Gun debate cross fireIn “Misfires in the gun control debate” (SN: 5/14/16, p. 16), Meghan Rosen reported on the roadblocks researchers face in collecting informative data on gun violence in the United States. Readers responded passionately, expressing many different viewpoints about the story and the controversial topic of gun control. “I thought Ms. Rosen’s article […]

Jupiter has a new visitor. After traveling 2.8 billion kilometers across space, NASA’s Juno probe — a mission to investigate Jupiter’s deep interior (SN: 6/25/16, p. 16) — arrived at the giant planet July 4. Juno’s scientific instruments were switched off on June 29 before the probe slid into its first of 37 orbits, so […]

To understand human longevity, look to the animal world, says James Carey, a biodemography specialist at the University of California, Davis. Studying other species, from insects to elephants, “provides important information for why we age and why we live as long as we do,” Carey says. By looking at how long other organisms can live, […]

Dark matter has once again given scientists the slip. Physicists with the Large Underground Xenon experiment, or LUX, report that their final set of data, collected from October 2014 to May 2016, contains no evidence of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up more than 25 percent of the universe. The LUX detector, located […]

In the arms race of life, a number of animals use venom as a weapon to paralyze prey and jump-start digestion. Meanwhile, venom also helps a variety of other seemingly defenseless creatures improve their odds against larger, stronger or more aggressive foes. In Venomous, molecular biologist Christie Wilcox surveys the animal kingdom’s wide array of […]

Here’s something new for real estate agents to boast about in posh neighborhoods: houses with a bigger variety of insects and spiders. Maybe that’s not the best selling point. But what’s called a “luxury effect” appeared among more than 10,000 arthropod samples collected from the insides of 50 houses in urban and suburban Raleigh, N.C. […]

It’s all relativeIn “Earth is young at heart” (SN: 6/25/16, p. 5), Emily Conover reported that Earth’s core is more than two years younger than the planet’s surface, according to new calculations. Thanks to the effect of gravity on the passage of time, a clock placed at Earth’s core will tick fractions of a second […]

It’s time to go wild studying antimicrobial resistance, a research team says. Most analyses of how microbes come to laugh off the drugs and disinfectants that should kill them have focused on people in hospitals or livestock on farms, says behavioral ecologist Kathryn Arnold of the University of York in England. Yet a growing number […]

Out-of-reach nutrients could help explain why life on Earth took so long to bounce back from the worst extinction of all time. Analyzing the chemical changes that followed the Permian extinction 252 million years ago, geologists propose that hot sea surface temperatures led to conditions that trapped nitrogen far below the ocean’s sunlit, life-filled layers. […]

If you have an appetite for cosmic destruction, there’s an app for that. NOVA Black Holes, a free iPad game developed by the PBS series NOVA, lets you hurl a star at other celestial objects while navigating an increasingly complex minefield of stars, planets and black holes. Each level presents a new target and a […]