The art world has been mourning the loss of seven paintings swiped from a Dutch museum last year--a Picasso, a Matisse and a Monet among them--whose remains authorities might have found inside a Romanian woman's stove. The famous works, if they have really been found, have been burned to a crisp, presumably to destroy evidence of the theft. So how do you figure out whether a pile of distinctly painting-like ashes belonged to the stolen artwork in question?

Forensic specialists screen the scorched remains with optical and electronic microscopy, according to a New Yorker piece on the case.

They look for specific materials that might come from a painting. "In an oven, you're going to be looking for things like metal, fasteners, nails, trace elements of the paints. There were some early paints that had lead in them. There was toxic yellow paint that French Impressionists used that had arsenic in it, and arsenic is a compound that doesn't break down in a fire," Robert Wittman of the FBI's Art Crime Team told the magazine.

They use x-ray fluorescence and x-ray diffraction to determine what elements the remains consist of, then use infrared and Raman microspectroscopy to compare molecules from the evidence to artwork from the same period.

Olga Dogaru, the owner of the stove in question, has claimed in court that she didn't, in fact, burn the paintings. Forensics experts are still preparing their report on the ashy evidence, but so far they're only looking to see whether the ashes contained remains of substances used in paintings--not authenticating whether the ashes could have come from the stolen paintings in question.

"Our task was to establish if the ash samples provided by the public prosecutor [contained] traces of substances and implements used to make paintings-for example, nails used to fix the canvas on chassis, substances used to prepare the painting primes, and pigments used by professional painters to prepare the oil colors," Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu of the Romanian National History Museum told The New Yorker.

[The New Yorker]

"If an asteroid hits the moon, it will just get another crater," says Gareth Wynn-Williams, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii. It would take a moon-size object to move the moon, says Clark Chapman, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, and most likely the moon wouldn't survive. Hitting it with a much larger, denser object would be like whacking an egg with a golf club.

But let's say that the moon and the thing hitting it will react like solid billiard balls. None of the known asteroids larger than 60 miles in diameter orbit anywhere near the moon. OK, how about if the largest known asteroid, Ceres-which at 600 miles across is roughly the size of California and Nevada combined-did manage to slip out of its place in the asteroid belt and set out on a collision course for the moon?

Hardly a budge, Wynn-Williams says. It's the equivalent of a four-year-old trying to knock over an NFL lineman. The moon orbits the Earth at some 0.635 miles per second. This orbital momentum is so great that it would overwhelm the impact force of a collision and just continue zinging around the planet.

By now it should be clear that the moon is staying put, but what could send it toward Earth? At minimum, you'd need an object of the same size and density as the moon to hit it at the same speed, and in the opposite direction of its orbit. This could stop the moon in its tracks, and it would fall onto Earth. Even if the collision only pushed the moon into a lower or less-circular orbit, that doesn't mean we would escape unscathed, though: If its new orbit halved its current distance from the Earth, ocean tides would get about eight times as big, Wynn-Williams says. "A lot of New Yorkers would get very wet."

This article originally appeared in the May 2010 issue of Popular Science magazine.

So you want to bike, but, ugh, pedaling, right? Get an electric bike instead! And, if you already shelled out the dough for a regular bike, you can just invest in this Kickstarter for Rubbee, an attachable engine that pedals your bike for you.

Electric-bike conversion kits aren't hard to find, but this looks like an especially easy (and stylish) way of transitioning: the machine just hooks on to the back of your seat and one end rests on the back wheel. An electric-powered wheel on the Rubbee spins against the bike wheel, creating friction and spinning the bike wheel. Spinning bike wheels, you perhaps are aware, is how people bike. Rubbee can get the bike moving at up to 15 mph for up to 15 miles. It weighs 14 pounds and takes about two hours to charge.

