New predictions suggest the epidemic could grow to alarming levels in the next few months

While previous outbreaks have been largely confined to rural areas, the current epidemic, the largest ever, has reached densely populated, impoverished cities — including Monrovia, the capital of Liberia — gravely complicating efforts to control the spread of the disease. Alessandro Vespignani, a professor of computational sciences at Northeastern University who has been involved in […]

This is what the NFL has to do: Change the way players think about domestic violence, and not just out of fear of a six-game suspension. Slaby told me about one program he helped to develop, called “MVP,” for Mentors in Violence Prevention. It began as a project by one of his graduate students. Now, […]

The sports chattering class has now called for the dismissal of Commissioner Roger Goodell. That may happen if facts keep appearing out of the blogosphere that point to duplicity on the part of the leader of the National Football League. He has apologized for “getting it wrong” when he at first administered only a lenient […]

The NFL announced the hiring of former FBI chief Robert S. Mueller III to probe how the league handled evidence in the Ray Rice scandal, as pressure on NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell ramped up with the report that a top NFL official had seen the damning knock-out video. NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said in a […]

In South Carolina, a 32-year-old father faces murder charges after he led police to the bodies of his five children, ages 1 to 8, who were dumped on the side of an Alabama road. In Georgia, a 33-year-old father is charged with intentionally leaving his toddler son to die in a hot SUV, strapped in […]

ISIS has been in Syria since the start of the civil war. Yet, over the past year, it has seized large portions of the country where it has set up a de facto hub of its self-declared Caliphate. Much of this land was seized from the same moderate rebel groups that Obama wants to support. […]

When 26 teachers, students and administrators were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it made national news for weeks. But there was one place 2012’s largest mass killing was never mentioned: the FBI database that tracks all U.S. homicides. And that isn’t the only major case missing. The 12 people who were killed […]

“Because we are a patriarchal society, a lot of the root cause here is attributable to hypermasculinity,” said Dan Lebowitz, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University. “ ‘If I can dominate you, I’m a man.’ That’s a powerful dynamic. But where is the construct that teaches youngsters […]

For all of the scholars and academics that occupy our fine city, you think they’d take a break from things like medicine and 3D printing for just one second to focus on things that are truly important. Luckily, Benjamin Schmidt, a professor in Northeastern’s Department of History, has done exactly that. Schmidt, using a database […]

Northeastern historian Ben Schmidt specializes in finding patterns in large bodies of digital text. Usually his work pertains to serious topics, but on a lark—in a single evening, in fact—he pulled closed captioning text to create a database of every line of (nearly) every Simpsons episode from the show’s 25-year run. His search tool, which […]

Does the triumph of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq herald the undoing of colonial-era boundaries elsewhere in the Middle East and Third World? Are other graves turning than those marked “Here Lies Sir Mark Sykes and Ci-gît François Georges Picot” – those of their partners in partition? It should not be overlooked: Nearly […]