News by Subject Policy & Ethics

Historically, conversion therapies have used electroshock therapy, chemical drugs, hormone administrations and even surgery. While these extreme practices are becoming rarer, many other harmful actions are still taking place, negatively impacting both children and adolescents as well as adults in the US, according to a perspective in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.

A new Economic Inquiry study finds that marijuana access leads to reductions in opioid-related deaths.

American liberals and conservatives have different views on equity, according to a new study focusing on Moral Foundations Theory, but are not that different from each other when it comes to the 'Protestant work ethic.'

Groundwater maintains vital ecosystems and strongly influences water and energy budgets. Although at least 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa depend on this valuable resource for their domestic water needs, the processes that sustain it and their sensitivity to climatic variability, are poorly understood. IIASA contributed to a study that looked into climate impacts on groundwater in light of changing climatic patterns in Africa.

Recent incidents make clear that we are in a new era in which one nation's economic interdependence on another can be wielded as a political weapon -- a phenomenon described as 'weaponized interdependence' by Henry Farrell (George Washington University) and Abraham L. Newman (Georgetown University) in a new article in International Security.

How much carbon dioxide can tropical rainforests absorb? Investigations by an international team of researchers with significant involvement from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) indicate that the absorption capacity is severely limited by the phosphorus content of the soil.