Rubbee's on Kickstarter right now, and the creators are shipping them off as reward for donating 799 pounds, or a little more than $1,200. You can get an electric bike for much cheaper than that, but if there's an analog bike you're really attached to, or you're not a fan of how most electric bikes are rigged, maybe it's worth it for an easy upgrade.

Garbage can use varies. In Finland, where the Enevo One smart garbage can sensor was invented, the garbage cans near the sea are filled as quickly as they can be emptied during the summertime. Summertime in Finland is lovely, I bet! People hang out by the sea, fishermen and sailors do their fishing and sailing, and Finlanders of all sorts do things that result in garbage.

But in the wintertime, I'm guessing, that nice little coastal area is now covered in approximately one to three vertical miles of ice (note: may not be entirely accurate). So there are fewer tourists touristing, fewer hangers hanging, fewer fishermen fishing, and fewer sailors sailing. Which means there's less garbage as well. But the garbage trucks have to come by with the same frequency, whether the can is overflowing or whether it's empty.

This is actually a problem! Unnecessary pickups waste time, labor, and energy: garbage trucks use lots of fuel and emit lots of things we don't like very much, and you can drastically reduce the amount of waste by cutting down on the amount of time you spend on the road. So the Enevo One system provides a solution: a very small puck-shaped sensor that mounts to the underside of the garbage can lid. It can sense how full the can is, and communicate that information to the collection company.

Even better, the Enevo has some "smart" qualities, meaning it can do a little bit of light thinking for itself. It collects and analyzes the garbage data and draws conclusions from it, so it can figure out when each can is likely to be full, how long it takes, and when the fullness ebbs and flows (if it does). There's no reason it needs to be restricted to Finland; this kind of tech would work well just about anywhere, though it might need a slight adjustment for international cans (here in New York City, for example, the cans have no lids). Also, it looks cool, and as always, we love all garbagetech.

[via FastCoExist]

You've probably seen water-repellant textiles where droplets of water miraculously bubble upon contact with the fabric. You may even own a pair of moisture-wicking workout pants. Smart fabrics have slowly made their way into the consumer market primarily in fitness wear but the potentials of using smart textiles still remains relatively unexplored.

Below are four magical materials that will capture your imagination and provide a glimpse at the novel properties of our future wardrobe.

Self-Repairing Fabric

In the near future you may never need to mend a pair of socks. Just watch the video - it's incredible.

Water Soluble Textiles

Clothes that dissolve and disappear may solve fashion's sustainability crisis.

Helen Storey - Wonderland from hh1edits on Vimeo.

Environmentally Responsive Fabrics

Similar to the way our skin responds with goosebumps when we feel a slight chill, our garments will be subtly and poetically responsive to environmental factors. CLIMATOLOGY is an exploration of the way our environments and garments may shift shape and color in response to environmental changes such as moisture, heat and light.

Climatology: Celebrating Nature's Survival Tactics from Elaine Ng Yan Ling on Vimeo.

Bio-Leather

Putting microbes to work, Suzanne Lee grows a flexible, translucent material with similar properties to leather.

This post was adapted from an article that originally appeared on Fashioningtech.

Researchers at the Someya-Sekitani Lab in Japan have engineered tactile sensors that can be bent, twisted, crumpled, submerged in liquid, stretched, and more--and they're lighter than a feather. Tactile sensors pick up on touch, force, or pressure--think of the way your car responds when you step on the brake, or (a more complex version) your touchscreen phone--but most existing sensors are silicon-based and therefore bulky. The latest innovation could lead to better and cheaper medical instruments and new health monitoring systems. It could also, eventually, advance consumer electronics, displays, and robotics, the researchers say.

The paper was published in Nature, and the researchers are from University of Tokyo, Johannes Kepler University, and University of Texas at Dallas. Their tactile sensor is made up of organic, carbon-based transistors, which are themselves composed of ultrathin semi-conductors--aluminum oxide dielectric with a "self-assembled monolayer of gold" deposited on top, amounting to just over 20 nanometers. Jonathan Reeder, an engineer and researcher on the project from UT Dallas, explains that the wisp-like semi-conductors were one of the major accomplishments that allowed them to get the complete sensor so thin.

