A landmark environmental law looks ahead.

In late December 1973, the United States enacted what some would come to call "the pitbull of environmental laws." In the 50 years since, the formidable regulatory teeth of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) have been credited with considerable successes, obliging agencies to draw upon the best available science to protect species and habitats. Yet human pressures continue to push the planet toward extinctions on a massive scale.

Education and electronic medical records and genomics network, challenges, and lessons learned from a large-scale clinical trial using polygenic risk scores.

Polygenic risk scores (PRS) have potential to improve health care by identifying individuals that have elevated risk for common complex conditions. Use of PRS in clinical practice, however, requires careful assessment of the needs and capabilities of patients, providers, and health care systems. The electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) network is conducting a collaborative study which will return PRS to 25,000 pediatric and adult participants.

Acknowledging Anti-Blackness, Overlooking Anti-Asian Racism: Missed Developmental Opportunities for Chinese American Youth.

This paper explores the pathways and barriers to critical consciousness development for Chinese American youth. Thirty-five interviews conducted in 2020 with high-school-aged students in Chicago were analyzed to better understand young people's experiences developing an understanding of anti-Asian racism and anti-Blackness. Results indicated that participants overwhelmingly engaged in sustained conversations about Black Lives Matter and/or made efforts to address anti-Blackness within their families, but engaged in limited conversations about anti-Asian racism.

Sociotechnical safeguards for genomic data privacy.

Recent developments in a variety of sectors, including health care, research and the direct-to-consumer industry, have led to a dramatic increase in the amount of genomic data that are collected, used and shared. This state of affairs raises new and challenging concerns for personal privacy, both legally and technically. This Review appraises existing and emerging threats to genomic data privacy and discusses how well current legal frameworks and technical safeguards mitigate these concerns.

Towards an effective transnational regulation of AI.

Law and the legal system through which law is effected are very powerful, yet the power of the law has always been limited by the laws of nature, upon which the law has now direct grip. Human law now faces an unprecedented challenge, the emergence of a second limit on its grip, a new "species" of intelligent agents (AI machines) that can perform cognitive tasks that until recently only humans could. What happens, as a matter of law, when another species interacts with us, can be integrated into human minds and bodies, makes "real-world" decisions-not through human proxies, but directly-and does all this "intelligently", with what one could call autonomous agency or even a "mind" of its own? The article starts from the clear premise that control cannot be exercised directly on AI machines through human law.

Protecting research data of publicly revealing participants.

Biomedical researchers collect large amounts of personal data about individuals, which are frequently shared with repositories and an array of users. Typically, research data holders implement measures to protect participants' identities and unique attributes from unauthorized disclosure. These measures, however, can be less effective if people disclose their participation in a research study, which they may do for many reasons.

Legal Admissibility of the Competence Assessment for Standing Trial for Defendants with Mental Retardation (CAST-MR).

The Competence Assessment for Standing Trial for Defendants with Mental Retardation (CAST-MR) was developed to assess competence to stand trial in defendants with Intellectual Disability. Although it remains the only validated instrument for this population, previous research has suggested it is rarely used by forensic examiners, a finding our survey of legal cases confirms. Initial validation studies provided some support for the instrument's reliability and validity.

The rise of affectivism.

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

Development of Brief Child Nutrition and Physical Activity Screening Questions for Electronic Health Record Use.

To develop and test brief nutrition and physical activity screening questions for children ages 2-11 years that could be used as a pragmatic screening tool to tailor counseling, track behavior change, and improve population health. A literature review identified existing validated questions for nutrition and physical activity behaviors in children ages 2-11 years. Response variation and concurrent validity was then assessed using a mechanical Turk (MTurk) crowdsourcing survey employed in 2018.

Catastrophic Risk: Waking Up to the Reality of a Pandemic?

Will a major shock awaken the US citizens to the threat of catastrophic pandemic risk? Using a natural experiment administered both before and after the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak, our evidence suggests "no." Our results show that prior to the Ebola scare, the US citizens were relatively complacent and placed a low relative priority on public spending to prepare for a pandemic disease outbreak relative to an environmental disaster risk (e.g.

The impact of cannabis access laws on opioid prescribing.

While recent research has shown that cannabis access laws can reduce the use of prescription opioids, the effect of these laws on opioid use is not well understood for all dimensions of use and for the general United States population. Analyzing a dataset of over 1.5 billion individual opioid prescriptions between 2011 and 2018, which were aggregated to the individual provider-year level, we find that recreational and medical cannabis access laws reduce the number of morphine milligram equivalents prescribed each year by 11.

Untapped capacity for resilience in environmental law.

Over the past several decades, environmental governance has made substantial progress in addressing environmental change, but emerging environmental problems require new innovations in law, policy, and governance. While expansive legal reform is unlikely to occur soon, there is untapped potential in existing laws to address environmental change, both by leveraging adaptive and transformative capacities within the law itself to enhance social-ecological resilience and by using those laws to allow social-ecological systems to adapt and transform. Legal and policy research to date has largely overlooked this potential, even though it offers a more expedient approach to addressing environmental change than waiting for full-scale environmental law reform.

Engaging policy in science writing: Patterns and strategies.

Many scientific researchers aspire to engage policy in their writing, but translating scientific research and findings into policy discussion often requires an understanding of the institutional complexities of legal and policy processes and actors. To examine how researchers have undertaken that challenge, we developed a set of metrics and applied them to articles published in one of the principal academic publication venues for science and policy-Science magazine's Policy Forum. We reviewed each Policy Forum article published over a five-year period (2011-15), 220 in all.

"Sorry” Is Never Enough: How State Apology Laws Fail to Reduce Medical Malpractice Liability Risk.

Based on case studies indicating that apologies from physicians to patients can promote healing, understanding, and dispute resolution, thirty-nine states (and the District of Columbia) have sought to reduce litigation and medical malpractice liability by enacting apology laws. Apology laws facilitate apologies by making them inadmissible as evidence in subsequent malpractice trials. The underlying assumption of these laws is that after receiving an apology, patients will be less likely to pursue malpractice claims and will be more likely to settle claims that are filed.