The Science Is Clear: Gun Control Saves Lives

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May 27, 2022

Culture The Science Is Clear: Gun Control Saves Lives By enacting simple laws that make guns safer and harder to get, we can prevent killings like the ones in Uvalde and Buffalo By The Editors

Public Health What We Know about Mass School Shootings--and Shooters--in the U.S. Criminologists explain what the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., and other deadly assaults have in common By James Densley,Jillian Peterson,The Conversation US

Public Health 'When Will Kids under Five Get COVID Vaccines?' and Other Questions Experts address when the youngest children could be eligible for the shots, why that has taken so long, and more By Charles Schmidt

Weather As 2022 Hurricane Season Looms, A Current that Fuels Monster Storms Is Very Warm The Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico has fueled major storms such as Hurricane Katrina By Nick Shay,The Conversation US

Epidemiology What We Know about the Rise in Monkeypox Cases Worldwide It is unclear how some people recently diagnosed with the disease became infected with the monkeypox virus or how it is likely to spread By Lars Fischer,Tanya Lewis

Quantum Physics Physicists Find a Shortcut to Seeing an Elusive Quantum Glow Once considered practically unseeable, a phenomenon called the Unruh effect might soon be revealed in laboratory experiments By Joanna Thompson

Epidemiology This Tick Can Make You Allergic to Meat, and It's Spreading Work on genetically modified pigs might provide a solution to the strange illness By Sara Goudarzi

Ethics The Field of Firearms Forensics Is Flawed The matching of bullets to guns is subjective, and courts are starting to question it because of testimony from scientific experts By David L. Faigman,Nicholas Scurich,Thomas D. Albright

Reproduction Your Phone Could Be Used to Prosecute for Getting an Abortion: Here's How Technology editor Sophie Bushwick breaks down the precedent for using your phone to monitor personal health data. By Sophie Bushwick,Tulika Bose | 05:00

Astronomy Our Sun Could Someday Reveal the Surfaces of Alien Earths In the far future, we could reveal detailed views of distant worlds by turning our home star into a gravitational lens By Allison Gasparini

Space Exploration NASA Hails Starliner Launch Success despite Thruster Glitch The Starliner team is confident the malfunctions won’t prevent the spacecraft from completing its mission By SPACE.com,Josh Dinner

Climate Change California Faces Summer Blackouts from Climate Extremes Energy planners are working to increase the grid’s reliability to keep the power on during droughts, wildfires and heat waves By Anne C. Mulkern,E&E News

BRING SCIENCE HOME Making Sound Waves In this activity you will be observing the vibrations caused by sound waves as they pass through a model membrane, just like the vibrations that go through our eardrums! Credit: George Retseck How well do you know your eardrums? You probably know that your eardrum is an essential part of your ear, allowing you to hear the world around you. But why do we call it a drum? It turns out that calling it a drum is a very accurate description of what your eardrum looks like—and what it does inside your ear. To understand how your eardrum works, imagine using a drumstick to bang on a real drum, and then touching the drum with your hand. When you do this, you can feel the vibrations moving through the drum material. Our eardrums work in a similar way, but instead of from the beat of a drumstick, our eardrums vibrate in response to sound waves hitting it. We can't see these sound waves with our eyes. But we can see how they cause vibrations in things around us, just as they do in our eardrums!

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