The transistors are deposited onto a special foil with a very rough surface. The foil is five times thinner than saran wrap, and even more compliant: its rough texture allows the circuitry to remain very secure in the "nanotized grooves and valleys," Reeder says, and allows the product to adhere to almost any surface.

Many researchers are focusing on flexible electronics, but the ones coming out of Someya-Sekitani Lab are the thinnest and most flexible circuits to date, the researchers say. (They have aptly nicknamed their work "imperceptible electronics.") The sensors can conform to almost any 3-D shape. They're also resilient, the research team says: the sensors maintain functionality up to 170 degrees C (though beyond 100 degrees C their efficiency gradually tapers off); they're nearly unaffected when immersed in saline solutions; and they can be crumpled up, flattened back out, and even placed on rubber and stretched out--none of which drastically impacts performance.

The researchers envision several potential applications. In a medical setting, you could place the sensors on skin to monitor vital signs like temperature and heart rate. Eventually you could even place them inside the body on muscles or organs for either monitoring purposes or electrical stimulation (of muscles along the heart, for example). In technology, Reeder says the most promising applications are in wearable electronics. Let your imagination run wild for a moment: how cool would it be to have an imperceptible touch control panel on your sleeve for your phone or music player?

They range from routine to absurd: How do I put together a biolab spill kit? Is it okay to work with amphibian cells? Oh, and should I worry about the fecal samples I've been culturing in my bedroom and the fungus they've been growing? These are the sorts of questions appearing on the newly launched Ask a Biosafety Expert (ABE) service on DIYbio.org.

It's no secret that biohackers, who do lab work in repurposed spaces with homemade equipment, face unconventional safety concerns. For years, they've rejiggered standard lab protocols or relied on online forums to answer their most basic questions. This January, the ABE service on DIYbio.org began providing professional advice. Here, for example, is the response to that fecal samples question: "Both the organisms that you are growing from the fecal samples and the fungi that took over the plates you are using could be infectious and/or toxic to you."

Kuiken and Bobe have made it their mission to establish standards for the DIY community.Developed by DIYBio's cofounder Jason Bobe and Todd Kuiken of the Woodrow Wilson Center, ABE is an online service that connects the general public with a panel of biosafety experts from the American Biological Safety Association (ABSA). It functions almost like an online tech support page, and provides DIYers with support similar to that at government and academic labs, where institutional biosafety committees are trained to advise. "The goal is for it to become a knowledge base," Bobe says.

Common sense can take a DIYer a long way, but each new experiment comes fettered with its own safety concerns, and thus, demands a unique set of safety protocols. One query, for example, sought advice on the installation of nitrogen tanks in the lab. Because the lab space was small and lacked a ventilation system, the experts advised against the tank. They also took the time to calculate that if the tank failed, the oxygen level would drop to just 0.5 percent above the level that might kill or incapacitate you.

Kuiken and Bobe have made it their mission to establish standards for the DIY community. ABE is the culmination of their two-year collaboration. In 2011, the two organized a European and U.S. congress to establish generally accepted DIYbio codes of ethics. Kuiken says ABE is another means to "let DIYbio write its own story, as opposed to other people coming in and saying ‘Oh here are these hackers and you need to be afraid of them.'"

'Ask a Biosafety Expert' is way to let DIYbio write its own story.ABE hasn't been all microbes and fecal samples. Other questions have been thinly veiled attempts by opponents to bait the service. One suspicious question they received came from an apparent high school student who wanted to work with HIV. When Kuiken and Bobe tried to follow up, the student vanished. Eventually, they bluntly advised against the project altogether and told him speak to a teacher. Kuiken says, "We assumed that was going to happen, we know we will probably get questions submitted by reporters that are trying to get information to test the security aspect of ABE."

"It's a process of learning," Bobe says. He hopes ABE will "encourage people to look down to the end of an experiment before they even get started."

