genomics. This information gives us fresh insight and new answers, but presents its […]

If you’re a middle-class parent in Boston, the question inevitably occurs: Should I raise my family in the city or abscond to the suburbs, where the public schools are a more certain bet? Anecdotally, it seems that increasingly parents are choosing to stay, and a new study based on in-depth interviews with Boston parents begins to explain […]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that violent crime in the United States rose for the first time in six years in 2012 — and Indianapolis was no exception. There were 776 more violent crimes and seven more murders in Indianapolis in 2012 than in 2011, according to the FBI. But experts cautioned that it […]

Northeastern University’s Dukakis Center has said the state needs to double or triple its rate of housing construction in order to meet coming demand. The Patrick administration believes the state needs 10,000 new apartments and condominiums per year over the next decade just to have a housing market that functions normally. Massachusetts has only hit […]

Burris, who lives in Lincoln, Calif., northeast of Sacramento, says after he graduates from high school he will attend Northeastern University in Boston, and plans to major in business administration, with a concentration in entrepreneurship and new venture management.

Serving the public isn’t enough for journalism, the Northeastern University professor says. His new book The Wired City taught him that the public first has to be created, nurtured, and given a voice.