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The 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill was the largest in U.S. history, releasing an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The scale of the disaster motivated diverse stakeholders to examine the human dimensions of the spill and how communities' resilience to similar threats could be improved. This examination is needed because, as long as humans depend on extracting oil and gas for energy, coastal regions are at risk for spills. In this report, the authors explore how communities, government officials, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and scientists can build community resilience to large oil spills. Researchers found mixed evidence of distress associated with the DWH disaster and a variety of factors that affected the nature and severity of people's experiences.

Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) are living longer than they used to. This increase in life expectancy presents novel challenges, including increased prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) among those with DS and related changes to caregiving needs. Information about the impacts of longer lives and increased DS-AD prevalence is lacking. This information is needed to inform both investment in research development programs for new treatments for DS-AD and policies related to health care and caregiving for aging adults with DS. To begin addressing the knowledge gap, the authors developed a multistate population simulation and projection model to study trends in DS-AD and the associated impact on caregiving. The results of the study demonstrate the potential for investment in DS and DS-AD to increase years of life without DS-AD among those living with DS, with concomitant improvements in caregiving time investments. Specific projections depend on assumptions about DS longevity, which itself might improve with increased research investment. The magnitude of the caregiving impact is notable, given that, unlike in the general population, DS caregiving is ongoing for many individuals with DS whether or not the patients have AD.

"Research on neighborhoods' and communities' roles in shaping people's experiences has expanded rapidly in the past two decades. As part of a research project on the effect that neighborhoods have on cognitive aging in the older U.S. population, RAND Corporation researchers developed a neighborhood contextual database containing a specific set of measures for use in that research. They generated these demographic, social, economic, housing, cultural, and urbanization measures from decennial census and American Community Survey data at the census tract level, plus a smaller subset of similar measures at the county and metropolitan statistical area (MSA) levels. The data cover 1990-2010, with values for intercensal year measures not available in American Community Survey summary files having been created using the method of linear interpolation. Census tract-level measures and county measures represent the 2000 census boundaries. The MSA-level measures mainly use the 2000 MSA coding. The authors provide this set of contextual data measures as a courtesy, and this document describes the construction and contents of this neighborhood contextual database"--Publisher's description.

This first collection of Margaret Mead's personal correspondence creates a vivid and intimate portrait of an American icon--with a foreword by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.