When New York is enveloped in pollution, the stock market loses value and sends a negative signal to global markets, a new paper finds.

From The Conversation, written by Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As the November 2012 national election demonstrated, the Hispanic electorate has increasing political clout, and projections show that this power will only increase in the coming decades.

When assessing academic studies, media members are often confronted by pages not only full of numbers, but also loaded with concepts such as “selection bias,” “p-value” and “statistical inference.”

There are almost 1.3 million lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) high school students in the United States, according to the first nationwide survey measuring their numbers and attitudes toward risk. These students – about 8 percent of the total – are nearly five times more likely than their straight peers to have attempted suicide and more than four times more likely to have experimented with hard drugs like heroin and meth.

Living in a crime-prone neighborhood can be stressful. Researchers in Scotland have found a link with premature births and low birthweights.