Many people questioned whether the tax break granted to Millennium at the end of the term of former Mayor Thomas M. Menino was misplaced, said Thomas J. Vicino, an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University. “There is a market failure here — there is not enough housing being produced for the city in […]

Crabs have a sort of inner ear that helps them to hear nearby predators, US scientists have found. An organ called the statocyst, previously shown to play a role in crustacean balance, is also used for the crab equivalent of hearing, they reported Tuesday in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Biologists […]

If you were at TechJam last week, or frequent the Kendall Square Farmers’ Market, or plan to attend this weekend’s Star Trek Convention (don’t admit that last one), you’ll probably notice a large white van. It’s not a kidnapper. It’s actually a creative marketing strategy designed to drum up interest in Northeastern University’s new master […]

One last point: in my recent Next Avenue blog post about the Giving With Purpose MOOC I enrolled in — offered by Northeastern University and the Giving With Purpose Foundation — I mentioned that it would give $150,000 in grants to nonprofits that passed muster with the students. The 30 winning nonprofits have just been […]

Bill Henderson, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law–Bloomington, presented some preliminary findings from a study of Northeastern University School of Law’s decades-old co-op program. Under that model, each law student spends a full year working in four real-world legal settings to supplement two years of classroom education. Interviews and surveys of Northeastern […]

The facts of General Motors’ recent troubles are well known: a storm of lawsuits and investigations resulting from mechanical failures that are linked to 13 driver deaths and over 13 million car and truck recalls worldwide so far this year. Now the big question is whether these setbacks will be fatal for the iconic American […]

The 1.7 million students who graduated from American colleges and universities last month, their newly minted bachelor’s degrees in hand, face bleak prospects. Their average student-loan debt is some $33,000. The underemployment rate for recent graduates is 44 percent, meaning the jobs many get won’t require the bachelor’s degrees they just earned. And since many […]

There are few places in the world quite like Indonesia, where exploding urban and rural populations meet some of Earth’s most diverse coral reefs and rainforest. A stunning archipelago of over 13,000 islands, it ranks second in the world for biodiversity and holds the ninth largest city on the planet. It’s also the place I […]

If patience is a virtue, Bostonians aren’t the most virtuous lot. A population of sidewalk speeders, jaywalkers, and people who use the horn more than the turn signal, we could all use a little more patience in our lives. David DeSteno, a Northeastern University professor, is making that possible. DeSteno, a researcher in the psychology […]

Last month, on the same day President Obama gave a speech that defended his decision not to militarily intervene in Syria, Max Abrahms, a professor at Northeastern University who specializes in terrorism, tweeted a blunt query: “When was the last US intervention in the Muslim world that was a resounding success?”

“It’s not a choice!” is a fundamental refrain of the gay-rights movement often echoed by both gay rights activists themselves and their allies. It adds a stark, clear line to the debate: You, the anti-gay-rights person, are punishing people for something they have no control over, just like their gender or the color of their […]

Colleges need to get more comfortable with integrating students into the working world, Mr. Gardner says. Otherwise, when they make the transition to the job market, “they just won’t have the experience, and they will wander in the wasteland for a couple of years until they put stuff together. That is cruel.” Of course, some […]