ScienceDaily: Science & Society News

Researchers compared maternal mortality data from 2018-March 2020, when the pandemic began, to April-December 2020. Overall, they found large increases in maternal death (33%) and late maternal deaths (41%) after March 2020 compared with before the pandemic, and conspicuous increases among Black and Hispanic mothers.

Most teachers focus on academic considerations when assigning seats. A new study is the first to show that these classroom seat assignments also have important implications for children's friendships and the enormous influence that teachers wield over the interpersonal lives of children. Friendships reflect classroom seat assignments. Students sitting next to or nearby one another were more likely to be friends with one another than students seated elsewhere in the classroom. Moreover, longitudinal analyses showed that classroom seating proximity was associated with the formation of new friendships. After seat assignments changed, students were more likely to become friends with newly near-seated classmates than with those who remained or became seated farther away.

Scientists review recent experiments and find noise regulations may need to be changed to protect porpoises, seals, and other sea-dwelling mammals. Current guidance for seals and porpoises is based on few measurements in a limited frequency range; the guidance is still valid for these frequencies, but investigators found substantial deviations in recent studies of the impact of low frequency noise on seals and high frequency noise on porpoises.

Intense heat in the southwestern United States broke records last summer partly because it hit in tandem with an unusually severe drought, finds a new study measuring for the first time how the two extreme weather events dangerously interacted in real time.

Children conceived through medically assisted reproduction (MAR) fare better at school but are more likely to have mental health problems by their late teens, according to a new study.

A new study found visits to the emergency department and hospitalizations are 22 per cent higher among individuals who use cannabis compared with those who do not. The findings also show serious physical injury and respiratory-reasons were the two leading causes of ED visits and hospitalizations among cannabis users.

Higher COVID-19 mortality rates among Black communities in Louisiana can be linked to pervasive health vulnerabilities associated with racism, including the location of many Black neighborhoods near industrial facilities and the higher likelihood among Black families of being uninsured, researchers found. The team identified the spatial distribution of social and environmental stressors across Louisiana parishes, and tracked the correlations among stressors, cumulative health risks, COVID-19 mortality rates, and the size of Black populations across the parishes.

A new study sheds light on how trade, and centrality in the global wheat trade network, affect food security. The study shows that many countries depend on trade to fulfill their food needs. Further, the global wheat trade is concentrated in a handful of countries whereby disruption in only a few countries would have global impacts, researchers suggest.

Researchers have found that people may have a tendency to form friendships with individuals who have a similar body odor. The researchers were even able to predict the quality of social interactions between complete strangers by first 'smelling' them with a device known as an electronic nose, or eNose. These findings suggest that the sense of smell may play a larger role in human social interactions than previously thought.

Researchers found that targets of cyberbullying were more likely to report suicidal thoughts and attempts, above and beyond offline bullying.

A new research result questions whether the benefits of breast cancer screenings has gradually declined to a degree that it is too small in relation to the costs in the form of overdiagnosis and overtreatment.

People are less morally outraged when gender discrimination occurs because of an algorithm rather than direct human involvement, according to new research.

The increased use of contraception in many countries is not because more women at any moment want to delay pregnancy or have no further children. Instead, it is because contraception is helping more women achieve their childbearing goals, according to a new study.

An important East Coast shellfish industry is projected to suffer revenue losses as offshore wind energy develops along the U.S. Northeast and Mid-Atlantic coasts, according to two recent studies.