When people believe that a door is closing — that they have a limited amount of time left to enjoy something, such as dining out or traveling — they gravitate to the comfort of something familiar rather than the excitement of something new, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. In eight experiments...
Nearly half the country (44%), or about 114 million Americans, give poor (30%) or failing (14%) grades to the U.S. healthcare system, percentages that climb higher and grow even more negative when it comes to affordability and health equity, according to a new report from West Health and Gallup, the polling organization. The 2022 West Health-Gallup...
While achieving the United Nations (UN) ambitious Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for wastewater treatment would cause substantial improvements in global water quality, severe water quality issues would contain to persist in some world regions. So conclude researchers at Utrecht University. They developed a new water quality model to further elucidate the current and future pollution...
A new paper in the Journal of the European Economic Association, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that the extension of voting rights can reduce political violence. The researcher finds this by looking at the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Political scientists have long debated the effect of enfranchisement on violence and political outcomes. In...
Prosecutors exert considerable power in the criminal justice system, and while defendants are predominantly Black and Latinx, prosecutors are overwhelmingly White. Despite calls for addressing racial disparities in this field, we know little about whether recruiting minority prosecutors would yield more equitable outcomes for defendants. A new study analyzed data from a large prosecutorial office...
Authoritarian regimes worldwide have embraced the digital age. And they have been generally effective at limiting the online presence of perceived adversaries within their borders — from intellectual dissidents to transnational activists. However, as a new study published in the journal New Media & Society shows, censorship is not strictly a state-run affair. By studying social media...
Police in the U.S. deal with more diverse, distressed and aggrieved populations and are involved in more incidents involving firearms, but they average only five months of classroom training—the briefest among 18 countries examined in a Rutgers study. According to the data, the rate of fatal police shootings in the United States in 2019 (3.1 per...
While gun violence in the United States continues to claim lives at an alarming rate, it is also taking a quiet toll on the U.S. economy, according to new research by Zirui Song, associate professor of health care policy in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and associate professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. In...
Taken as a share of the market price, the climate change impacts of mining the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin is more comparable to the impacts of extracting and refining crude oil than mining gold, according to an analysis published in Scientific Reports by researchers at The University of New Mexico. The authors suggest that rather than being considered...
Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day is linked with a longer lifespan and lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared with avoiding coffee, according to research published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. The findings applied to ground, instant and decaffeinated varieties. “In this large, observational study, ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee were...
