If you’ve ever watched a rap cypher, you’ve probably wondered how someone can string together a substantive narrative of rhymes while also ethering someone or offering a sociopolitical analysis of some form. Who really knows? But new freestyle rap-based game Vers, developed by 21-year-old Northeastern University entrepreneurship student Jerry Spatch, is offering people a chance […]

To make matters worse, cybersecurity suffers from an image problem. The field pays well, but many computer science students would rather create new products and technologies for Apple or Google. “Computer science is sexy. Cyber isn’t,” said P.K. Agarwal, regional dean of Northeastern University’s Silicon Valley campuses, which teach cybersecurity. The field offers high-stress jobs […]

Five days after being acquitted on double murder charges, convicted murder and former Patriots player Aaron Hernandez was found hanging inside his state prison cell and was pronounced dead shortly after in what prison officials say appears to have been a suicide. Hernandez was serving a life sentence for the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd, […]

But according to Leo Beletsky, a public health and drug policy expert from Northeastern University, the drop in violent crime had “absolutely zero” to do with the war on drugs. States which declined to lock up thousands of low level drug criminals saw a similar decline, he said.

Hidden beneath its tusk-like shell is a jet-black, slippery and slimy sea creature that looks like it came off the set of Alien. Scientists said on Monday that they’ve discovered the first living specimen of a giant shipworm in a Philippine bay. People have known of the huge mollusk for hundreds of years, by the […]

The haunting images from the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings still remain with Northeastern University professor Jose Martinez. Four years later, it’s one of the reasons he’s motivated to stop the next one. “How can I as a scientist, help us avoid situations like that,” asked Martinez. His team at the university are developing a new […]

“For me, it is like a finding a mythical creature,” said Daniel L. Distel, a research professor at Northeastern, who has been studying mollusks since the late 1980s and had long dreamed of finding a giant shipworm. “You know it’s something no one has ever seen. It’s like coming across a living dinosaur.”

In a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Daniel Distel, a microbiologist at Northeastern University, and colleagues described a live one for first time. Its symbiotic relationship with bacteria provides clues to how the giant shipworm evolved its strange way of eating, and may enrich our understanding of infection in […]

Today marks the end of the time period imposed by the Supreme Judicial Court in January requiring prosecutors to make final decisions about the estimated 24,000 Massachusetts criminal drug cases tainted by the misconduct of Annie Dookhan, a state chemist whose fraudulent activity at the Hinton Crime Lab in Jamaica Plain came to light more […]

The field pays well, but many computer-science students would rather create new products and technologies for Apple and Google than design and operate systems that spot, resist and mitigate a widening variety of attacks. “Computer science is sexy. Cyber isn’t,” said P.K. Agarwal, regional dean of Northeastern University’s Silicon Valley campuses, which teach cybersecurity. “Cybersecurity […]

The seemingly irrational decision to broadcast footage of himself committing a heinous crime lines up with a familiar psychological profile, said James Alan Fox, a well-known criminologist who teaches at Northeastern University and has consulted on major murder investigations. “There are offenders who feel proud of their crimes, their conquests — and oftentimes they’re people […]

Team leader Daniel Distel, a marine biologist at Northeastern University in Boston, plucked a specimen from the stink and packed it into a section of white PVC pipe, transporting it live several thousand miles to the lab of University of Utah medicinal chemist Margo Haygood. “Seeing Kuphus for the first time was a highlight of […]