The campuses of Northeastern University and Berklee College of Music are jammed together in the Fenway like roomies sharing a too-small dorm room. It was in a Northeastern dorm in 1999 that freshman Shawn Fanning launched a digital file-sharing service called Napster, which could make any piece of recorded music instantly accessible, for free. Seventeen […]

“Here we are we see a murder that may never happen again in this town. It’s such a weird case that it’s hard to understand,” Northeastern University Criminologist Jack Levin said.

“The truth is, stranger abductions are rare,” says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, citing a 2014 FBI report noting that 332 went missing in 2014. Research by David Finkelhor, Director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, finds that in fact the number of missing children […]

In recent months, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and members of his administration have come under scrutiny for allegedly pressuring city contractors to hire union labor.  That scrutiny has yielded two indictments so far, with the possibility of more to come. Specifically, two city officials face federal criminal charges related to suspicions they forced a music […]

More is at work here than just the rise of online shopping, says Barry Bluestone, a political economist at Northeastern University. He studied the first movement away from department stores and into discount stores in the 1970s, and he says the cause now is the same: a declining middle class. “Retail trade is going to […]

While everyone’s focus has been stuck on Rio, one Northeastern team grabbed the gold in an entirely different spot: the University Powerlifting World Cup in Belarus. The women’s powerlifting club, which started only six years ago and had never before competed internationally, showed its strength in squats, benching, and deadlifts. Five of the seven women who competed won […]

Attackers are smart, and to make malicious emails more enticing for the victims, a frequent trick is to tie them to an event that is currently going on,” said Engin Kirda, professor of computer science at Northeastern University. “As the Olympics are popular right now, users should expect to see malicious emails related to the […]

A scientist can spend several months, in many cases even years, strenuously investigating a single research question, with the ultimate goal of making a contribution – little or big – to the progress of human knowledge. Succeeding in this hard task requires specialized, years-long training, intuition, creativity, in-depth knowledge of current and past theories and, […]

“The Dow is a quirky and incomplete barometer of U.S. equity markets,” says Paul Bolster, professor of finance at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business in Boston. Yet in balance with another number – the Standard & Poor’s 500 index – the Dow maintains surprising relevance. “In spite of monitoring the share price level of […]

The research on PFOA is stronger than on most chemicals and the documented connections between the chemical and cancers has grown exponentially in recent years, building a uniquely large of body of research, compared to most chemicals, said Phil Brown, director of the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute at Northeastern University. He said state […]

However, these same pundits (including me) are now warning that government agencies, including the FBI, are finding ways to circumvent the technology behind Tor. Knowing that might, and should, give pause to those who use and rely on Tor. Adding more fuel to the fire are two researchers at Northeastern University: Guevara Noubir, professor of […]

Many coal miners, the thinking goes, have mechanical skills that can easily be transferred to deployment of new energy systems—installing solar panels, for instance. “There’s going to be way more jobs in the renewable distributed energy system,” says Jennie ­Stephens, a professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University. “We should be focused on […]