Matt Niederhuber researches cell biology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Twitter: @genspacenyc

Sir James Dyson, Inventor General of all the gadgets you didn't realize you needed, has just released this child-sized vacuum for urban apartments. It's lovely.

The DC49 Multi Floor weighs about 11 pounds and is powered by the same motor as Dyson's hand-dryers--those ones that create a mini-hurricane you slowly pull your hands through. (Dyson says the vacuum's extra quiet, although the hand-dryers definitely aren't.) The idea's to attract city-dwellers short on storage space, and you can carry the vacuum's motor with one hand, if this disembodied arm photo is accurate.

There's a standard vacuum-cleaner head you can attach, and the DC49 also includes the Dyson Ball tech, which lets the vacuum pivot to steer better. Your furniture's legs will no longer live in fear.

[Dyson via Dezeen]

Anthony Weiner has been at it again. Or he's been at it all along? Regardless, the former disgraced Congressman turned NYC mayoral candidate has admitted to sexting up a storm last year, even as he proclaimed to anyone who would listen that his illicit messaging days were over.

Though Weiner seems to be particularly persistent with his scandalous behavior, he's hardly the only politician to get himself involved in an illicit affair and then lie about it. Are politicians just a bunch of lying egomaniacs who think that everyone wants to see their junk?

Sadly, the science isn't really there to prove that. Plus, Anthony Weiner hasn't been diagnosed with anything--he doesn't call himself a sex addict, though some of his behavior sure seems to resemble compulsion. So it's impossible to say what's motivating him to potentially derail his career for a few nudie pics. We'll leave that to his psychologist.

But the strange case of Carlos Danger--Weiner's alias from this latest round of illicit exchanges with a 23-year-old calling herself Sydney Leathers--seemed too weird not to search for some underlying logic.

Psychopathic Politicians

According to one study from The Journal of Personality And Social Psychology, some politicians do tend to share personality traits with psychopaths. By analyzing personality data collected from 121 living experts on U.S. presidents, the research, published last year, found that some traits we associate with psychopathy might actually be helpful in higher level politics.

"Psychopathic personality (psychopathy) is a constellation of personality traits encompassing superficial charm, egocentricity, dishonesty, guiltlessness, callousness, risk taking, poor impulse control, and, according to many authors, fearlessness, social dominance, and immunity to anxiety," the authors explain.

They go on:

"There was a class of traits that we called 'fearless dominance' that seemed to tap into more of the adaptive traits [of psychopathy]," lead author Scott Lilienfeld, a psychology professor at Emory University, tells PopularScience.com in an interview. "Fearless dominance is very similar to boldness--they tend to be socially and physically fearless, tend to be very resilient in the face of stress."

Presidents like Andrew Jackson and Lyndon B. Johnson scored high on all markers of psychopathological traits, with both positive and negative connotations, "being both fearless and dominant but also being quite impulsive and self-centered," as Lilienfeld puts it.  

Narcissism

In a forthcoming study accepted by Psychological Science, Lilienfeld and his colleagues used the same data on presidential personalities to tackle another trait that can be associated with both political success and psychological disorder: narcissism.

As might be expected, presidents exhibit higher levels of grandiose narcissism--the flamboyant ego trip variety of narcissism, as compared to the Woody Allen, insecure self-obsession variety--than the general population, and grandiose narcissism is on the rise in presidential personalities (though that might be because it's easier to identify these traits in more recent presidents). Like fearless dominance, grandiose narcissism can be helpful in some respects in politics--the study found it was positively correlated with winning the popular vote and initiating new legislation. Narcissistic presidents were perceived as more persuasive and better communicators.

"You have to have a big ego to want to be president," Lilienfeld says. "You need to have a thick skin. A little bit of those traits not an entirely a bad thing."

