On June 18, 4-year-old Bentley Thomas Koch fatally shot himself in the face. A few weeks earlier, Harmony Warfield, age 7, was shot and killed by her 2-year-old cousin. And teens Shadi Najjar and Artem Ziberov, both on the eve of graduating from high school, died in a hail of gunfire. Stories like these of kids dying from gunshot wounds are devastating, but, sadly, they aren’t an anomaly.

The most comprehensive look at fatal and nonfatal firearm injuries among children in the United States makes that abundantly clear. Every day, roughly 19 children die or are medically treated in an emergency department for gun-inflicted wounds, a study published June 19 in Pediatrics finds.

The statistics, based on data from 2002 to 2014, are stark:

Nearly 1,300 children, from birth to age 17, die from gunshot wounds each year on average and another 5,790 kids are wounded;
Of the deaths, 53 percent are homicides, 38 percent are suicides and 6 percent are accidents;
Boys ages 13 to 17 make up the bulk of gunshot victims;
Cause of death varies by race — African-Americans are overwhelmingly more likely to die from homicide than suicide; white kids are nearly three times as likely to die from suicide as from homicide; and for American Indian and Asian-American kids, it’s 50-50.
But this study doesn’t just lay out the numbers. It starts to dig deeper into the whys. And those whys can have important implications, laying the framework for policies that could ultimately lead to a drop in the numbers.

For the numbers, Katherine Fowler, a behavioral scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and colleagues started with data from the National Vital Statistics System and the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.

For the whys, her team looked at cases described in the National Violent Death Reporting System, or NVDRS. That let the researchers fill in details like where an incident took place and whether it involved multiple victims — for instance, a homicide followed by suicide or a multiple victim homicide. The database also includes demographic information about the shooter, evidence of alcohol or drugs at the time of death, and whether the incident was gang-related or involved a boyfriend or girlfriend or parents. Clues to whether relationship, financial or school issues were part of the problem also come to light, as does evidence of depression, anxiety, any previous suicide attempt, treatment for mental health problems and physical health problems. Notes about playing with a gun or thinking the gun was a toy, as well as hunting accidents are also included.
This tally of circumstances led Fowler and colleagues to conclude that firearm homicides of younger children, up through age 12, often involve conflict between parents, intimate partners or among family. “This highlights how children can be caught in the cross fire in cases of domestic violence and points to the importance of addressing the intersection of these forms of violence,” she says.

The results also reveal something important about child suicides involving guns. “While mental health factors are important, the findings also show that firearm suicides were also frequently related to situational life stressors and relationship problems with an intimate partner, friend or family member,” Fowler notes.

It’s these kinds of details that can help researchers and lawmakers create more effective policies to prevent such tragic deaths and injuries. It’s worked in other cases. Statistics have shown that tweaks to laws regulating the times of day teens can drive lead to injury prevention. Ditto for access to free swimming lessons when it comes to stopping accidental drownings. But similar data on gun deaths and injuries and the effectiveness of policy to prevent them are harder to come by thanks to lack of funding and political support (SN: 5/14/16, p. 16).

Even so, “we know kids are killing themselves and others with guns,” says David Hemenway, a Harvard University economist and an expert in gun research. When it comes to combatting the problem, “the circumstances help narrow down the policy.”

Fowler says the findings “highlight the need for evidence-based solutions to address this public health problem.” She’s armed with a laundry list of potential policies that could have an impact on the whys of gun violence and make a dent in the stats. School counseling programs could help kids manage their emotions and develop skills to resolve problems in relationships and with peers, she says. Along with therapy, those programs could help to reduce suicidal behavior and youth violence. Street outreach programs may also reduce gang-related violence. Parents and pediatricians talking about storing guns safely — a policy touted by the American Academy of Pediatrics, but one that has met resistance in some states — is another option.

There’s another big need, too: more data.

Despite a better picture of what’s happening when kids get a hold of guns, the data are fragmentary and incomplete, says pediatrician Eliot Nelson of the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital in Burlington. For instance, information from the NVDRS was limited to 17 states, so the numbers aren’t nationally representative. Last year, the database was expanded to 42 states and could eventually be expanded to all 50, but that will take additional funding from Congress.

The way gun injury and death data are coded in databases is another issue. Many unintentional deaths, such as when a child accidentally shoots and kills a sibling or friend, are labeled homicides, Hemenway says. Such misclassifications make it more difficult to create a policy, he says. Take, for instance, encouraging parents to lock up guns in the house. Without correctly coded data to say that younger kids are more likely to be killed by a gun at home while older kids are more likely to be killed by guns at a friend’s house, it’s harder to know how to talk to parents. For parents of young kids, the message might be to lock up their own guns; for parents of older kids, it might be to inquire about guns at the homes of their children’s friends. “We don’t always know who best to target our message to,” Nelson says.

