Given the limits of willpower, some psychology professors at Northeastern University began thinking about alternatives. Might experiencing certain emotions help curb our desire for the short-term gratification that comes from spending money? In particular, David DeSteno and his colleagues wanted to find out what role gratitude might play in squelching the desire to spend money. […]

To shrink an inverter down, engineers are probably going to have to figure out how to build them around switches made out of semiconductors that can flick a lot faster. Two likely candidates are silicon carbide (SiC) and gallinium nitrate (GaN). Faster switching means they would shed less heat, so the inverter wouldn’t need so […]

Dozens of colleges and universities are reeling after having been cited by the Education Department for their apparently lax response to allegations of sexual assault. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House are on a moral crusade to eradicate the problem, making constant reference to a troubling statistic: that one in five women are victims of […]

Meanwhile, New England’s factories, once among the world’s most prosperous, have ended decades of job loss and are now facing a new problem: recruitment. In 2012, Barry Bluestone, dean of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University, estimated that over the coming decade, manufacturers in Massachusetts alone would need to fill […]

The NCAA, member schools and broadcasters may be forced to negotiate licensing deals to pay college football and basketball players for appearing in live broadcasts of championship games, cutting into more than $16 billion in television contracts for the NCAA and its conferences. Current and former athletes could band together to bargain for group licenses, […]

There’s an online sharing marketplace for everything these days. The latest vertical to pop up on our radar: private flights. Boston startup Flytenow is working to do just that, and startup incubator Y Combinator is putting its money behind it as part of its current batch of startups. The problem for folks who have a […]

The three-day truce in Gaza is over. Rockets from Gaza were fired into Israel and Israel responded with airstrikes. As the fighting continues, Dov Waxman of Northeastern University’s Middle East Center joins Here & Now’s Robin Young to discuss how much money flows from the United States to Israel, how it’s changed over the years […]

Is it possible that the next hot social startup was hatched in a dorm room on the campus of Northeastern University? Amino has just five employees in a shared storefront office in Downtown Crossing, but already hundreds of thousands of people use its mobile apps, which enable fans of Dr. Who, anime, or the virtual […]

If you think drones are cool, our skies are about to get a lot more high-tech. Researchers are developing robotic birds and bees — and they might take flight soon. This isn’t what your parents had in mind when they talked about the birds and the bees. One group of researchers from Northeastern University and […]

But while UX is one issue, larger phones are more difficult to use from an ergonomic standpoint. Northeastern University professor of physical therapy Jack Dennerlein said a larger handset “means more awkward postures of the thumb, and reduced performance when using it with a single hand. As the size gets bigger too, the devices are […]

What makes you a good person or a bad person? How do you choose between the devil and the angel on your shoulders? What forms your moral compass? Well, it could be how you were raised. Or your faith. Or the values of the society you live in. But if you ask a neuroscientist, they’ll […]

FBI officials had no immediate comment on the reason for the turnabout, but the plan seemed reminiscent of a similar effort of the Obama administration to grade media coverage of its response to the BP oil spill. Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor for Northeastern University, told The Times last week that such a system posed […]