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But all that really tells us is that we need more research. In the wake of some particularly high-profile mass shootings, the national debate over gun control is perhaps more heated than ever. Does gun control actually result in fewer deaths? Or does the solution lie in some other kind of protection? A study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine found that more firearm laws are in fact associated with fewer firearm deaths, although that may not actually tell us whether one leads to the other. Researchers from Harvard University and the Boston Children's Hospital looked at firearm-related fatalities between 2007 and 2010 and compared each state's rate of firearm fatalities per 100,000 people. They created "legislative strength scores" on a scale of 0 to 28 for each state's firearm laws, with each law counting as one point. (Gun-loving Utah came in with a score of 0, while Massachusetts had the strongest laws with a score of 24.) For the four years they examined, there were 121,084...

Nanoscale pillars behave like a medieval torture device for invading cells. Cicadas are best known here in North America for only emerging from deep underground in huge swaths once every 17 years, but periodical cicadas aren't the only unusual insect in their family. One species, the Clanger cicada, has a way cooler claim to fame: Their clear wings are equipped with nanoscale spikes that stretch and deflate bacteria with "extreme efficiency," according to a new study in Biophysical Journal. The researchers say this is the first biomaterial found to destroy bacteria purely with its physical structure, rather with some kind of biological interaction. To test how the cicada's defense mechanism worked, the researchers microwaved bacteria to change the elasticity of their membranes. Bacteria cells with more rigid structures were able to withstand the cicada's bactericidal wings, but once their surface structure was softened by the microwave exposure, the nanopillars stretched and impaled...

Head To Head From the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention We take a look at a new idea about head injuries in football. There's plenty of evidence that repeated head hits in football-even if they don't quite cause concussions-are associated with neurological problems later in life. Yet what exactly happens in the years between a hit and the appearance of symptoms such as memory loss and depression? What exactly causes the symptoms, and how might medicine prevent them? One group of researchers has a new idea. Sub-concussive jostling to the brain could lead to a series of events that ends with cells in the immune system attacking the brain, says Jeffrey Bazarian, a physician at the University of Rochester Medical Center and a co-author on a new study about brain injury as an autoimmune response. The study was preliminary and wasn't set up to prove that immune cells are harming the brain. Instead, it found evidence that's one step short of proof. The data "don't really prove...

'Keep Calm And Rape Off' Amazon via NY Daily News How did these insane slogans actually get on the internet? And who's buying them? Click here for some other examples of algorithms getting offensive. Just because you can use an algorithm to make slogans doesn't mean they'll turn out the way you'd hoped. That's a lesson Solid Gold Bomb, a retailer selling through Amazon, learned when offensive T-shirts were discovered on its sales page this week. The shirts were "parodies" of the "keep calm and carry on" slogan that's been trendy for a few years. Except these versions had some offensive, misogynistic taglines: "Keep Calm And Rape Off." "Keep Calm And Knife Her." The shirts have since been pulled from the store. Who the hell thought those shirts were a good idea? Actually, it wasn't a who. It was an algorithm designed to mix-and-match adjectives and verbs with the slogan in hopes that it might find a winner. The shirt designs were automatically generated and posted to Amazon's UK page....

Papal Odds David Smith, Revolutions Updated hourly, for your convenience It looks like Archbishop Angelo Scola is a top pick among Vatican-watchers for the next pope. Wanna bet on it? Now you can (But only if you're not American; betting on the pope is illegal in the United States because it's considered an election). AJ, an analyst at a healthcare company, has written some code that automatically scrapes odds that different papal candidates will win the Catholic Church's authoritative position. The odds come from a "prominent bookkeeper," AJ writes, and they're updated hourly. Right now, AJ's bookie's top pick is Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana. If chosen, Turkson would be the first African pope in a very long time. Not all bookies agree, of course (though Turkson is high on many lists). Oddschecker compiles the numbers from 13 bookkeepers and places Archbishop Angelo Scola of Italy on top. Betting on the pope has a long history, which the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog...

These branching scorched patterns look just like river systems. Melanie Hoff, an art student at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, connected cables carrying 15,000 volts of electricity to a large sheet of plywood and then filmed the results. Check out her video, and then find out how to make your own Lichtenberg Figure: [Via Colossal]

NERSC's FranklinNERSC Welcome to a future in which big data helps law enforcement predict and punish crime before it happens. John Anderton is the chief of a special police unit in Washington, D.C. This particular morning, he bursts into a suburban house moments before Howard Marks, in a state of frenzied rage, is about to plunge a pair of scissors into the torso of his wife, whom he found in bed with another man. For Anderton, it is just another day preventing capital crimes. "By mandate of the District of Columbia Precrime Division," he recites, "I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks, that was to take place today...." Other cops start restraining Marks, who screams, "I did not do anything!" The opening scene of the film Minority Report depicts a society in which predictions seem so accurate that the police arrest individuals for crimes before they are committed. People are imprisoned not for what they did, but for what they are foreseen to do, even though...