Studies such as Fowler’s are slowly filling in the gaps. But not fast enough for kids like Bentley, Harmony, Shadi and Artem. “We want to keep growing our knowledge to prevent problems,” Nelson says. But, he says, it’s hard to do when money and politics hamper research into the problem. Gun-related deaths ranks third as the leading cause of death in 1- to 17-year-olds in the United States. “Gun death in kids is such a common problem,” Nelson says. “We can’t continue to ignore it.”

In Carl Sagan’s 1985 sci-fi novel Contact, a radio astronomer battles naysayers and funding setbacks to persist in her audacious plan — scanning the skies for signals from aliens. Sagan had real-life inspiration for his book (and the 1997 movie of the same name): astronomer Jill Tarter, who spearheaded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, for decades.

In Sagan’s story, the protagonist, Ellie Arroway, detects mysterious chatter from the cosmos. Tarter had no such luck. But her story, told by journalist Sarah Scoles in Making Contact, still provides insights into what it means to be human in a vast universe potentially harboring other life.
Tarter began her career as a typical radio astronomer, studying mainstream topics like stars and galaxies as a Ph.D. student. But after graduating in 1975, she began to focus on SETI, poring over data from radio telescopes, searching for unnatural blips that could be a sign of an intelligent civilization. SETI researchers typically focus on radio waves because those long wavelengths can travel through our galaxy’s dust without being absorbed.
Writings about SETI are prone to dreamy romanticism, but Making Contact admirably steers clear of excessive sentimentality. As a child gaping at the stars, Tarter wondered if creatures in the heavens were looking in our direction. Of course, Scoles notes, plenty of kids have wondered the same thing. Though Tarter’s childhood musings might seem special in retrospect, they aren’t what make her stand out.

Instead, Scoles — who has clear affection for her subject — highlights Tarter’s tenacity. In the face of numerous obstacles, Tarter pushed the field forward, seemingly by force of will.

In a detailed portrait of how the science sausage gets made, the book follows Tarter as she faced numerous funding woes. The field of SETI, which has at various points in its history received money through NASA, is an easy target for funding cuts, with some politicians deriding it as a wasteful hunt for “little green men.” Tarter, like the fictional Arroway, fought with Congress for taxpayer dollars SETI received, then scrambled for cash from other sources to keep telescopes and other equipment in operation. Wealthy donors kept SETI afloat — and still do. To maximize their ability to accept funding, Tarter and other SETI pioneers founded the nonprofit SETI Institute, in Mountain View, Calif., in 1984.
Throughout, Tarter somehow managed to maintain her passion for a long shot search.

Although it’s a compelling story, the book stumbles in a few places, mainly minor sloppiness with physics facts, which may bother the most astute readers. (Scoles writes, for example, “Light is the only way we can learn about the universe,” neglecting gravitational waves and neutrinos, both of which have revealed secrets of cosmic objects.)

Now retired, Tarter has lost her chance to follow in Arroway’s fictional footsteps — she will never find any alien communiqués. But even if astronomers never hear from E.T., Tarter sees benefits in the search: SETI is an opportunity to make humankind less selfish. Just the thought that other creatures might inhabit the universe can make human squabbles seem less significant.

A strange property of spider silk helps explain how the arachnids avoid twirling wildly at the end of their ropes.

Researchers from China and England harvested silk from two species of golden orb weaver spiders, Nephila edulis and Nephila pilipes, and tested it with a torsion pendulum. The device has a hanging weight that rotates clockwise or counterclockwise, twisting whatever fiber it hangs from. When a typical fiber is twisted, the weight spins back and forth around an equilibrium point, eventually returning to its original orientation.
But unlike several fibers the scientists tested — copper wires, carbon fibers and even human hair — the spider silk deformed when twisted. That distortion changed the silk’s equilibrium point and cut down on the back-and-forth spinning, the scientists report in the July 3 Applied Physics Letters. Eventually, scientists might design spin-resistant ropes for mountain climbers, who, like spiders, should avoid doing the twist.

A new type of soft robot can go under the knife and make a full recovery in about a day.

