Male professors are far more likely to be considered “smart” or “brilliant” by their students, according to an analysis of reviews from the website Rate My Professor. Benjamin Schmidt, a professor at Northeastern University, created a searchable database of roughly 14 million reviews from the site.

Max Abrahms, a political-science professor and terrorism specialist at Northeastern University, suspects the number is lower than many people believe. “There are other groups”—such as Boko Haram in Nigeria—“that have rapidly expanded their membership size in the absence of social media,” he pointed out to me. “Battlefield success is a better predictor” of group size […]

On Valentine’s Day weekend, Jonathan Hutson found himself exchanging tweets with somebody unpleasant: a Holocaust-denying anti-Semite, by the look of things. Then Hutson looked up the person’s earlier tweets. This guy was tweeting about shooting up a school. He said that he wanted to execute 30-plus grade-school kids.” So Hutson decided to draw the person […]

The bacchanal of charges, counter charges, accusations, and recriminations concerning the MBTA’s highlight-reel non-performance over the last several weeks is redundant. In sum, you would be right to conclude that a lot of people had a lot of years to get a job done and failed to do it, and that failure haunts the region […]

This has not been the best year for the National Football League. Combine the public relations disaster of the domestic abuse scandals with the growing public recognition that, as a result of playing the game, retired players suffer debilitating medical and mental conditions, the League is quite fortunate that the public still adores the game. […]

Max Abrahms, a specialist in terrorist groups, from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, said he was less concerned with the technological advances. “Terrorist groups are simply keeping in tandem with current times. We shouldn’t be surprised,” he said by phone. But he cautioned against seeing any IS group influence on Boko Haram as one-way traffic. […]

A troubling portrait of Elliot Rodger is painted in a nine-month investigation by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department. Rodger was responsible for the May 23 slayings that left six UC Santa Barbara students and Rodger dead. The report said Rodger became increasingly obsessed with violence in the two years before the slayings, even searching […]

In a crowded restaurant, your eyes might drift to your dining companions’ lips to make out what they’re saying over the din. That’s because when speech is hard to make out, lip-reading provides extra clues for comprehension. In a new study of monolingual and bilingual infants, Northeastern University professor David Lewkowicz and colleagues found that […]

In the U.S., the State Department runs a social media effort called “Think Again, Turn Away,” which aims to highlight the brutality and hypocrisy of terror groups. Originally, the program targeted all extremists, but in recent months, it has focused overwhelmingly on the Islamic State, as the group’s influence and social media support appeared to […]

When it comes to the study of human physiology, few organs are more complex and intriguing than the human brain. Even though many areas of the brain are still a mystery to scientists, new research from Northeastern University, the University of Oxford, and several Boston institutions may help to bring researchers a step closer to understanding one of its most crucial functions: speech. In a […]

Appeals Court Judge Juan Torruella, who had requested the oral arguments, grilled Mr. Weinreb with questions the defense has raised about alleged bias, and even read some inflammatory quotes from anonymous, potential jurors contained in a defense filing. Mr. Weinreb called those quotes “selective and misleading,” citing the argument Judge O’Toole used when he last […]

Little is known about the controversial, cyber vigilante who goes only by the moniker Jester. He operates in the shadows, a lone wolf, waging war on terrorists. The self-described patriot claims to be former military with contacts in the Government. And he has a cult following of more than 66,000 Twitter followers. “The Jester, he’s […]