As many as 40,000 people in the US could already be carrying the Zika virus, having caught it while travelling abroad, a team analysing the epidemic has warned. This figure was calculated by extrapolating from the numbers of pregnant women who have been confirmed to be carrying the virus after visiting countries where it is […]

It became a near-instant — and unlikely — icon after it was switched on in December 1965, the enormous oil company logo glowing high above Kenmore Square. The Citgo sign, said to be the largest illuminated sign in New England at nearly 60 feet by 60 feet, has been called this city’s Big Ben or Eiffel Tower. Nationwide television […]

Whether it’s full boycotts or tweets containing the F word, Dan Lebowitz, executive director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said, “We’re in a time where people are really having a discussion about what athlete activism looks like.” Lebowitz points to LeBron James, of the National Basketball Association’s Cleveland Cavaliers, […]

The contest drew proposals from a range of high-profile developers who enlisted renowned architects and pitched modern office and condo towers packed with various civic amenities. But Millennium was a logical choice, said George Thrush, an architecture professor at Northeastern University.

College professors reading through their students’ essays often have to determine if they pass the sniff test: Does the paper seem authentic, or does it rely a bit too heavily on Wikipedia? But for Cecelia Musselman, an English professor at Northeastern University, writing a Wikipedia entry was the entire point. Over the past year, she’s […]

Teach compassion through mindfulness. Mindfulness can enhance attention span and reduce stress, but now researchers are finding that it can also foster empathy. In a study at Northeastern University, participants took an eight-week meditation course. When they were then faced with the option of giving up their chair to a person in visible physical discomfort, they were […]

“The link is the perception that they are going to alter your weight, shape, appearance,” said Rachel Rodgers, a counseling psychology researcher who studies body image and eating concerns and is an associate professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University. “The representations of ideal appearance in society are very restrictive and very unrealistic both for […]

Brazilian forces have had high visibility at the games, but Northeastern University professor Philip D’Agati, an Olympics political scholar, said there has been an alarming lack of public scrutiny of Brazil’s security readiness, particularly amid governmental turmoil and threat of a police strike. “From my perspective, it’s really concerning that questions about the willingness of […]

The Trump campaign’s charges are “absolutely baseless,” said Alan Schroeder, a professor at Northeastern University who wrote Presidential Debates: Fifty Years of High-Risk TV. “There is no rigging, and nothing different about this year’s schedule from previous cycles.” Given that there are 256 NFL games from early September to December, experts said it would be […]

Texas on Monday becomes the eighth state in the U.S. to permit properly licensed gun owners to carry concealed weapons on college campuses, and the timing could not be worse. When he chose Aug. 1 for his concealed carry bill to take effect at all public colleges and universities across Texas, state Rep. Allen Fletcher wasn’t aware of […]

A decline is automobile sales is dragging down consumer spending in Massachusetts, said Alan Clayton-Matthews, a senior contributing editor of MassBenchmarks and a Northeastern University economics professor. After strong auto sales last year, car purchases declined by 6.4 percent in the second quarter, Clayton-Matthews said. Non-automobile spending increased by 2.2 percent in the second quarter, […]

“It may seem surprising that a member of the human microbiota—the community of bacteria that inhabits the body—produces an antibiotic,” Kim Lewis and Philip Strandwitz, microbial biologists at Northeastern University who were not involved with the study, tell the BBC. “However, the microbiota is composed of more than a thousand species, many of which compete […]