U.S. Schools and High-Risk Chemicals
Center for Effective Government | READ STORY

This interactive map tool, developed by the Center for Effective Government, identifies U.S. schools within none mile of a high-risk chemical facility. The Center has also provided a press release, offering succinct analysis of the data. Roughly 4.6 million U.S. children, at approximately 10,000 schools, live in close proximity to a dangerous chemical plant.

Tax Time
National Priorities Project | READ STORY

The nonprofit National Priorities Project, recently nominated for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, has done the hard work of making taxes and the federal budget easily understood. Today their tool of choice for conveying this information is through interactive and visualized data. The graphic shows very clearly the breakdown of where every single tax dollar goes.

Wives Better Educated than Husbands
Pew Research | READ STORY

This report, presented by the Pew Research Center, shows that for the first time in the history of Pew's research, there are more marriages in the U.S. between better-educated women and less-educated men than there are between better-educated men and less-educated women. Pew connects this development to the fact that women have recently eclipsed men in higher education more generally, and also to a general decline in marriages between spouses having only a high school degree or less education.

The Culture of Incarceration
TAC Reports | READ STORY

Prisons have become the country's holding tanks for people with severe mental illnesses. That may not be news, but a new report from the Treatment Advocacy Center puts some bleak numbers on this issue. In the 1970s, as state hospitals across the country began shutting down, about 5 percent of prisoners had serious mental illness. By the 1990s, it was 15 percent. The Treatment Advocacy Center report says now that number is 20 percent. In fact, 10 times as many people are in prisons -- over 350,000 -- as are in state hospitals -- about 35,000.

Clouds and Global Temperatures
Phys.org | READ STORY

Global average temperatures will rise at least four degrees Celsius by 2100 and potentially more than eight degrees Celsius by 2200 if carbon dioxide emissions are not reduced according to new research published in Nature. Scientists found global climate is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than most previous estimates.

Increasing Burden of Climate Change
Los Angeles Times | READ STORY

Two studies, both reported on by the Los Angeles Times, point to increasingly tangible effects of climate change. First, the study linked above, published in the journal Science, discusses recent warming trends in the Pacific Ocean: the Ocean is heating faster now than it has in 10,000 years. Second, this article reports on another study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which shows that Rocky Mountain wildflower seasons have been extended by 35 days in virtue of recent changes to the global climate.