Researchers fashioned a robotic hand, gripper and muscle from self-healing rubbery material. To test their robots’ resilience, the engineers sliced each with a scalpel, then put them in an oven. After cranking up the heat to 80° Celsius, baking the bots for 40 minutes, then cooling them to room temperature, the researchers found that all three bots’ cuts had completely closed up. Twenty-four hours later, the machines had regained at least 98 percent of their original strength and flexibility, the researchers report online August 16 in Science Robotics.
Incisions broke bonds between two chemical ingredients that make up the material, furan and maleimide. At higher temperatures, these chemical compounds can also split up, as well as move around more easily. So as the researchers cooled the material, the compounds were able to re-bond with those on the other side of an incision.
“This material could heal, in theory, an infinite number of times,” says study coauthor Bram Vanderborght, an engineer at Vrije University Brussels.

The work helps address a major limitation of squishy, flexible robots — which are better suited than their traditional, rigid counterparts for navigating rough terrain and handling fragile objects, but are vulnerable to punctures and tears. Self-healing machines could pave the way for creating more durable, reusable soft bots.

Nearly 1 in 5 adolescents has suffered at least one concussion, according to a survey of U.S. teens. And 5.5 percent reported two or more concussions diagnosed in their lifetimes, researchers report in the Sept. 26 JAMA.

About 13,000 eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders participated in the 2016 Monitoring the Future survey, an annual national questionnaire of adolescent behavior and health given in schools. Among other questions, teens were asked whether they had ever had a head injury that was diagnosed as a concussion — 19.5 percent replied “yes.” Those teens were more likely than others to play competitive sports and be male, white and in a higher grade.

Previous studies have found that kids taking part in contact sports are at higher risk of suffering a concussion. These new data on actual prevalence of concussions, though self-reported, are important, say the authors, for crafting prevention efforts that protect teens from injuries.

People in the United States who wear contact lenses share an eye-opening characteristic. Roughly 85 percent report regularly taking at least one risk when wearing or cleaning their lenses. In the Aug. 18 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describe results from a 2016 national survey of more than 6,000 people.

Contrary to previous studies, teens did better in some categories than adults. The no-no’s below can lead to serious eye infections, mainly by introducing microorganisms into the eye. Even water that’s safe to drink or swim in can bug up lenses.

Gene-editing tools heralded as hope for fighting invader rats, malarial mosquitoes and other scourges may be too powerful to use in their current form, two new papers warn.

Standard forms of CRISPR gene drives, as the tools are called, can make tweaked DNA race through a population so easily that a small number of stray animals or plants could spread it to new territory, predicts a computer simulation released November 16 at bioRxiv.org. Such an event would have unknown, potentially damaging, ramifications, says a PLOS Biology paper released the same day.
“We need to get out of the ivory tower and have this discussion in the open, because ecological engineering will affect everyone living in the area,” says Kevin Esvelt of MIT, a coauthor of both papers who studies genetic solutions to ecological problems. What’s a pest in one place may be valued in another, so getting consent to use a gene drive could mean consulting people across a species’s whole range, be it several nations or continents.

Researchers have constructed this kind of drive in yeast, a fruit fly and several mosquitoes, but none of the tools have been deployed yet in the wild (SN: 12/12/15, p. 16). Meanwhile, some researchers are already working to add brakes or off-switches into a new generation of gene drives.

The major concern is that current gene drives “are probably too powerful for us to seriously consider deploying in conservation,” says geneticist Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Gemmell is a coauthor of the PLOS Biology paper.
This opinion could prove especially controversial in New Zealand. In 2016, the government resolved to protect the nation’s imperiled biodiversity by exterminating invader rats, stoats and possums that are wreaking havoc on native species. Gene drives just might make that possible.

Though warning of perils, the researchers also propose some solutions. A weaker system, which Esvelt calls a daisy drive, splits up components of the drive called guide RNAs. These guide RNAs direct the gene-editing machinery to its DNA target, where molecular scissors then snip and swap genetic material. As genes get inherited or not in the chancy jumbling of sexual reproduction, descendants in later generations become less likely to inherit all the spaced-apart pieces needed to operate the gene drive.

Esvelt’s lab is working to create a daisy drive in two kinds of nematode worms and is looking at other species as well. Other labs are now working on tamer gene drives, too.

Anthony A. James of the University of California, Irvine says that the disease-carrying Anopheles mosquito species that he and his colleagues have equipped with gene drives are self-limiting. When females end up with two of the genes he’s inserting, they don’t “survive very well after they have fed on blood.” Researchers are now raising these mosquitoes to see whether the genes spread and then dwindle away. “We don’t need our genes to last forever,” James says, “only long enough to contribute to getting rid of malaria.”

