In 1994, Congress passed 42 U.S.C. Section 14141 as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, granting the U.S. attorney general the power to initiate structural reform litigation against local police departments engaged in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional behavior.

It made few headlines but it has been credited as the basis for the Department of Justice to forcefully reform numerous large police departments across the country – including Cincinnati, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Generally, local law enforcement doesn't like federal interference and the federal government doesn't want to try and manage 18,000 police departments, no matter how many laws Congress passes saying it should.

When it comes to ecology and zoology, policy actions tend to ignore the system and focus on turning one knob. Then, when the ripple effect is felt throughout the ecosystem, a new knob is turned.

Sometimes the problem with that approach becomes obviously early on, especially in California, where various federal and state bodies are always in court with each other trying to fulfill their legal mandates while species suffer. And what happens when the eradication of an invasive species threatens an endangered species? 

The American Geosciences Institute's newest Status of the Geoscience Workforce Report, released May 2014, has good news: jobs requiring training in the geosciences continue to be lucrative and in-demand.

Even with STEM outreach campaigns causing the number of graduates in most fields to overwhelm academic jobs by a ratio of 6:1, geosciences project a shortage of around 135,000 geoscientists needed in the workforce by the end of the decade. Obviously that is not academia, but you won't have to be 40 years old before you make a decent living in the private sector.

In the never-ending battle between cat and dog owners, one factoid can't be denied: cats are terrible at helping take down big game.

But mammoth kill sites in Europe that containing lots of mammoth bones - up to 86 of the beasts - used for dwellings has led Penn State Professor Emerita Pat Shipman to formulate a new hypothesis of how these sites were formed. 
Shipman
suggests that their abrupt appearance may have been due to early modern humans working with the earliest domestic dogs to kill the now-extinct mammoth. Shipman even believes there is a way to test the predictions of her new hypothesis. 

Waterpipes - hookahs - create hazardous concentrations of indoor air pollution and poses increased risk from diminished air quality for both employees and patrons of waterpipe bars, according to a new paper from Johns Hopkins, which did an analysis of air quality in seven Baltimore waterpipe bars and found that airborne particulate matter and carbon monoxide exceeded concentrations common in public places that allowed cigarette smoking. Air nicotine was markedly higher than in smoke-free establishments. 

In the medical work force, women have representation no different than any other corporation. That makes sense, women have accounts for half of all medical student graduates for decades.

Yet in the top tiers of academia, they lag behind men. Is that gender bias? It is, claims Dr. Anna Kaatz and Dr. Molly Carnes of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.