News by Subject Social & Behavior

In a time of aging infrastructure and increasingly smart control of buildings, the ability to predict how buildings use energy -- and how much energy they use -- has remained elusive, until now. Researchers from Saudi Arabia, China and the United States collaborated to develop a smarter way to predict energy use through a method that involved artificial systems, computational experiments and parallel computing.

New research from McGill University and the University of California, Santa Cruz has found that the local streets of the world's cities are becoming less connected, a global trend that is driving urban sprawl and discouraging the use of public transportation.

Extreme heat kills more people in the United States than any other type of hazardous weather and will likely become even deadlier due to climate change. However, extreme heat does not affect all people equally. A new study by researchers at Portland State University, the Science Museum of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University is one of the first to link historical housing policies across the United States to inequitable heat exposure.

Electric scooters are increasingly part of the crowded urban landscape, but a UC San Francisco study has found a major surge of injuries related to scooters, particularly among young adults.

The popularity of bike-share systems has grown in popularity thanks to the younger, more environmentally conscious generation. While they have garnered considerable attention in cities from Paris to Washington, D.C., their promise of urban transformation is far from being fully realized.

A Yale analysis of 478 cities with populations of more than 1 million people finds that urban growth across the world is predominantly moving outward rather than upward, a trend that is generally considered inefficient and unsustainable.

Women who live less than 300 metres from green space may be at lower risk of excess weight or obesity. This is the main finding of a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by 'la Caixa', and published in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health.

A new study by Cornell researchers developed a first-of-its-kind model to control traffic and intersections in order to increase autonomous car capacity on urban streets of the future, reduce congestion and minimize accidents.