A powerful storm barreled toward Southern California after flooding highways, toppling trees and causing mud flows in areas burned bare by recent fires across the northern part of the state. Drenching showers and strong winds accompanied the weekend’s arrival of an atmospheric river — a long and wide plume of moisture pulled in from the...
The high-profile disappearances of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa in England and Gabby Petito in the US have brought renewed attention to media bias in coverage of missing person cases. In 2019-2020, over 150,000 people were reported missing to police in England and Wales. Of those whose ethnicity was known, about 80% were white, and 14% were black. The rate of black...
An oil spill first reported on Oct. 2, 2021, has released thousands of gallons of crude oil into southern California coastal waters. The source is believed to be a leak in an underwater pipeline connected to an oil drilling platform 17.5 miles offshore. Oil has washed ashore in Huntington Beach and Newport Beach and into...
The big idea The number of people killed by police officers in the U.S. has been massively underreported in official statistics over the past four decades, with an additional 17,000 deaths over that period, according to our new research. Our study, which was published on Oct. 2, 2021, in The Lancet, compared statistics from the...
When you’re stressed, do you ever feel like you just don’t want to be around other people? According to a Dartmouth study, greater levels of stress on a given day were found to be predictive of decreases in social interaction the following day. The results are published in the journal Emotion. “For our study, we wanted...
The US$1.2 trillion infrastructure bill now moving through Congress will bring money to cities for much-needed investments in roads, bridges, public transit networks, water infrastructure, electric power grids, broadband networks and traffic safety. We believe that more of this money should also fund the dismantling of racist infrastructure. Many urban highways built in the 1950s...
Hood River, long an agricultural center for Oregon, faces an uncertain future of climate impacts, but a new Portland State University study lays out strategies that the watershed can adapt to become more resilient to the inevitable changes. Glaciers are receding and snowpack levels are peaking earlier and declining faster, meaning farmers will lose water...
Oil companies began gradually restarting some of their refineries in Louisiana, and key fuel pipelines fully reopened Tuesday, providing hopeful signs that the region’s crucial energy industry can soon recover from Hurricane Ida’s onslaught. Exxon Mobil said crews were starting to resume normal operations at its Hoover platform in the Gulf of Mexico that managed...
Hundreds of thousands of Louisianans sweltered in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida on Tuesday with no electricity, no tap water, precious little gasoline and no clear idea of when things might improve. Long lines that wrapped around the block formed at the few gas stations that had fuel and generator power to pump it. People...
Cities are hubs of human activity, supercharging the exchange of ideas and interactions. Scaling theory has established that, as cities grow larger, they tend to produce more of pretty much everything from pollution and crime to patents and wealth. On average, people in larger cities are better off economically. But a new study published in the Journal of...
