Using 20 years of satellite-derived data on wildfire severity and smoke particulate matter from California, Iván Higuera-Mendieta and Marshall Burke conclude that low-severity fires – a proxy for prescribed burns – can significantly reduce the probability of very high severity wildfires for a decade. The smoke particulate pollution produced by these less severe fires is outweighed by the reductions in future smoke from wildfires as a result. The researchers’ modeling suggests that sustained treatment of 500,000 acres annually in California with prescribed burns would reduce cumulative harmful smoke pollution by about 10% over a decade. The findings by Higuera-Mendieta and Burke fill an important data gap about potential air quality tradeoffs associated with prescribed burns. The effects measured in the study are most impactful in the state’s conifer forests, the researchers found. A policy that applies prescribed burning for up to 1 million acres/year in California conifer forests would yield cumulative benefits in terms of smoke reduction that exceed the costs of the added smoke from the initial prescribed burning “in as early as two years, with benefits exceeding costs by at least three-fold a decade after project initiation,” the authors write.

The COVID-19 pandemic did not push nurses out of hospitals or other care settings as feared, but nurses left their primary jobs at nearly double the rate from 2018 to 2022, a new University of Michigan study found. 

Independent directors may be far more effective at controlling executive pay than critics claim, according to new research from the University of Surrey. Researchers found that companies with more independent board members move faster to correct risky CEO compensation structures. 

A new study from the Brookings Institution has found that ICE surges are causing significant job losses in cities where ICE is most active. In the first nine months of 2025, ICE operations led directly to the loss of at least 668,000 jobs across 86 U.S. metro areas. The toll was not limited to immigrants: between 51,000 and 297,000 of the lost jobs were held by American-born workers.