California’s upcoming ballot is smoking. This November voters will decide on whether to legalize recreational marijuana and, as state officials announced yesterday, on whether a $2 tax should be added to every pack of cigarettes and electronic cigarette products.   “States are responsible for people’s health care and picking up that tab, and so originally […]

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute are developing small, self-guided flying robots that use 3-D imaging technology to help engineers pinpoint and assess structural damage and other weaknesses in large structures, such as bridges and dams. A prototype version of the Aerial Robotic Infra­struc­ture Ana­lyst, or ARIA, has already successfully mapped a small bridge, […]

Terrorists descended upon a restaurant in the diplomatic zone in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka yesterday, taking dozens of hostages and killing two police, in the latest attack that security experts say is likely ISIS — or an equally deadly offshoot.   If indeed ISIS is responsible for the attack, it would further shroud the […]

When Aaron Swartz, a prominent programmer and digital activist, was arrested in 2011, he was halfway through a fellowship at Harvard’s Center for Ethics. Police took him in after he entered a computer closet at MIT and downloaded enormous amounts of data from JSTOR’s extensive database of academic research. Swartz was charged with 13 felonies, […]

Ride-hailing service Uber will begin tracking personal driver behavior after a series of app updates, the company announced last week. Starting last Friday in 26 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and the District, the app will score drivers on how well they brake, if they accelerate smoothly, use their phone while driving, drive within […]

Steel or cement, plastics or carbon fiber, silicon or graphene: Whether in construction, aerospace or electronics, picking the right material for the job involves choosing the best fit among a limited number of options, which often leads to tricky compromises. Now, a development at the Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates could mark a […]

The leader of Al Qaeda is warning of the “gravest consequences” if Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is executed. A terrorism expert with Northeastern University, Max Abrahms, says this threat is an attempt to shore-up supports around then world at a time when Al Qaeda is seen as losing.

A court decision last month that permitted federal prosecutors to use evidence obtained through government hacking in a child pornography case has stirred fears about privacy. “This is the opinion of one court judge,” said Andrea Matwyshyn, a law professor at Northeastern University. “Other courts will, at best, find this to be data. It is […]

When it comes to accessing public websites, Tor has an intrinsic security problem: though the nodes between your computer and the public internet are unable to see where the traffic is coming from or going to, the final hop in the network (known as an exit node) gets to know what webserver you are connecting […]

Last week’s Boston Globe story indicating that Boston will experience more flooding sooner than thought due to climate change came as no surprise. Scientists monitoring the ice sheet in the Arctic and Greenland noted that it was melting faster than predicted in April. But, is Boston doing enough to prepare? Some work is already underway. […]

Bacteria have been discovered in our guts that depend on one of our brain chemicals for survival. These bacteria consume GABA, a molecule crucial for calming the brain, and the fact that they gobble it up could help explain why the gut microbiome seems to affect mood. Philip Strandwitz and his colleagues at Northeastern University […]

The Supreme Judicial Court recently heard oral arguments concerning how the Commonwealth should handle the cases affected by the misdeeds of Annie Dookhan, the former state crime lab chemist who engaged in a pattern of tampering with evidence. The joint efforts of prosecutors, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and others have established more than 24,000 cases […]