Falkland Islands Wolf Michael Rothman, Ace Coinage Inc DNA testing and marine geology shows how the now-extinct Falkland Islands wolf crossed almost 300 miles of sea. In 1690, British explorers at the Falkland Islands questioned how a wolf made its way almost 300 miles from the Argentinian shore to the isolated islands. In 1834, on his famous Beagle voyage, Charles Darwin asked the same question. Now a team of researchers say they've figured out how the now-extinct species managed the trip: it skated over. To figure it out, a University of Adelaide team did some DNA digging. First they tested tissue samples from the skull of a wolf Darwin himself (!) collected and samples from a recently uncovered wolf specimen in New Zealand. They also looked at six specimens from a related species--the almost-wolf Dusicyon avus--to determine when, exactly, the Falkland wolf diverged genetically. DNA testing seemed to show the two split ways about 16,000 years ago. Other studies that relied on museum...

Roku 3 Roku Roku just announced the company's newest flagship media player, the Roku 3. Roku is one of our favorite, most indispensable little gadgets--a hockey-puck-sized gadget that plugs into your TV and gives you great, easy access to Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, Spotify, Rdio, HBO Go, MLB TV, Flickr, Plex, and a few hundred other apps. It's by far the easiest and most fool-proof way to get streaming content on your TV. The newest version addresses a few of the issues we had with the device. Compared to a Boxee Box or Apple TV, Roku has always been underpowered and its interface has always taken simplicity to an extreme--sometimes it's not very efficient, and it's not the most attractive interface out there. The new box comes with an improved processor, which should help it deal with more intense tasks like beaming high-def content from a computer, and a new interface, which looks a bit more grid-like and certainly prettier than before. The remote also gets an...

Airwriting Volker Steger/KIT It's all in the wrist. Though smartphone technology has evolved to be able to treat your depression and drive your robot, one basic function -- typing -- can still be a total pain. Stabbing at your tiny touchscreen keyboard with club thumbs doesn't make for an effective texting method. Computer scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany felt they could design a better way to type using gesture control. Enter "airwriting," a system currently in development to turn the movements you make as you write in the air into typed letters. A thin, glove-like wristband is equipped with acceleration sensors and gyroscopes like those already found in a cell phone. It recognizes handwriting movements and transmits them to a computer with a wireless signal. It can distinguish between when you're actually trying to write, versus when you're cooking or doing laundry, the researchers say -- in case you were planning on cooking while wearing your high-tech...

Liquid At Europa's Surface Based on new evidence from Jupiter's moon Europa, astronomers hypothesize that chloride salts bubble up from the icy moon's global liquid ocean and reach the frozen surface, where they are bombarded with sulfur from volcanoes on Jupiter's largest moon, Io. NASA/JPL-Caltech The moon's thick ocean may derive energy from chemicals donated by nearby Io. Scientists are pretty confident Europa is home to a vast subterranean ocean, but could it have any water on its surface? According to a new study, maybe yes. That's big news for anyone hoping to send a robotic explorer to the icy moon. And it could be big news for anyone interested in the possibility of life on that Jovian satellite. Salty water from Europa's 60-mile-thick ocean makes its way to the surface somehow through cracks in its ice sheet, according to new research. Once it's there, it is exposed to sulfur from the neighboring moon Io, Jupiter's largest. Magnesium chloride in the water interacts with the...

Coming In An experimental bomb squad robot from 2001 shows off its dexterity. Photo by Randy Montoya Before sending any people in, police sent two robots to check out an Ohio shooter barricaded in his house. An Ohio man has been charged for shooting a robot. Michael Blevins was charged with vandalism of government property, after drunkenly firing at a police robot in his house. Perhaps what's more interesting is that the police used a robot at all. On February 23, police responded to a call that 62-year-old Blevins was making threats and had fired a gun in his home, the local Chillicothe Gazette reports. When police arrived, Blevins refused to answer the door. After verbal negotiations failed, police sent two robots into Belvins' house instead of human officers because they believed Blevins had a lot of firearms. Blevins allegedly shot the larger of the two robots with a pistol. Police eventually arrested Blevins, whom they reported as being highly intoxicated, and searched his house...

