The perceived neediness of Hurricane Katrina victims is a better determinant of charitable giving than the victims' race, according to study by Christina M. Fong, research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, and Erzo F.P. Luttmer, associate professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. The paper was published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Atlantic basin, and the reported increases in recent decades in some hurricane intensity and duration measures in several basins have received considerable attention.

While investigating the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans evacuees, a group of UCLA researchers stumbled across something they had not been looking for - the deep level of distrust the largely minority victims felt toward public health authorities.

The nation's first study to examine African Americans' evacuation response in a disaster has found that a combination of poverty, optimism about riding out the hurricane, and perceptions of racism by authorities coordinating the evacuation influenced many people not to leave New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, researchers at the University of South Carolina have found.

Two of the world's worst natural disasters in recent years stemmed from different causes on opposite sides of the globe, but actually had much in common, according to researchers who are part of a large National Science Foundation-funded research initiative that has been studying both the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 and the Hurricane Katrina of 2005.