Yet high levels of grandiose narcissism also correlated with facing impeachment resolutions and unethical behavior, including extramarital affairs. According to the study, narcissism has been linked to deceit and failure to learn from mistakes, and people with higher levels of grandiose narcissism might be more likely to take "unwise risks."

Texting pictures of your junk while you're still in the public eye is an unwise risk by most standards. And, as another researcher pointed out, power could also come into play. Dean Keith Simonton, a professor at the University of California Davis who has also studied the psychology of presidents, notes that politicians do tend be slightly different from the average citizen, in a way that might influence their sexual behavior, a la Carlos Danger. "One especially striking trait is their strong need for power, that is, the motive to exert an impact on others, to leave an impression, to persuade and control, and to attain high prestige," Simonton explained via email. "In essence, the "Alpha male" (or female) syndrome. This power often takes the form of aggressive sexual behavior - the 'conquest.' Indeed, the Don Juan theme in literature is strongly associated with power motivation.

Do Voters Even Care?

Voters tend to look down on a politician's sexual indiscretions. But does it actually impact how they vote? According to a 2003 paper from The Social Science Journal, a few studies have argued that charges of immorality are more damaging than other kinds of accusations. Others have found that extramarital affairs aren't as damaging to a politician's reputation as something criminal, like tax evasion.

"People don't necessary see a straight sex scandal as representative of an individual's ability to govern effectively," political scientist David Doherty says. "A sex scandal can be compartmentalized as, this is part of your personal life. Tax evasion suggests an unwillingness to adhere to the laws that you're making."

Regardless, when members of Congress get implicated in scandals, their re-election margins falter. Vincent Moscardelli, a political science professor, says Weiner's case is a little difference, both because he's not an incumbent in the mayoral race, and because it's hard to tell whether voters will see this latest round of scandal as an extension of the scandal that caused him to resign from Congress in 2010.

Moscardelli and his colleagues at the University of Connecticut found in a study published last month that it takes four to six years for a member of Congress to recover from a scandal, votes-wise. Scandal-implicated candidates don't get fewer votes, but their opponents tend to get more. Voters turn out especially to "kick the bum out," according to the study.

By this math, even as Weiner started this latest campaign, he was still technically recovering from his past scandal.

"The more people that see his name associated with this particular scandal, the tougher it's going to be for him to overcome it. There's no way to spin this most recent piece of information in a positive way for his campaign," Moscardelli says. Well, except that Weiner's got great taste in psuedonyms.

By playing with the Google Maps API, Kim Asendorf put together this randomly-generating series: every time you click refresh, a new, weird map of the world pops up. You might get a day-glo view of only city roads, or all the rivers in the world might be color-coded, while borders between countries disappear completely. Check it out.

[Kim Asendorf via Creative Applications Network]

My parents were right!! A spate of studies over the past decade has found that kids who spend more time outdoors are less likely to develop near-sightedness. Outdoor time seems to protect kids even if they do a lot of "near work" (e.g., reading Goosebumps and Animorphs nonstop) and if their parents are myopic.

When I was a kid, my parents would always tell me to stop reading and go play outside. I would scoff: What kind of parents want their kid to stop reading? But maybe they had a point after all.

A team of Australian researchers recently reviewed major studies since 1993 of kids, myopia and time spent outdoors. They found more than a dozen studies, examining more than 16,000 school-age kids in total, that found children were more likely to be nearsighted or to develop nearsightedness if they spent less time outdoors. A few of the later studies also found that being outdoors protected even those kids who did a lot of near work or had myopic parents. The studies included kids living in Europe, the U.S., Asia, the Middle East and Australia.

The researchers did find three studies, comprising about 4,600 kids, where there was no association between nearsightedness and time spent outdoors. Of those three studies, one looked at a group of children that was predominantly myopic (83 percent of them were nearsighted) and spent very little time outdoors overall (just six hours a week, on average). Another study looked at younger children, aged six months to six years. Nearsightedness is rare in kids that young.

