If President Joe Biden follows through on his promise to nominate a Black woman to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, longer-term change to the court is possible, based on voting patterns of Black female judges versus white male judges, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis. The study, “Replacing Justice Breyer,”...
Social media has supercharged the spread of information—and misinformation, which presents significant challenges when trying to distinguish between fact and fiction on social media platforms like Twitter. One of the most prolific, widely shared, and highly scrutinized Twitter accounts of the past several years belonged to former U.S. President Donald Trump. In the final year...
Journalist, photographer, author and professor Howard W. French’s Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, is the most recent in a long career of thoughtful and significant literary and journalistic interventions. It demands an account of modernity that reckons with Africa as central to...
A new study by a team of researchers from Israel and Ghana has brought the first evidence of nonrandom mutation in human genes, challenging a core assumption at the heart of evolutionary theory by showing a long-term directional mutational response to environmental pressure. Using a novel method, researchers led by Professor Adi Livnat from the...
Regular citizens have taken the fight against illegal logging into their own hands in the pine-covered mountains of western Mexico, where loggers clear entire hillsides for avocado plantations that drain local water supplies and draw drug cartels hungry for extortion money. In some places, like the Indigenous township of Cheran in Michoacan state , the fight...
When it comes to being divisive, it doesn’t get more literal than a wall. Walls exist as a means of separation, creating a sense of security by keeping something—or more typically someone—out. And whether it’s separating Americans and Mexicans, Israelis and Palestinians, East Germans and West Germans, or any other two groups, the political divisiveness...
In both mature and burgeoning markets, underwriters who boast a high reputation will prevail, as they get to choose their clients. The question becomes: Who might they choose? According to the new study “Who do you take to tango? Examining pairing mechanisms between underwriters and initial public offering firms in a nascent stock market”—authored by...
A new study found a steep decline in the development of forest and agricultural land from 2000 to 2015 compared to the previous two decades, which resulted in a broad shift towards denser development patterns throughout the U.S. A primary culprit was rising gas prices. Researchers from Oregon State University, Montana State University and the...
It’s difficult to plan ahead when SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is so unpredictable. But, there is now a straightforward method for predicting one of the resources needed to slow the spread of COVID-19 in communities. Researchers at Boston University (BU) developed a real-time method for projecting COVID-19 quarantine needs in congregate housing settings...
Landslides and flooding caused by heavy rains killed at least 19 people in Brazil’s most populous state Sunday while high waters forced some 500,000 families from their homes over the weekend, authorities said. Three people from the same family died when a landslide destroyed their house in the city of Embu das Artes, according to...
