Regardless of your political leanings or the company you keep, the road to the 2024 presidential polls will likely be studded with conversational potholes. So how do you keep insults (or rolls) from flying at the dinner table?

Dozens of University of Maryland programs earned high rankings in U.S. News & World Report’s 2024-25 Best Graduate Schools lists released Tuesday, with many achieving top-25 placements in overall and specialty categories.

Among UMD’s highlights, the College of Education and the School of Public Health both climbed into the top 25, and the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) earned four top-25 accolades, including No. 15 in artificial intelligence.

Depending on where Marylanders live, their assurance of safe drinking water isn’t always crystal clear. In some Baltimore neighborhoods, it can be brown. While the city’s drinking water meets federal safety standards when it leaves municipal treatment plants, it might pick up lead, E. coli and other contaminants while flowing through a network of aging pipes before reaching a drinking glass. 

It can be as simple as a high-five from a kid while prepping an anti-bullying workshop in Prince George’s County. Or seeing a family equipped with tools like mosquito nets to reduce their malaria risk in Sierra Leone.

“It’s so rewarding to volunteer in these communities,” said biological sciences major Meghna Pandey ’24, co-president of the University of Maryland’s Public Health Beyond Borders—the first organization of its kind at an American college.

LGBTQ+ as well as Black and Latinx populations are at increased risk for using tobacco products, so youths of color who are LGBTQ+ are squarely in the sights of Big Tobacco. As a result, they experience greater tobacco-related health burdens than their non-LGBTQ+ and white peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Black barbershops and beauty salons often serve as virtual community centers, improving not only the hairstyles but the well-being of their clients by hosting vaccine clinics health outreach activities, according to Professor Stephen B. Thomas, founding director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Health Equity and originator of the barbershop initiative known as HAIR (Health Advocates In-Reach and Research).

Without smart policymaking, banning harmful chemicals like bisphenols and phthalates—common ingredients in plastics manufacturing—can result in a game of regulatory whack-a-mole where chemicals of similar toxicity or that have not been rigorously tested take their place.

The finding comes from a wide-ranging University of Maryland study published on Wednesday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

After a dreary winter—and brutal flu and cold season—most of us are welcoming a new kind of affliction: spring fever. Coma-like weeks on the couch, whether brought on by a super virus or the new season of “Vanderpump Rules,” may have you itching to resuscitate your fitness routine—or reluctant to emerge from hibernation.

A University of Maryland public health researcher joined scholars from institutions worldwide to call for the retraction of four studies purporting to show damaging psychological effects of abortion, including one submitted as evidence in a decision overturning Roe v. Wade and now involved in a current Supreme Court case over availability of the abortion drug mifepristone.