Could Ultra-processed Foods Be the New ‘Silent’ Killer?

Hundreds of novel ingredients never encountered by human physiology are now found in nearly 60 percent of the average adult’s diet and nearly 70 percent of children’s diets in the U.S. An emerging health hazard is the unprecedented consumption of these ultra-processed foods in the standard American diet. This may be the new “silent” killer, as was unrecognized high blood pressure in previous decades.

California Group Exploring Viability of a Community-Centered Direct Air Capture Hub

Researchers from Berkeley Lab are co-leading a project to explore the creation of a direct air capture facility that uses cutting-edge technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in California’s Southern San Joaquin Valley.

Investors Force Black Families Out of Home Ownership, New Research Shows

Data from 800 neighborhoods in the Atlanta metropolitan area between 2007 and 2016 revealed that major investors bought homes in majority-minority neighborhoods far from downtowns and in lower-income areas. These homes were often undervalued because of their minority populations, but they remained desirable and offered good market value.

Susan G. Komen® Commends Introduction of Legislation to Remove Financial Barriers to Diagnostic Imaging

Susan G. Komen commends commends the introduction of the Access to Breast Cancer Diagnosis (ABCD) Act of 2023 in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. The legislation would remove a significant financial barrier to people receiving medically necessary diagnostic and supplemental breast imaging.

Statement on Passage of Diagnostic and Supplemental Imaging Legislation in Maryland

Susan G. Komen commended the Maryland General Assembly for passing diagnostic and supplemental imaging and Governor Wes Moore for signing it into law. The bill removes a financial barrier to a critical form of screening for some high-risk individuals and an important step in determining the need for a biopsy to rule out or confirm breast cancer.

PGS Global Ed Series #4: Citizens Preferences in Divided Societies

Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University is pleased to invite all to join the PGS Global Ed Series #4: Citizens Preferences in Divided Societies. The talk will be held on Tuesday, 4 April 2023 at 4:30 PM Bangkok time (GMT+7) at PGS Main Classroom (M08) on M Floor, Building 3, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.

Among the upcoming cases to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court will be Arizona v. Navajo Nation, No. 21-1484. University of Georgia School of Law Assistant Professor Adam D. Orford is available for further commentary

Among the upcoming cases to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court will be Arizona v. Navajo Nation, No. 21-1484.  The case focuses on two issues: Whether the opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, allowing the…

Prenatal care for foreign-born Latinx people dropped during 2016 presidential campaign

Rates of prenatal care among foreign-born Latinx pregnant people decreased below expected levels during the 2016 presidential campaign – likely reflecting the effects of harmful anti-immigrant rhetoric, reports a study in the November issue of Medical Care. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

City-based soda pop taxes don’t effectively reduce sugar consumption

As taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages continue to pop up across the U.S. and abroad, public health experts laud their effect on lowering purchases of the calorie-heavy drinks and encouraging healthier habits. But new research from the University of Georgia suggests many soda taxes might actually not be making much of an impact at all when it comes to improving diets and reducing sugar intake.

Highly partisan U.S. election administration should become nonpartisan to preserve democracy, new report recommends

Election Administration In America – Partisan by Design, a recently released report from the Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy at Arizona State University and Open Primaries, a national election reform organization, indicates electoral codes in the United States are rife with rules for how the two major parties – Republican and Democratic – prioritize their power at the exclusion of everyone else.

Mass shootings: Conservative, liberal #socialmedia users starting to agree — enough is enough, says @UNLV researcher

Schoolchildren huddled in Uvalde, Tex. classrooms as classmates and teachers are cut down by a rogue gunman. A peaceful weekend afternoon at a Buffalo, N.Y. grocery store interrupted by a white supremacist who sprays the aisles of elderly, predominantly African American weekend shoppers with an AR-15 style rifle. Only five months into the year, these attacks tallied as the 198th and 214th U.

FAU’s LeaAnne DeRigne, Ph.D., Cited in U.S. ‘2022 Economic Report of President Biden’

DeRigne’s research on the importance of paid sick leave benefits cited in President Biden’s report, was published in 2016 in the journal Health Affairs. The study was the first to examine the relationship between paid sick leave benefits and delays in medical care and forgone medical care for both working adults and their family members.

Policy and Supreme Court experts available to speak on leaked opinion that appears to overturn Roe v. Wade

ALBANY, N.Y. (May 3, 2022) — Last night the news organization Politico reported on a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision in the Mississippi case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. While the final opinion, expected this summer, could…

Poor and Minority Communities Suffer More from Extreme Heat in U.S. Cities

Low-income neighborhoods and communities with higher Black, Hispanic and Asian populations experience significantly more urban heat than wealthier and predominantly white neighborhoods within a vast majority of populous U.S. counties, according new research from the University of California San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.

Only 20 states implemented health equity committees to assist with COVID-19 vaccine distribution planning

A new study out of UChicago found that while 43 states (out of 51, including all 50 states and Washington, D.C.) created a committee to develop a vaccine distribution plan, only 20 plans mentioned using a health equity committee to assist with plan development.

Food Insufficiency Rates in California Increased by More Than a Fifth in Earliest Months of Pandemic

A UCLA team has found that in the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than three million Californians reported their households went without sufficient food. That was an increase of 22% from the pre-pandemic rate, and the impact was felt widely across the state, especially among those already facing hunger.

UA Little Rock Receives Nearly $325,000 NSF Grant to Shine Light on Muslim Hate Crimes in Arkansas

Two criminal justice professors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock have been awarded a $324,987 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund a three-year program to study anti-Muslim sentiment and Muslim hate crimes in Arkansas. Dr. Tusty ten Bensel, director of the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology, and Dr.

UCI, Tsinghua U.: California’s 2018 wildfires caused $150 billion in damages

Irvine, Calif., Dec. 7, 2020 — In 2018, California wildfires caused economic losses of nearly $150 billion, or about 0.7 percent of the gross domestic product of the entire United States that year, and a considerable fraction of those costs affected people far from the fires and even outside of the Golden State. For a study published today in Nature Sustainability, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, China’s Tsinghua University and other institutions combined physical, epidemiological and economic models to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of the blazes.

Philadelphia Tax on Sweetened Drinks Led to Drop in Sales

Philadelphia’s tax on sweetened beverages led to a 38.9 percent drop in the volume of taxed beverages sold at small, independent retailers and a significant increase in the price of taxed beverages, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. This study builds on previous research that suggests beverage taxes can help reduce purchases of sugary drinks, led by Christina Roberto, PhD, an associate professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Penn, and senior author on this latest paper published in Health Affairs.

Studies examine how race affects perceptions of law-involved Blacks, school discipline

The extent of discriminatory treatment Black adults and children experience at every point of contact within the legal system and the biases that result in Black children’s behavior being managed more harshly in school are detailed in two new analyses from researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

UCI to lead $10 million NSF-funded center on protecting personal data privacy

Irvine, Calif., June 12, 2020 — The National Science Foundation has awarded $10 million to support a new research center devoted to personal data privacy in an increasingly networked and instrumented world. The center will be hosted and led by the University of California, Irvine and is in collaboration with Northeastern University, the University of Iowa, the University of Southern California and Spain’s IMDEA Networks Institute.