Another lab’s current version of disease-fighter mosquitoes already has a touch of the daisy. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes engineered with some built-in parts of the gene editor have their guide RNA split into two parts and put on different chromosomes, says molecular biologist Omar Akbari of the University of California, San Diego. Pictures of many weird mosquitoes created this way — all yellow or with three eyes or forked wings — attest to the fact that the drive system works. Akbari’s research appears November 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Akbari is not very worried about the risk of accidentally wiping out disease-carrying mosquitoes. “A thousand children die every day,” he says. It would be unethical not to use a tool that could lessen the loss, he says.

He does recognize that the case for caution could be different for other species. “A lot of pet owners would be sad,” he says, if a gene drive went wrong and escaped worldwide during some future attempt to rid, say, Australia of its terribly destructive feral cats.

Magnetic poles are seemingly inseparable: Slice a magnet in half, and you get two smaller magnets, each with its own north and south poles. But exotic magnetic particles that flout this rule may be lurking undetected, some physicists suspect.

The hunt is in full swing for these hypothetical particles known as magnetic monopoles — which possess a lone north or south pole. Now, two groups of researchers have further winnowed down the particles’ possible masses and characteristics, using data from particle accelerators and the corpses of stars.
There’s good reason to suspect magnetic monopoles are out there, some physicists suggest. The particles’ existence would explain why electric charge is quantized — why it always seems to come in integer multiples of the charge of an electron instead of a continuous range of values. As a result, magnetic monopoles are popular. “A lot of people think they should exist,” says James Pinfold, a particle physicist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

If even a single magnetic monopole were detected, the discovery would rejigger the foundations of physics. The equations governing electricity and magnetism are mirror images of one another, but there’s one major difference between the two phenomena. Protons and electrons carry positive and negative electric charges, respectively, but no known particle has a magnetic charge. A magnetic monopole would be the first, and if one were discovered, electricity and magnetism would finally be on equal footing.

For decades, scientists have searched fruitlessly for magnetic monopoles. Recent work at the Large Hadron Collider, located at the particle physics lab CERN in Geneva, has reinvigorated the search. Magnetic monopoles might be produced there as protons slam together at record-high energies of 13 trillion electron volts.

Unfortunately, the latest search by Pinfold and collaborators with the Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC, or MoEDAL (pronounced “medal”), found no magnetic monopoles, despite analyzing six times the data as the project’s previous pursuits. Still, the new research has set some of the most stringent constraints yet on how easily the hypothetical particles may interact with matter, the MoEDAL collaboration reports December 28 at arXiv.org.
Magnetic monopoles may also dwell where magnetic fields are extraordinarily strong and temperatures are high. Under these conditions, pairs of monopoles might form spontaneously. Such extreme environments can be found around a special kind of dead star known as a magnetar, and in the aftermath of collisions of heavy atomic nuclei in particle accelerators. By studying these two scenarios, physicists Arttu Rajantie and Oliver Gould, both of Imperial College London, put new constraints on monopoles’ masses, the researchers report in the Dec. 15 Physical Review Letters.

If magnetic monopoles had relatively small masses, the particles would sap the strength of magnetars’ magnetic fields. That fact suggests that the particles must be more massive than about 0.3 billion electron volts — about a third the mass of a proton — the researchers calculate. That estimate depends on another unknown property of monopoles, the strength of their magnetic charge. The particles have a minimum possible magnetic charge. A magnetic charge larger than this baseline value would correspond to a minimum mass greater than 0.3 billion electron volts.

For a monopole with twice the minimum charge, Rajantie and Gould determined that magnetic monopoles must be more massive than about 10 billion electron volts, going by data from collisions of lead nuclei in the Super Proton Synchrotron, a smaller accelerator at CERN. Studying similar collisions of lead nuclei in the LHC could improve this estimate, due to the LHC’s higher collision energies.

While other experiments have set higher monopole mass limits than the new estimates, those analyses relied on questionable theoretical assumptions, Rajantie says. “These are currently the strongest bounds on the masses of magnetic monopoles that don’t rely on assumptions” about how the particles are created, he says.

The results are “very exciting,” says theoretical physicist Kimball Milton of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, who was not involved with the research. Of course, he adds, it’s “not as exciting as if somebody actually found a magnetic monopole.”

Even if monopoles do exist, the particles might be so heavy that they can’t be produced by accelerators or cosmic processes. The only magnetic monopoles in the universe might be remnants of the Big Bang. A future incarnation of MoEDAL, located on a mountaintop instead of in an accelerator’s cavern, could look for such magnetic monopoles that sprinkle down on Earth from space, Pinfold says.

