Still, safe­guards for lithium-​​​​ion bat­teries have pro­gressed to the point that a fire on an air­plane should never have hap­pened, said San­jeev Muk­erjee, a chem­istry pro­fessor at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity and … read more »

One of the prob­lems with office work is that many of us are using chairs that don’t fit our bodies very well or give ade­quate sup­port to the back, said … read more »

Cities breed their own patholo­gies, and homi­cide is a pre­dom­i­nantly urban form of law­less­ness. But mass murder, in fact, is not. When James Alan Fox, a crim­i­nol­o­gist at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity … read more »

Pro­fessor Lisa Gitelman is writing a book about doc­u­men­ta­tion, including Post-​​​​it notes and copying, and how it has affected history.

Michael Dukakis spent his 79th birthday on Sat­urday chasing a grown man down the street. The reason? To cap­ture one more vote for Eliz­a­beth Warren, the Demo­c­ratic can­di­date for the Senate.

SEATTLE — With name tags clipped on and Pow­er­Point at the ready, offi­cials from North­eastern Uni­ver­sity invited prospec­tive stu­dents in one night last week for a peek at a new … read more »

With only a few weeks remaining until the elec­tion, it’s still not clear how Mitt Romney would manage our jobs crisis. There aren’t many lessons from his term as the … read more »

While rat­ings for almost every­thing on tele­vi­sion have sunk, big spec­ta­cles that hold some promise of spon­taneity — N.F.L. games, the Olympics and var­ious singing com­pe­ti­tions — con­tinue to thrive.

The new format for the pres­i­den­tial debate prompted plenty of par­tisan debate online — as did the per­for­mance of the mod­er­ator, Jim Lehrer. Mr. Lehrer’s light touch was widely crit­i­cized during … read more »

Tele­vised debates between can­di­dates for the White House are not per­fect vehi­cles. But com­pared with other forms of polit­ical com­mu­ni­ca­tion — speeches, inter­views, adver­tise­ments, cam­paign Web sites and the like … read more »

How do we decide whether to trust some­body? An unusual new study of col­lege stu­dents’ inter­ac­tions with a robot has shed light on why we intu­itively trust some people and … read more »

Com­plaining about the mod­er­a­tors of the pres­i­den­tial debates is a time-​​​​honored tra­di­tion of the elec­tion season. Usu­ally, the com­plaints wait until the mod­er­a­tors have actu­ally asked a ques­tion. Not this … read more »