Engineering students let the electricity-powered robot down from a harness and tried to let it walk, only to watch as Val’s legs awkwardly lurched and locked into a ballet pose. “That doesn’t look good,” said Taskin Padir, a professor at Northeastern University, noting Val’s $2 million price tag. Northeastern and UMass-Lowell are partnering on a […]

But despite near-universal local acclaim, some outside observers like James Alan Fox, an expert on the dynamics of active and mass shootings at Northeastern University, see the Public Threat Alert System Act as no more than feel-good measure that will accomplish little. In fact, Fox suspects it could do more harm than good. “It’s a […]

Northeastern University economist Harlan Platt says the debate reminds him of taxis fighting the inevitable spread of Uber. But the new, better way of running an airline — Norwegian Air is finding ways to reduce costs by breaking the old model of basing an airline in one country, employing people there and hiring its crew […]

Kim Lewis, director of the antimicrobial discovery center at Northeastern University, also questions the utility of these compounds in overcoming antibiotic resistance. The best way to avoid resistance is to create entirely new kinds of antibiotics, he says. However, in this case, the method yields variants of macrolides, which might be useful for medicine in […]

We have troves of data about political communication — digital transcripts of every law, speech, news story, blog, and tweet. With those, computer scientists are building tools for understanding the language of politics. In essence, they are putting the “science” in political science. One scientist is Oren Tsur, a researcher at Harvard and Northeastern who […]

The life-and-death struggle that a Lakeville bank employee found herself thrust into on Monday could leave her with long-lasting psychological scars, say local experts who think the brazen bandit — who didn’t try to conceal his identity — was hoping to become infamous. “I would think that she would have a lot of trouble going […]

Under the Louisiana law, anyone who targets law enforcement for crimes ranging from murder to theft could face an additional sentence of six months in jail for a misdemeanor and five years in jail for a felony. The focus of hate crime statutes has typically been protection of vulnerable groups who might be victimized due […]

The incidents suggest that Israel’s democratically elected political leaders — and the voters who elect them — have moved so far to the right that even military leaders, who have historically enjoyed revered status, are not immune to the scorn once reserved for the country’s activist left wing. “It is one thing when people ignore […]

More than 40 years after he resigned as president, Richard Nixon remains the lodestar for political skullduggery. And so it was when Donald Trump threatened to retaliate against Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in response to news that the Post is siccing 20 reporters on Trump to look into every aspect of his life and […]

Northeastern University is livestreaming an artist in action. Boston’s own Cedric Douglas is getting a worldwide Internet audience as part of the university’s campaign to embrace street art over the past few years, which has brought artists with both local ties and an international presence to the campus. The school recently set up the live-streaming […]

Just north of D.C., transportation planners in Montgomery County, Maryland,are taking a systematic approach to breaking this vicious cycle. With a newBicycle Stress Map, county planners have quantified and mapped the “traffic stress level” of the county’s bike network, assigning a numeric value and corresponding color to every street and bike trail. Based on methodology […]

The campaign to raise the cigarette tax comes on the heels of the state’s ban of tobacco sales to anyone under 21, marking a substantial shift in the Golden state in public attitudes and policies against tobacco use. And it could spur other states to follow suit. I think when state policymakers see that another state has […]