Northern India experiences some of the world’s worst winter air pollution, with dangerous episodes often prompting emergency control efforts. In major cities like Delhi, the Air Quality Index has reached levels above 999 – over 30 times the World Health Organization’s safety limit. A new study finds that much of the year-to-year variation in winter pollution can be traced to large-scale weather systems – and that these relationships could provide useful warning of an unusually polluted winter, months in advance.

The study, published in Science Advances, finds that 70% of the year-to-year variation in winter air pollution across northern India can be explained by the frequency of western disturbances – storm systems that travel eastward from the Mediterranean region toward South Asia by strengthening vertical ventilation and bringing precipitation that helps clear accumulated pollution from the air. Winters with more frequent western disturbances therefore tend to experience lower air pollution levels, while winters with fewer of these storms are more susceptible to persistent severe pollution.

A new study published in The Milbank Quarterly provides insight from leaders, clinicians, and care coordinators for six of the 17 Medicaid ACOs in Massachusetts between 2018-2024, finding that these ACOs were able to improve the quality of patients’ maternal care by intentionally and strategically incorporating new maternal metrics and initiatives mandated in their contracts, as well as by providing the necessary resources and infrastructure to meet these requirements. Mandating specific maternal health initiatives, from timely prenatal care to postpartum depression screening, motivated the ACOs to adapt or develop programs that align with maternal health goals. 

Researchers at Wayne State University have been awarded a five-year, $3.94 million R01 grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to investigate how air pollution levels commonly found in Detroit accelerate biological aging and impact metabolic and cognitive health.

In a Policy Forum, Noam Angrist and colleagues discuss a science-backed research agenda for understanding how to successfully implement educational programs at scale. “The frontier of education research and practice is to improve implementation,” Angrist et al. write. “There is growing evidence on what works – now we need to translate that evidence into action and systematically study the process, so that we can do it repeatedly and at increasing scale to achieve effective, equitable, and enduring learning for all.” Although most children around the globe attend school, learning outcomes remain low in many parts of the world. A growing body of research has identified programs that can improve learning, yet interventions that succeed in small, controlled studies often lose effectiveness when implemented at scale and by governments. According to the authors, a major obstacle is that education research rarely measures how faithfully programs are implemented or how widely they are adopted, making it difficult to determine whether poor outcomes result from flaws in the program itself or from shortcomings in its implementation. Here, Angrist et al. call for stronger implementation science in global education, modeled partly on efforts in health care, to close the gap between research discoveries and real-world practice. The authors propose a four-stage framework to turn educational research into effective, equitable practice at scale: efficacy trials, effectiveness trials, policy plans, and large-scale implementation. This approach emphasizes testing whether interventions work across diverse populations and real-world settings, as well as whether they are affordable and sustainable. “We hope the implementation science for global education agenda motivates a shift toward research that informs the decisions and challenges that confront implementers and government decision-makers,” the authors write. “By ensuring that more science makes it into implementation and that more implementation is made scientific, implementation science can support the ultimate goal of all children learning.”