Outside PopSci's Office Google Streetview New research tries to measure the impact of streetscapes on our mental health. If you condensed all 200,000 years of humanity's existence into a one hour-long video and then played it back, you would have to wait 58 minutes for people to build their first city-like habitat--a honeycomb-like mud-brick town of 5,000 in present-day Turkey. Half a minute later, you'd see another city, in Iraq, surge to 50,000 people, and 45 seconds after that, Egypt's Alexandria would swell by another factor of ten, to 500,000. With just two seconds to go in the movie, London's population would skyrocket to 5 million--another order of magnitude--just as all the rest of the developed world began to erupt in a frenzy of urbanization. During the last half of the last second, the developing world would follow. Today, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population makes its home in an urban environment, compared to just 13% in 1900. That...

Coffitivity Coffitivity Coffitivity gives you the ambient noise of a coffeeshop, wherever you are. I wrote this post while using the service to test it out. Coffitivity is a website with a ten-minute, looping recording of ambient noise in a coffeeshop. According to a paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, background noise can have a positive effect on "creative cognition," which correlates roughly to creativity. As the classic creative-type white noise element is background noise from a coffeeshop, Coffitivity provides a recorded clip you can listen to wherever you want. (You can read a snippet of the paper investigating the intersection of noise and creativity here.) As writing blogposts about websites is, in a very loose sense, a creative task, I fired up Coffitivity while writing this post to see how it works. 12:30: I do not write well with distractions. I am wildly inefficient when working from home, because my home is full of fun. I used to write all of my college papers in...

Mapping Human Metabolism Recon X Never get lost in your own metabolic processes again! An international team of researchers has debuted what they're calling a "Google map" of the human metabolism -- the most expansive virtual model of human metabolism to date, called Recon 2. Metabolism, the blanket term for all the physical and chemical processes that your body employs to convert food into energy, plays an important role in health and disease. More comprehensive biological modeling of our metabolism can help us compute and predict how our bodies will respond to drugs, in addition to expanding our knowledge of the connection between our body's chemical interactions and a variety of diseases. Multiple models of the human metabolism exist, but Recon 2 is so far the most comprehensive. While the human metabolic network isn't actually Google Maps' latest attempt at virtual tourism (color me disappointed), the comparison comes from Recon 2's capacity to incorporate many complex details...

Waste-to-Energy Plant Bjarke Ingels Group But not without taking some criticism. Denmark starchitect Bjarke Ingels has always designed eye-popping structures, but his plan for a combination ski slope/garbage burner/energy plant sounded especially zany when it was announced in early 2011. Pitched as a sustainable building, it faced some early push-back from the city of Copenhagen because it might damage the environment (ironic!) and for a while it looked like the project might get scrapped entirely. But, nope. The Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) just announced that they've broken ground on the building. The slope/burner/plant, a replacement for the aging Amagerforbraending plant nearby, sounds pretty straight-forward: it incinerates garbage for heat and energy. Bonus, the roof's built at an angle to bring downhill skiing to the flat land of Copenhagen. The city pointed out that the project could raise emissions by as much as 200,000 tons of CO2 yearly, but Ingels said the plant would be an...

Higgs Candidate Event A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment produces two high-energy photons (the red towers). This is what physicists would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs boson, but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. CERN For physicists, it was "an appointment with destiny." Physicists still get frustrated when people say the Higgs boson has been found--true, it's very probably been found, but the only thing that's been verified yet is that a boson has been discovered. Its mass is right around where the Higgs ought to be, and it sure seems like a Higgs boson, but no one is calling it final, at least not yet. Nevertheless, the tales of intrigue and jealousy and genius surrounding the hunt for the particle are coming to light in new books and periodicals. The latest comes today from the dean of physics journalism, Dennis Overbye of the New York Times. The particle itself could be something from science fiction: It's a...

That Better Not Be A Store-Bought Salad Dreamstime No caffeine? Say it ain't so, science! As cute as babies are, most aspects of pregnancy seem like the worst kind of torture you could inflict upon yourself. You can't drink, you can't smoke, you can't eat sushi or unpasteurized cheese. Parts of your body will never be the same. Plus you have a TINY HUMAN growing within you. Who knows what you're about to pop out. It could be the next Mother Teresa...but it could also be the next Donald Trump. Science is constantly telling pregnant women what they can and can't do, but it's hard to know what's a real threat to your future bouncing bundle of joy. What we think we know about pregnancy is constantly changing. Some studies say moderate drinking isn't dangerous, but many health organizations urge pregnant women not to drink at all. Not to mention the fact that every culture says something different about what's safe. In Japan, sushi is considered healthy during pregnancy. In the U.S., it's...

