Think about the people in your life who are 65 or older. Some of them are experiencing the usual mental difficulties of old age, like forgetfulness or a dwindling attention span. Yet others somehow manage to remain mentally sharp. My father-in-law, a retired doctor, is 83 and he still edits books and runs several medical […]

“The average Japanese is not that interested in issues of energy,” said Daniel P. Aldrich, professor of political science at Northeastern University. “They are antinuclear, but they are not willing to vote the L.D.P. out of office because of its pronuclear stance.” Sustained political protest is rare in Japan, but some analysts say that does […]

Though census data shows that about 35 percent of Charlotte residents are black, about 80 percent of the 2016 homicide victims were black. That imbalance is a little bit higher than the national average, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University. The high rate of black victims […]

After years of lagging behind the rest of the country in solving homicides, the department’s upgrade has yielded a 10 percent jump in the rate at which detectives solved murders over a two-year period, according to a Northeastern University study released recently and publicized last week by the researcher and Boston police. The stepped-up effort, […]

Adding all of this together reveals some unsustainable labor trends. Barry Bluestone, a professor of public policy at Northeastern University who’s run some of the jobs numbers, predicts that in Massachusetts, “we’re going to need about 93,000 additional home care workers over the next 10 years, or almost 10,000 a year.”

“Foreign firms have long argued that the Japanese bidding process is one that is ripe for corruption due to a lack of openness and transparency,” Daniel Aldrich, professor and director of the security and resilience studies program at Northeastern University in Boston, said in an e-mail. For nuclear decommissioning “there is even less clarity and […]

Michael Dukakis sometimes got roughed up politically as governor of Masschusetts and Democratic presidential nominee in 1988. Last week he got roughed up literally — all in the name of a cleaner Boston. A passerby spotted Dukakis with blood on his face the morning of Dec. 8, but Dukakis said it was just a mishap. […]

Now, as happened in Alaska, doctors are encountering superbugs that are developing resistance to colistin, too. “We are losing the standoff with pathogens,” said antibiotic researcher Kim Lewis, a Northeastern University biochemist. “Without antibiotics, essentially you do not have modern medicine.”

Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University and an expert on wrongful convictions, said there is a belief among defense attorneys that the use of informants is often based on a “wink and a nod” instead of an explicit arrangement. The other problem prosecutors face when relying on jailhouse informants is […]

To learn more about what all this means for US-Russia relations, I called Harlow Robinson, a history professor at Northeastern University, who told me among other things that Tillerson’s conflicts of interests were unprecedented and that Russian hackers will never relent. Here’s what we talked about.

Leaders know all too well that with great power comes great responsibility. This mantra has been echoed by luminaries including Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and even Spiderman. It is the great charge of a leader to shoulder responsibility for making decisions that will have profound implications for many. But that doesn’t come […]

We don’t know why triclosan has these effects, but one explanation might lie in the different ways that antibiotics and antibacterials work. Most antibiotics kill bacteria by interfering with essential steps in their life cycle, such as making cell walls. Since triclosan prevents bacteria from growing, they may not go through as many life cycle […]