Three days after Bronny James revealed that he had committed to USC, the Trojans have landed another son of an NBA great.

DJ Rodman, the son of five-time NBA champion Dennis Rodman, announced on Tuesday that he will transfer to USC for the 2023-24 season.

Rodman played four seasons at Washington State. He will use his extra year of eligibility to join a USC team that is loading up on talent.

Just how good is Rodman? And what role could he play for the Trojans?

How good is DJ Rodman?
Rodman was a reliable starter in 30 out of 31 games for Washington State this past season. He is coming off his most impactful year, posting 9.6 points, 5.8 rebounds, 1.4 assists and 0.7 steals while shooting 38.1 percent from beyond the arc in 2022-23.

Rodman scored in double figures in 12 contests this past year, including a 23-point performance against Eastern Washington in the NIT. He corralled double-digit rebounds in four games and snagged at least two steals in eight games.

Rodman plays on the wing, but he competes on the defensive end and on the glass — just like his father. He's a versatile defender who will take on perimeter assignments and battle big men in the post.

He'll create second-chance opportunities with a nose for the ball as an offensive rebounder, and he's capable of stretching the floor with an improved 3-point shot.

Rodman will add depth to a reloaded USC roster that should compete for a Pac-12 championship next season.

DJ Rodman college stats
Rodman played 111 games over four seasons at Washington State. He served as a role player over his first three seasons before being promoted to the starting lineup for his senior season.

You can find his career averages below:

21.7 minutes per game
5.5 points per game
4.0 rebounds per game
0.9 assists per game
0.4 steals per game
0.2 blocks per game
39.8 percent FG
35.2 percent 3PT
77.6 percent FT
USC roster for 2023, including DJ Rodman and Bronny James
Name Height Position Class Hometown High School
Isaiah Collier 6-4 G FR Marietta, Ga. Wheeler HS
Bronny James 6-3 G FR Los Angeles, Calif. Sierra Canyon HS
Arrinten Page 6-9 F FR Marrieta, Ga. Wheeler HS
Kobe Johnson 6-6 F JR Milwaukee, Wis. Nicolet HS
Vincent Iwuchukwu 7-1 F SO San Antonio, Texas Southern Calif. Academy
Oziyah Sellers 6-5 G SO Hayward, Calif. Southern Calif. Academy
Boogie Ellis 6-3 G SR San Diego, Calif. Mission Bay HS
Zach Brooker 6-0 G SR Calabasas, Calif. Sierra Canyon HS
Joshua Morgan 6-11 F SR Sacramento, Calif. Sheldon HS
Harrison Hornery 6-10 F JR Toowoomba, Australia Mater Dei HS
Kijani Wright 6-9 F SO Los Angeles, Calif. Sierra Canyon HS
DJ Rodman 6-6 F SR Newport Beach, Calif. JSerra Catholic HS
Did LeBron James and Dennis Rodman play together?
No, they did not.

Rodman retired after the 1999-00 season. James was drafted in 2003, making his NBA debut at the start of the 2003-04 season.

When the 2017 Great American Eclipse hit totality and the sky went dark, bees noticed.

Microphones in flower patches at 11 sites in the path of the eclipse picked up the buzzing sounds of bees flying among blooms before and after totality. But those sounds were noticeably absent during the full solar blackout, a new study finds.

Dimming light and some summer cooling during the onset of the eclipse didn’t appear to make a difference to the bees. But the deeper darkness of totality did, researchers report October 10 in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America. At the time of totality, the change in buzzing was abrupt, says study coauthor and ecologist Candace Galen of the University of Missouri in Columbia.
The recordings come from citizen scientists, mostly school classes, setting out small microphones at two spots in Oregon, one in Idaho and eight in Missouri. Often when bees went silent at the peak of the eclipse, Galen says, “you can hear the people in the background going ‘ooo,’ ‘ahh’ or clapping.”
There’s no entirely reliable way (yet) of telling what kinds of bees were doing the buzzing, based only on their sounds, Galen says. She estimates that the Missouri sites had a lot of bumblebees, while the western sites had more of the tinier, temperature-fussy Megachile bees.
More western samples, with the fussier bees, might have let researchers see an effect on the insects of temperatures dropping by at least 10 degrees Celsius during the eclipse. The temperature plunge in the Missouri summer just “made things feel a little more comfortable,” Galen says.

This study of buzz recordings gives the first formal data published on bees during a solar eclipse, as far as Galen knows. “Insects are remarkably neglected,” she says. “Everybody wants to know what their dog and cat are doing during the eclipse, but they don’t think about the flea.”