Sony A58 Stan Horaczek Our friends over at Popular Photography just put up a hands-on examination of the new Sony A58 DSLR. The A58 is the couple-years-later followup to the A55, which won Popular Photography's highest honor, Camera of the Year, back in 2010. It's cheap, at only $600 for the whole kit, but it doesn't skimp on features or quality, with a 20MP sensor (upped from 16MP on last year's model), an OLED eye-level finder, and 60i video at 1080p--damned impressive at that price point. Head on over to Pop Photo for a sample gallery and more insights.

Morning Star NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute A mind-expanding planetary view. There's nothing quite like stretching out and taking in the stars. Except, maybe, taking in the stars from the neighborhood of Saturn. NASA's Cassini spacecraft took these two images of Venus--only a shiny dot, really, in each photo--as seen from the the Saturnian system. Technically the spacecraft is a few hundred thousand miles from Saturn, but we still get a phenomenal view of the rings. In the first one, here, taken at dawn on Saturn, you can just spy Venus toward the top of the frame, next to Saturn's "G ring," that bright elliptical swoosh running across the middle. (That light toward the bottom is another star.) And here you can see Venus through Saturn's trademark rings. It's just a little up and left from the center. [CICLOPS via io9]

Vortex Robert Kozloff/University of Chicago Two physicists at the University of Chicago have created a knotted vortex in fluid for the first time ever. They describe their findings in a paper in Nature Physics this week. Vortices form in liquids, gases and plasmas, occurring naturally in everything from water to weather systems to galaxies. Theory has suggested that knotted vortices exist for almost a hundred years, but scientists haven't been able to observe their existence until now. They may exist in the cores of neutron stars and in the plasma on the sun. brightcove.createExperiences(); The researchers 3-D printed twisted hydrofoils, or wings designed for water, that when accelerated would create vortices in the shape of the wing. Gas bubbles made with electricity in the water moved toward the center of the vortex, allowing the researchers to observe the core clearly and record them with a high-speed camera. The vortex loops elongated and circulated, colliding with each other and...

Looking For Friends On Facebook Photo by Andrew Sorensen, CC BY-NC 2.0 Ah, the wonders of the intertubes never cease. Always wished you could be friends with your favorite celebrity… at least on Facebook? This new algorithm may help you get there. Researchers in Taiwan, China and the United States have come up with a computer program that lets you choose a target friend on a social network--whether an activity partner, a romantic interest or a work contact--then suggests a series of people for you to friend so that you can send your target an invitation after you've already built up a number of mutual friends. "Why can't I try to do that on my own?" you say. "If I wanted to meet X at company Y, I could start chatting with Z, whose cousin works at Y…" Well, in a test in which researchers pitted 169 people trying to meet friends on Facebook against the new algorithm, the algorithm did significantly better. As MIT Technology Review explains, the algorithm tries several routes to the...

Artist's concept of satellites, plus the International Space Station, in orbit over Earth NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Countries like Kazakhstan and Vietnam are taking a swing at imaging Earth. Is it just me, or is it getting crowded in here? More than 280 new observational satellites are expected to enter orbit around Earth over the next decade, Aviation Week reported from an analysis by Paris-based Euroconsult. About 30 percent of those spacecraft are expected to come from countries with developing space programs, such as Kazakhstan and Vietnam. The satellites will provide their home countries with images for crop monitoring, weather forecasting, military observation, urban planning and everything else that developed programs already use satellites for. They'll also provide competition for companies that sell their satellite images to groups that don't have their own satellites. Governments and other groups spent $1.4 billion to buy satellite images in 2011. By 2021, Euroconsult...

HIV CDC Early treatment answers some questions, raises others 1. The baby girl was cured with standard anti-retroviral drugs. When the baby was born in a Mississippi hospital in 2010, pediatric specialist Hannah Gay began treating her with three anti-retroviral drugs just 31 hours after she was born. This combination treatment has been around since the mid-1990s, and remains the biggest breakthrough in the fight against a disease that has claimed tens of millions of lives over the past few decades. As long as people keep taking the treatment cocktail, the virus remains virtually undetectable (a level of about 50 copies of the virus in a milliliter of blood). But one of the things that makes HIV so heinous is that the virus can remain dormant in a person's DNA indefinitely. It insinuates itself in the body's immune cells and then lurks there silently until some stress on the body--a minor cold, a long week at work--calls the immune cells up to active duty. Then the virus springs back...

