Where we live, work, and play impacts our health. Air pollution and traffic noise from nearby roads and highways can increase residents’ risk of chronic health conditions, but living in areas with more local infrastructure means residents have easier access to health care, healthy food, and recreational facilities. New transportation options such as light rail…

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Racism-related stress may help explain why Black women in the United States are over 50% more likely to deliver a premature baby than white women. Just over 14% of Black women have premature births compared with 9% of white women.1 These stark racial disparities have been documented for more than a century, reports Catherine Cubbin…

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As coronavirus cases rise in less densely populated states in the Midwest and West, the disease, combined with high levels of obesity in rural America, could pose major challenges for health care systems, suggests Mark Lee at the University of Minnesota. People of any age with obesity face a greatly increased risk of severe illness…

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Women with children and a heterosexual male partner do the most housework—more even than single moms, according to an analysis of time-use data.1 Specifically, married and cohabiting mothers report more housework than never-married or divorced/separated mothers, but all mothers report about the same amount of child-care time, find Joanna Pepin of the University of Texas…

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The more time mothers spent engaged in activities with their adolescent children (ages 12 to 18), the less teens were involved in delinquent behavior, such as skipping school, shoplifting, staying out at night without permission, and getting in trouble at school or with the law, according to a study in the most recent issue of…

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Despite declining rates, teen birth rates in the United States remain persistently high, at 34.4 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19. And these rates are dramatically higher than in other developed countries. In the United States, girls are more than twice as likely as their Canadian peers to have a child (14.2), and…

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