WGBH WATCH: Hurricane Katrina, 10 years later It was ten years ago this Saturday that Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeastern Louisiana. With 127-mile-an-hour winds, it was the most powerful storm to hit the US in decades, and, ultimately, it was the costliest in American history. When the levees broke around New Orleans, about 80 percent of the city and its surrounding […]
WGBH Boston Globe to address columnist John Sununu’s outside interests Last week the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America published its latest post on the many conflicts of Boston Globe columnist John E. Sununu, a former Republican senator and the son of former New Hampshire governor John Sununu. Now the Globe’s editorial-page editor, Ellen Clegg, says she’s dealing with Sununu in several ways: […]
Aging our children: Column Last Friday, a Wisconsin judge entered not guilty pleas on behalf of two 13-year-old girls accused of repeatedly stabbing a classmate just to please the fictional horror character Slender Man. Rejecting defense counsel’s arguments for transferring jurisdiction to juvenile court, Judge Michael Bohren insisted that the girls be tried in criminal court. The apparent motive […]
Marketplace The long party for commodity producers is so over There’s a history of super cycles, according to economist Bilge Erten of Northeastern University. In a recent paper, she found long commodity booms often were built on colossal demand: from the U.S. reconstructing itself after the Civil War, and from Europe and Japan rebuilding after World War II. Then they ended, Erten says, just as […]
Al Jazeera Crime spikes in several US cities confound criminologists James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, is dismissive of the half-year statistics. “The shorter the window, the more volatile the numbers,” he said. “Six-month homicide numbers are especially unreliable.” He likens it to a 100-point spike in the stock market on one day. “It doesn’t say anything. … You really shouldn’t […]
Compounding fallout rattles Wilmington firm An FDA spokesman, responding to a Globe inquiry on Sunday, said the agency was reviewing the issue but was unable to comment immediately. Todd Brown, vice chairman of the Department of Pharmacy and Health Systems Services at Northeastern University, said he is not aware of First Databank or any listing service judging a product and […]
Yahoo! Bend & Snap: Origami inspires new ways to fold curved objects For example, at the microscopic scale, Evans speculated that knowing which curves snap quickly could someday help researchers create tiny snapping cells or capsules that could mix together liquids, such as drugs going into the human body, faster than mixing methods available today. “They put together an elegant theory,” Ashkan Vaziri, an engineering researcher at […]
Disaster recovery may depend on who you know, more than financial resources Ten years ago, Daniel Aldrich moved from Brighton to New Orleans to prepare for a new job as a professor of comparative politics at Tulane University. As he and his family settled into their new city, there were news reports of a hurricane developing off the coast of Florida. But Aldrich did not understand the […]
The Patriot Ledger Is China in a currency war with US? China’s recent surprise decision to devalue its currency, the renminbi (also known as the yuan), versus the dollar sent shock waves through financial markets. It could trigger a race to the bottom to gain an export price advantage, which would have a major impact on the U.S. economy and on looming decisions by the Federal […]
Killer’s appeal could guide Tsarnaev’s plan “There are some cases right now that are going to change the dynamic of how the courts will look at this issue,” said Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University. He said appeals courts are generally reluctant to overturn a judge’s decision unless a clear error is evident. But the influx of social media […]
We used to count black Americans as ⅗ of a person. For reparations, give them 5/3 of a vote If you want to shut down a conversation about race, just say the word “reparations.” Even black Americans are divided over the idea that money can compensate for the vestiges of an evil institution that ended 150 years ago; only 60 percent think the government should make cash payments to descendants of slaves. White Americans, on the […]
Nature News Nanotube impants show diagnostic potential Preliminary experiments in mice, reported by scientists at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, Massachusetts, this week, suggest that the devices are safe to introduce into the bloodstream or implant under the skin. Researchers also presented data showing that the nanotube–polymer complexes could measure levels of large molecules, a feat that has […]