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For decades, researchers have studied the influence of social movements on broader society. Yet nearly nine years after the start of Black Lives Matter, few studies have sought to quantify the movement’s impact on police use of lethal force. Researchers point to a central challenge: incomplete data.

If the Supreme Court overturns the landmark decision, women in states where abortion becomes illegal could find themselves subject to increased digital surveillance. For someone suspected of seeking an abortion, social media posts, location data, and online searches could be gathered as evidence.

In recent decades, India’s tigers have rebounded, reclaiming some of their historic range. At the same time, human development has encroached upon the animals’ habitat, leading to a spike in human-tiger conflict. Now, wildlife officials are working to identify and remove problematic tigers.

In “How to Sell a Poison,” medical historian Elena Conis chronicles the history of the infamous pesticide and its lasting impact on public health and the environmental movement, showing how concerns were raised long before Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” became a catalyst for activists in the 1960s.

The band of orbital space just above our atmosphere can be thought of as a critical part of our natural environment, a resource vital to creatures both above and below the skies. In recent years, artificial satellites have emerged as an invasive species that threatens to tip the system out of balance.

In a push to dramatically reduce its carbon footprint, the steel industry is testing new manufacturing technologies that don’t rely on fossil fuels. Still, experts say transforming a global industry that turned over $2.5 trillion in 2017 and employs more than 6 million people will take enormous effort.

Computerized cabinets are used to dispense medications in nearly all hospitals in the United States. But because health care workers can often search for a particular drug using three or fewer letters, safety advocates say the technology is primed for error — and can lead to potentially fatal mix-ups.

In India, live-in domestic workers — who often come from marginalized communities — toil in conditions that some advocates liken to modern-day slavery. Public health measures intended to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, workers and advocates say, have sometimes made the situation even worse.

Keith O’Brien’s “Paradise Falls” is the deeply reported tale of how a group of neighborhood mothers galvanized their community in the 1970s and turned Love Canal’s toxic-chemical disaster into a landmark in the history of grassroots activism, leading to the passage of the 1980 Superfund Act.

In a series of interviews conducted last year, science journalists described being targeted with online hate. It is time for news organizations to respond forcefully to this problem.

As farmers face changing weather patterns, environmental degradation, labor shortages, and the rising cost of key supplies, no segment of agriculture is without passionate advocates of robotics and artificial intelligence as solutions. But the promises of precision agriculture still haven’t been met.

While 89 percent of nursing home workers are now vaccinated against Covid-19, tens of thousands have obtained medical exemptions from a federal mandate that went into effect earlier this year. Public health experts say few legitimate reasons exist to avoid the vaccine, raising questions about the trend.

Many sanitation workers in India must wear GPS trackers, and some say taking off the device incurs a fine of half a day’s salary, around $4. Workers also have to take the devices home, and worry about privacy leaks and the inability to turn off the trackers and cameras — even when they are in the bathroom.

In “Song of Our Scars,” physician Haider Warraich surveys the scientific, historical, and cultural dimensions of pain, and the dire results of our misconceptions. He argues that rather than merely a rote physical process, pain is intertwined with emotion, experience, and context.

This month: Residents of Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley say pollution in the Litani River is responsible for a host of chronic health problems. While a causal link is hard to prove, cleanup efforts are precarious amid the country’s economic crisis and shifting blame between refugees and government inaction.

An incrementalist approach to science may pay off in the short run, but big advances require daring acts of inquisitiveness. To give young researchers the confidence and support they need to make new discoveries, universities and grant institutions must do a better job of rewarding failure.

A tribal belt in India has low Covid-19 vaccination rates: 82 percent of the population hasn’t had a single shot. This is in stark contrast to India as a whole, where more than 70 percent have received at least one dose. The hesitancy may have far-reaching implications for India’s pandemic recovery.

Early adolescence is a time of huge cognitive change and a critical time to build students’ understanding of science, yet almost a quarter of middle school science teachers in the U.S. have no scientific background. Geographically, this shortage coincides with attitudes toward Covid prevention.

Every year, a complex and chaotic struggle for power plays out among 4,000-pound male elephant seals, with the top-ranked victors standing guard before clusters of female seals. This “living soap opera” of breeding season on the California coast offers an evolutionary window into group power hierarchies.

The latest and final installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report paints a grim picture of our climate trajectory. But it also gives us reason for hope. The report confirms that the solutions to climate change exist — we just have to adopt them.

In the Charahi Qambar camp for internally displaced people, at the tail end of winter, nighttime temperatures hover around freezing. Even as rooms and walls collapse due to melting snow, families huddle around the metal stoves that feature in nearly every home. But keeping warm is not simple.

Although its worst impacts have been unevenly distributed, the Covid-19 pandemic has indelibly touched every corner of American life. In words, images, and data, we look back at the undulating waves of illness, the sometimes disordered official response, and the slow adaptation to a new way of life.

Cesarean sections can be necessary and even lifesaving, but public health experts have long contended that too many performed in the U.S. aren’t. Despite scrutiny, the overall C-section rate in 2020, 31.8 percent, is nearly as high as it was a decade ago. In many states, the rates are far higher.

Within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, tech companies took steps to reduce the circulation of anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Will these efforts be effective? Researchers say that without better access to social media data, which may require new laws that force companies to broaden access, it’s hard to know.

In “Healing,” former director of the National Institute of Mental Health Thomas Insel argues for a more nuanced approach to fighting serious mental illness. After interviewing patients, their families, and clinicians, Insel finds that we already have the tools for recovery — we only lack the will to use them.

The President’s new research enterprise, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, is eerily reminiscent of the war on cancer that Richard Nixon declared in his 1971 State of the Union address. And like Nixon’s war, two historians argue, Biden’s mission to conquer cancer seems destined to fail.