Toymaker Maxwell Bogue of 3Doodler David Mosher We catch up with the brains behind the 3Doodler, a plastic-melting pen that lets you draw 3-D objects in midair. Even the best consumer 3-D printers require a whole lot of brains to create the simplest plastic tchotchke. Toymaker Maxwell Bogue doesn't think creative expression in three dimensions should be so hard, so he created the 3Doodler: a plastic-melting pen that lets you draw objects in midair. We've covered the pen before. But we still wanted to catch up with Bogue at the recent 2013 Kairos Global Summit on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to see just what this little gadget could do: brightcove.createExperiences();

Unlocked Phones Petition via WhiteHouse.org The White House "agrees" that consumers should be legally allowed to make full use of their phones--but it's still against the law. Where do we go from here? A petition created by Sina Khanifar to make unlocking phones legal has garnered over 114,000 signatures on the White House's website--and the White House has finally responded. Before we get into that, here's what's going on. In 1998, the Clinton Administration passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which was an attempt to criminalize the circumventing of Digital Rights Management, or DRM. You see, in 1998, people still sometimes bought these curious shiny silver discs called CDs. But thanks to new sharing networks like Napster, people sometimes ripped the music off those CDs and shared them with strangers on the internet. To stop that, a few of the major record labels, led by Sony, implemented security measures that theoretically made it harder to rip those CDs. It did...

The arms race between bacteria and viruses just got a microscopic bit hotter. Sometimes, I read a news item that pretty much overturns an entire class of pedagogy in my head. Take, for example, the discovery that virus particles steal and repurpose a bacteria's immune system, and use it against them. My first thought was "holy crap, bacteria have an adaptive immune system?!" Then I remembered reading something about that from a couple of years ago (which I clearly promptly forgot, because I don't actually follow that particular field very closely). My second thought was "of course viruses would exploit that -- those bastards exploit every loophole that mutagenesis and genetic theft have to offer." The phenomenon, which was published in Nature this week, was discovered by Kimberly Seed and colleagues when they looked at bacteriophages who usually infect and kill the bacterium responsible for cholera Vibrio cholerae. When looking at samples, they noticed that the phages' genomes had...

Gina McCarthy and Ernest Moniz via Wikimedia Commons/MIT New nominations for energy secretary and EPA head will probably face uphill battles in the Senate. The likely next secretary of energy is a physics professor researching new energy at MIT, and the next chief of the Environmental Protection Agency has spent years developing regulations to combat greenhouse gas emissions. Both were formally nominated today to fill some of the many empty posts in President Obama's cabinet as his second term rolls along. And both come from backgrounds that suggest Obama really does want to do something, at least regulation-wise, about climate change. Obama's Department of Energy pick, Ernest Moniz, researches how coal, natural gas, nuclear power and solar energy will fare in a future faced with tough requirements for carbon dioxide emissions. At a speech in Chile in February, Moniz said electricity demands will triple in the coming years, which will cause a "catastrophic increase in the temperature"...

ArduLab Dave Mosher Launching even small experiments into space can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Most of the money goes toward a spaceship or rocket ride to beat Earth's gravity, but another big chunk is the experimental equipment. Just one 10-centimeter cube in which to cram experiments, for example, can set a researcher back $10,000. A new company called Infinity Aerospace is trying to undercut competitors by offering the same space in a plastic box, called ArduLab, for $2,000. The "Ardu" comes from the open-sourced, sensor-laden Arduino microcontroller included with the box to help pull off advanced experiments in microgravity. To learn more, Popular Science caught up with company cofounders Brian Rieger and Manu Sharma during the Kairos Global Summit, which recently occurred on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. brightcove.createExperiences();

Alcohoot Dave Mosher Blow into the device, and it displays your blood alcohol content on your iPhone. To get drinkers to play it safe after a night out, three young entrepreneurs are banking on a police-grade breathalyzer that they call Alcohoot. The $99 device plugs into an iPhone and communicates with an app. After a gusty blow it logs and displays your blood alcohol content to within a hundredth of a percent. If you're above the legal limit, it helps you search for the nearest greasy spoon -- or a cab. Alcohoot's founders gave us a demo on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during the 2013 Kairos Global Summit recently. (Don't worry, boss -- no one blew above 0.00 percent.) brightcove.createExperiences();