David Lazer, a computational social scientist at Northeastern University who has studied social networks and misinformation on the internet, says any company that is helping to keep the lights on at a site trafficking in hate content, including web hosts and payment processors, will face difficult questions. “Each company has some potential control,” he says. […]

This week on Hidden Brain, the podcast talks with users, families, and researchers, including Northeastern’s Leo Beletsky, about risky drug use. 

The risks created by easily accessible software are increasingly coming into focus. Recent research from Northeastern University in Boston has found that apps for Android phones were acting beyond their terms of use by recording users’ screens and sending that information back to the company. Of the 17,260 apps researched, they found over half had […]

Northeastern professor Jessica Silbey says, “The rule of citizenship acquired by birth by being born within the United States is the law of the Constitution. It is the first sentence of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States […]

Sean Gallagher, founder and executive director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy, discusses online degrees.

Researchers say one reason there is so much stigma around drug use is that many people view addiction as a moral weakness. Leo Beletsky, a public health researcher from Northeastern University, says stigma enters the political discourse “around personal responsibility versus coddling and enabling.”

Ms. Azrael is one of the researchers behind the 2015 National Firearms Survey, conducted by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and Northeastern University, which provided some of the most up-to-date estimates of who owns guns in the U.S.

“We don’t want to hurt feelings,” said Northeastern University marketing professor Jay Mulki, who studies personal selling. “It’s like when you go to someone’s house, and even if the baby is ugly, you are not going to say the baby is ugly. You are going to say, ‘Ahh, look at the cute baby.’ ”

Northeastern University journalism professor and longtime media reporter and critic Dan Kennedy tells me that, of the hundreds of journalists he knows or has written about, he can probably count the number of bad apples he’s encountered—people who plagiarize or fabricate—on one hand. The rest “are absolutely trying to do the best job that they can, oftentimes […]

 Led by researchers at Harvard University, Northeastern University, and UW, the first-of-its kind national research study investigates the significant gap between the public’s perception and the difficult realities of firearm death rates, which the study author point out could potentially lead to further danger.

There are four commonly cited types of hate crimes, conceived by Northeastern University researchers in 2002 and now used by the National Institute of Justice and taught at the FBI Academy… To create the typology, the Northeastern researchers first analyzed 169 hate crimes that had been reported to Boston police in 1991 and 1992. A later […]

Another study from Northeastern University in Boston found that some people actually have the ability to induce goosebumps, which would have been a valuable tool for staying safe in primitive times. The study found that people who were able to induce goosebumps, known scientifically as voluntarily generated piloerection, were more emotionally open.