Scientists aren't sure yet why being outside prevents kids from becoming Miss Four-Eyes early in life. There is some evidence, from studies done in lab mice, that sunlight may trigger the production of the brain chemical dopamine, which in turn prevents eyes from growing elongated. Nearsighted eyes are overly elongated. However, some conflicting studies mean that scientists can't be sure this is what's happening in humans.

Scientists also aren't exactly sure how strongly outdoors time protects kids. Some studies have found a small protective effect, while others have found larger ones, the Australian reviewers report.

Interestingly, the studies that have looked at near work-stuff you do that requires you to focus on something in a close range, such as reading and writing-haven't consistently shown that it causes nearsightedness. It may be that it's difficult to calculate exactly how much near work a person does, the Australian team says. In addition, some research groups classify computer and TV time as near work, while others don't. Televisions are far away enough that they don't strain the eye too much, while computer use is about half a straining as reading, the Australian team reports.

Some scientists have proposed that frequently looking at far distances helps prevent myopia. That sounds like a good reason for outdoors time's protective effects, but studies about this seem sparse.

Overall, the strong evidence for outdoors time preventing nearsightedness may be a good reason to get kids out more. There are even ongoing clinical trials in China and Taiwan that are examining whether getting classes of kids outside reduces the number of them who develop myopia later.

Bonus FYIs: Nearsightedness In Hollywood

Do Asians all wear glasses, like they do in the movies?

Nearsightedness is much more common in kids in certain Asian countries than in Western countries. Studies of Singapore, China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea have found that around 80 percent of kids are nearsighted. In the U.S. and Europe, 30 percent to 50 percent of kids are.

However, myopia doesn't seem to be genetically linked to race. For example, in ethnically diverse Singapore, similar rates of myopia appear in all the ethnicities that live there, including in people of Indian origin, who are more genetically akin to Middle Eastern and European people than East Asian people. Instead, environmental factors seem to make the difference.

Do smart people really all wear glasses?

This Hollywood stereotype touches upon a truth-adults with more education are more likely to be nearsighted. Studies have also found that kids in Singapore with higher exam scores were more likely to be myopic.

This may mean that the duration or intensity with which people do near work does affect their risk for nearsightedness, even though near work studies have been inconsistent, the Australian reviewers wrote.

In 2009, at the World Championships in Berlin, Usain Bolt beat his own previous world record by 0.11 seconds, running a 9.58-second 100-meter dash. The record is getting more and more difficult to break, as it's history shows (and as we may be nearing the limit of human speed), making each new record-breaking performance intriguing to physicists. A study, published today in the European Journal of Physics, examines the physics of Bolt's historic feat.

Stats:
Height: 6 ft 5 in.
Distance: 100m
Time: 9.58 seconds
Terminal Velocity: 12.2 m/s (27.3 mph)
Average Force: 815.8 newtons
Tailwind: 0.9 m/s (~2 mph)

Using approximate race-day conditions (temperature, altitude, Bolt's surface area) along with measurements from the race's laser velocity guard device (which measured Bolt's position and speed every 0.1 second), the researchers were able to calculate the immense amount of drag that Bolt overcame. Bolt used 81.58 kJ of energy during the race, but 92.21% of that energy was absorbed by the drag! Additionally, Bolt's maximum power output was 2619.5 watts after only 0.89 seconds of the race--more than enough energy to power a large vacuum cleaner (or the Pirate Bay).

The researchers' equations mapped so perfectly onto Bolt's actual performance that they were also able to make predictions based on hypotheticals: if there had been no tailwind at Berlin, Bolt would've ran a 9.68; with a stronger tailwind of 2 m/s, he would've ran a 9.46 (which would've actually beaten the purported limit to how fast a human can run); and obviously, "if Bolt were to run on a planet with a much less dense atmosphere, he could achieve records of fantastic proportions," the lead researcher says in a press release. However, the equations won't work for greater distance sprints, for their calculations assume that in a 100m race the runner is able to maintain "a constant horizontal force," as opposed to, say, a 400m race in which the force gradually tapers off due to extended exertion. It might take extraterrestrial conditions for anyone to beat Bolt's extraordinary feat anytime soon--he's nearly superhuman.