Industry officials maintain that existing environmental standards for phosphogypsum are already strict enough. But environmental advocates disagree: More than a dozen groups filed a petition with the EPA in February 2021, asking the agency to strengthen phosphogypsum disposal regulations.

Norwegian authorities have seized and killed smuggled animals, raising questions about how the country handles endangered wildlife at its borders. The situation, experts say, extends far beyond Norway: Around the world, animals are being euthanized in a paradoxical effort to promote their conservation.

The latest IPCC mitigation report, released last week, outlines economic and political choices society can make to affect the trajectory of climate change. The report found that “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors,” limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is impossible.

Whitney Phillips’ research has taken her to some of the internet’s darkest corners. As a media studies scholar, Phillips argues that it’s futile to treat virtual spaces in isolation, because the cultural factors that led to their creation are all around us — and in some cases are almost mundanely mainstream.

For more than 200 years, London’s Hunterian Museum has shown off the monumental skeleton of Charles Byrne, whose corpse was taken against his wishes. It is just one of many museums displaying ill-gotten human remains, a practice tied to historical misdeeds that often exploited the poor and marginalized.

Pediatric transgender medicine was pioneered at a Dutch clinic where practitioners developed a protocol and published groundbreaking research. But as the number of teens seeking treatment has skyrocketed globally, the clinic’s approach has come under fire as too conservative — and also as too experimental.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has forced the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental group of Arctic states and Indigenous peoples, to suspend their joint activities in protest of Russia’s unprovoked aggression. Scientists worry that important climate data will be left unrecorded just when we need it the most.

Sixty years after President Kennedy described space as a new frontier, scholars are calling for greater awareness of the connections between the search for life on other planets and the legacy of colonialism on Earth. Indigenous perspectives, they point out, upend many Western assumptions.

In “Troubling the Water,” Abby Seiff reveals how dams, overfishing, and climate change are threatening a vast Cambodian lake and the culture that depends on it. Likened to a heartbeat, Tonle Sap Lake floods and drains seasonally, bringing nutrients and fish to the people. But the heartbeat is weakening.

What will it take to jolt the world into action against climate change? By dragging us to places that nonfiction can’t, the emerging genre of climate fiction is showing us what it will look and feel like to live — and suffer — on a scorching, atmospherically violent planet.

This month: Alkaline hydrolysis is an end-of-life option that’s gaining popularity in Canada and the U.S. It’s marketed as a greener form of cremation — a way to still end up with ashes, but without sending harmful emissions into the air. But getting the technology approved by lawmakers has proven difficult.

Not only on land, permafrost is also thawing under the sea, emitting greenhouse gases and leaving behind massive seafloor sinkholes. As the Artic warms four times as fast as the rest of the planet, scientists are only beginning to understand how quickly this underwater source of carbon may be released.

Ground penetrating radar is being used by Indigenous groups in Canada and the U.S. to identify possible unmarked graves of children at former residential schools. But the technology has its limits, and researchers must also gather records, oral histories, and possibly disinter bodies — a painful final step.

If it wasn’t the world’s largest bee and therefore a sort of holy grail for a team of researchers, the Wallace’s giant bee may have just been another nameless fatality, squeezed from its shrinking habitat. Instead, in 2019 it was reported alive for the first time in decades, spurring hopes for conservation.

Many science Ph.D. recipients don’t obtain tenure-track academic research positions, and may wind up working outside of science altogether. Until graduate schools acknowledge and properly confront the reality of the academic job market, they’ll be doing an egregious disservice to their students.

Since 2005, the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s wildlife division has run one of the longest, most detailed assessments of fishers, small weasel-like mammals that are both culturally significant and rare. The program illustrates the possibilities and pitfalls for Indigenous-led wildlife programs.

In the two years since the pandemic took hold, Covid outbreaks have plagued detainees in recurring waves, sweeping through almost every ICE facility in California. Since last April, connecting physicians with detainees to ensure they get accurate vaccine information has been the mission of one program.

The 2008 book “Nudge” outlined the concept of a nudge: a subtle prompt that can alter human behavior. In the following years, governments embraced nudging as a way to shape people’s behavior while maintaining individual freedoms. But amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, the limits of nudging are being tested.

In John Abramson’s “Sickening,” a Harvard professor and family physician chronicles the deceptive marketing practices of profit-driven drug companies. Abramson uncovers how the systems set up by so-called Big Pharma can cause undue suffering — starting with several recent pharmaceutical scandals.

As mask mandates expire and social distancing measures are curbed across the U.S., the threat of Covid-19 still looms large for millions of people with compromised immune systems. Protecting them is not only a matter of health equity, it is critical to forestalling the rise of new coronavirus variants.

Experts say IBCs are a crucial tool for ensuring the safety of biomedical research. But evidence suggests that IBC oversight still varies from institution to institution, creating a biosafety system that’s uneven, fiercely resistant to public scrutiny, and subject to minimal enforcement from the NIH.

Peer support for first responders has resonated broadly in the medical community, but because so much of it is predicated on anonymity and confidentiality, the approach lags in one key respect: There is a lack of empirical evidence that it works. Still, organizations across the country are providing services.

As Western governments untangle themselves from Russian oil and gas, Ukrainian climate scientist Svitlana Krakovska notes that the roots of the climate crisis and the invasion are in fossil fuels. As Russian oil is banned in the U.S., some see this as a moment to decisively break from fossil fuels altogether.

Recovering from her divorce, Florence Williams explores the many effects heartache and trauma can have on the body and brain in “Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey.” Seeking an understanding of what is happening in her own body, Williams essentially uses herself as an experiment in how to heal.