Law

As cities test different approaches to handling 911 calls, a new study shows dispatching mental health specialists for nonviolent emergencies can be beneficial. In Denver, it reduced reports of less serious crimes and lowered response costs.

New research reveals that 44 percent of Earth's land area -- some 64 million square kilometers (24.7 million square miles) requires conservation to safeguard biodiversity.

The day is coming -- some say has already arrived -- when new inventions that benefit society are dreamt up by artificial intelligence all on its own.

Praying mantises have gained recent popularity as pets, sold at animal fairs and pet markets, but also collected in the wild by a fast-growing community of hobbyists and professional marketers. An overview of this market's dynamics reports on both problems and opportunities of the pet mantis market, like the absence of regulations, but also the potential of a stronger collaboration between hobbyists and scientists for biodiversity conservation.

The animal collections housed at zoos and natural history museums -- living specimens in the first case, preserved in the other -- constitute an exhaustive trove of information about Earth's biodiversity. A new paper lays out a pathway to increasing collaboration between these groups that would enhance our understanding of the animal kingdom.

New research is helping law enforcement agents, forensic scientists and historians uncover attempts to hide victims.

New research shows that private protected areas help conserve underrepresented biomes and highly threatened regions. Researchers have assessed 17,561 privately protected areas in 15 countries across five continents. Their findings reveal that compared to state protected areas, PPAs are twice as likely to be in areas with the greatest human disturbance, such as regions used for agriculture and mining. They are three times more likely to be in biomes with almost no established conservation reserves and protect 1.2% of key biodiversity areas.

Skin cells and their DNA varies between individuals, but new data shows that some groups of people have higher variability in their cell deposits. The South Australian forensic science researchers are building a suite of new insights into crime scene investigation -- including the difference between high, intermediate and low skin 'shedders' that will help understanding of trace or 'touch DNA'.

A new study has found that costs of conservation projects are rarely reported, making it difficult for others to make decisions on the most cost-effective interventions at a time when funding for biodiversity conservation is severely limited.

A new study from cognitive scientists offers an answer to why legal documents such as contracts or deeds are often so impenetrable.

A new study among young Danish men confirms the assumption that risk-tolerant, impatient and self-centered people are more likely to commit crimes than risk averse, patient and altruistic people are.

Scientists have used genetic testing of ivory shipments seized by law enforcement to uncover the international criminal networks behind ivory trafficking out of Africa. The genetic connections across shipments that they've uncovered exposes an even higher degree of organization among ivory smuggling networks than previously known. The article incorporates results from DNA testing of more than 4,000 African elephant tusks from 49 different ivory seizures made in 12 African nations over a 17-year period.

Gabon's network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) provides a blueprint that could be used in many other countries, experts say. Since announcing a new MPA network in 2014, Gabon has created 20 protected areas -- increasing protection of Gabonese waters from less than 1% to 26%.

Online food retailers do not consistently display nutrition information on their websites -- and U.S. laws are lagging behind in mandating the same labeling required for foods sold in brick-and-mortar stores, according to a new analysis.

A study showed that -- within an appropriate framework -- gait recognition could be a viable technique for protecting individuals and their data from potential crime.

As many as a half of all drinkers underestimated how drunk they were, judging themselves still safe to drive despite having exceeded the legal driving limit.

Efforts to protect threatened and endangered species in central Africa might be more successful if they focused on a smaller geographic area, new research suggests.

Researchers have trained computers to predict the next designer drugs before they are even on the market, technology that could save lives. Identifying these so-called 'legal highs' within seized pills or powders can take months, during which time thousands of people may have already used a new designer drug. But new research is already helping law enforcement agencies around the world to cut identification time down from months to days, crucial in the race to identify and regulate new versions of dangerous psychoactive drugs.

Psychological scientists and criminologists say our system of jurisprudence needs a simple no-cost reform -- switch to testing eyewitnesses for their memory of suspects only once.

Researchers have highlighted that the illegal and unsustainable global wildlife trade has bigger ramifications on our everyday lives than you might think.

Illegal or unsustainable wildlife trade affects biodiversity, ecosystem services, people's livelihood, and economies all over the world. Worldwide experts warn about the perils related to this activity and provide a roadmap for curbing its growth.

It is commonly assumed that any important scientific knowledge would be available in English, and so scientific knowledge used in international studies is predominantly sourced from English-language documents. But is this assumption correct? According to new research, the answer is no, and science written in languages other than English may hold untapped information crucial to the conservation of global biodiversity.

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has pledged to protect 30% of land to support the recovery of nature, but a new study finds that much of the new land that has been allocated to meet this aspiration is not in the highest priority areas for biodiversity conservation.

New research has found that the habitats of West African (western) chimpanzees are threatened due to inadequate legislative protection from human development.

Conservation science and policy could be saving more biodiversity by shifting to measurements and decisions based on preventing the loss of ecosystems and species within protected areas.

In a new article, researchers provide an overview of sample preparation techniques and information on routine sample types that may be encountered in forensic toxicology cases.

A conclusive narrative review has found physical punishment of children is not effective in preventing child behavior problems or promoting positive outcomes and instead predicts increases in behavior problems and other poor outcomes over time.

The story of efforts to conserve the endangered oribi in South Africa represent a diaspora of issues as varied as the people who live there.

Researchers describe the improved mathematical methodology of an open source tool called Gerrychain, which can help observers detect gerrymandering in a voting district plan by creating an ensemble of alternate maps that also meet legal voting criteria.

Concern tends to ratchet up a notch when pollution enters the river runoff discussion on a national scale, specifically when smaller, navigable intrastate bodies of water push pollution into larger interstate waters often involved in commerce (i.e. the Mississippi River, Great Lakes, Ohio River).