News by Subject Policy & Ethics

Parent-child separation has long-term effects on child well-being, even if there is subsequent reunification. After being separated, reunited children can experience lasting difficulty with emotional attachment to their parents, self-esteem, and physical and psychological health, according to a new brief released by the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). The brief, written by scholars of SRCD's Latino Caucus, emphasizes that for some children, time does not appear to fully heal these psychological wounds.

Our ability to exercise self-control is linked to our neurobiology.

Black Americans are nearly three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts, with even larger disparities among those who are unarmed. The trend is also harming the mental health of the black community, according to new research published in The Lancet.

Police killings of unarmed black Americans have adverse effects on the mental health of black American adults in the general population, according to a new population-based study. With police killings of unarmed black Americans widely perceived to be a symptom of structural racism, the findings highlight the role of structural racism as a driver of population health disparities, and support recent calls to treat police killings as a public health issue.

In 2014, California voters approved Proposition 47, which reclassified drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, and in the process reduced the state's prison and jail populations. Now, a study out of UC San Francisco has quantified the effects of the ballot measure, which was at the leading edge of a national movement to reduce incarceration rates and change the criminal justice approach to substance use disorders.

Cannabis use may be decreasing among teens, but a new study showed that American adults have increasingly used cannabis daily since 2007. The study found that nondaily cannabis use decreased among those aged 12 to 25 and 35 to 49 before 2007, and increased among all adults after 2007, particularly among adults 26 to 34.

In an article published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania researchers call for modernizing the way Medicare pays for training nurses, and highlight a successful new model of cost-effectively training more advanced practice nurses to practice community-based primary care.

Current experimental approaches in Medicaid programs -- including requirements to pay premiums, contribute to health savings accounts, or to work -- may lead to unintended consequences for patient coverage and access, such as confusing beneficiaries or dissuading some people from enrolling, according to a new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

From the spatter analysis made famous in the TV show Dexter to the frequent DNA profiling of CSI and the real cases covered in the FBI Files, blood tests are ubiquitous in forensic science. Now, researchers report in ACS Central Science that a new blood test, which could be performed at a crime scene, could help determine the age of a suspect or victim within just an hour.

A new UBC study used DNA barcoding to determine that 70 of 281 seafood samples collected in Metro Vancouver between September 2017 and February 2018 were mislabelled.