As highly debated as the topic of gun control is in America, there's almost no research into the causes of gun violence or how to prevent it. Until recently, there was a virtual gag on gun violence research because of a stipulation that federally funded research can't promote gun control.

In January, President Obama changed the game by defining gun violence as a public health issue, and calling for more comprehensive research. In response, University of California, Irvine professors Dominik Wodarz and Natalia Komarova created the first mathematical model to measure how legal gun availability impacts firearm-related homicide rates, published today in PLOS ONE.

Mathematical models are more than just equations--they use statistics and data to describe the way a complex system works, and predict how different variables might effect outcomes. This one provides a model for the full range of possible gun-control scenarios--from the total ban of firearms to the arm everyone approach.

"We're trying to bring epidemiological approaches to this field of gun violence and violenceprevention, so we can predict what strategies are better for preventing death instead of just arguing about it," says Wodarz, a biologist who studies disease and evolutionary dynamics through mathematical models.

"What is under debate is essentially an epidemiological problem," he and his co-author and wife, mathematician Natalia Komarova, write in the paper. "How do different gun control strategies affect the rate at which people become killed by attackers, and how can this rate be minimized?"

They incorporated variables like the percent of the population that legally owns guns, the fraction of the criminal population that owns guns illegally, and whether you're more or less likely to die in an attack if you own a gun.

"For instance, if there is no gun control--guns are allowed--what is the percentage of the population that will take up their legal right? How many will actually carry it?" Komarova explains. "This is something that can be estimated."

Though with the previously published data available, their analysis suggested that a ban of private gun possession or a partial reduction in gun availability might lower the rate of gun-related homicides, this model can't tell us definitively how gun deaths might be prevented yet. It's just a preliminary model to how we might approach the debate scientifically, one that can be updated as more statistics become available. "There's a lack of data in the field," Komarova says, because of the effective ban on federal funding for this type of research. "One of the purposes of the study was to encourage people to go and study these things." The researchers liken it to trying to diagnose a disease without having access to things like the patient's temperature or blood pressure.

The researchers plan to continue their work with the model, possibly incorporating how the controversial Stand Your Ground law--the self-defense law that gives people the right to defend themselves against attackers without the obligation to try to retreat from the altercation--might affect homicide rates.

Any science related to gun violence is bound to be controversial, and though they didn't need federal funding to carry out this study, the publication process was unusually rigorous here. The researchers had to satisfy the whims of 11 different peer-reviewers before publication (the typical paper only has a couple), something Komarova says has never happened to either of them over the course of publishing hundreds of journal papers.

"We complained to our colleagues and they said, 'What do you want? It's a paper about gun control," she says.

4,580 degrees Fahrenheit: the surface temperature on exoplanet COROT-7b, one of the 10 worst places to live in the universe, according to NASA scientists

600 miles: the diameter of the largest known asteroid, Ceres (could an asteroid impact knock the moon into Earth?)

70 gigawatts: the power of a concept space laser that would vaporize incoming asteroids

50 percent: the reduction in suicide risk for men who drank two to four cups of coffee daily, in a new study

.001 millimeters: the smallest motion that the Leap Motion controller can track (see how two grade-school friends created the technology that could kill the computer interface as we know it)

11.5 million light-years: the distance to the spiral Sculptor Galaxy, which looks like a trippy watercolor painting in an image from the new Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array

10 days: the average time it took men to recover after heart surgery during the full moon, compared with 14 days during other parts of the moon cycle

2017: the year the U.S. Army may get a new surveillance blimp that can float at 10,000 feet for 30 days straight

20 hours: the time it takes this button-bashing robot to crack the passcode on an Android phone

3 million miles: about how close you could get to the sun before you died

2.2 billion years: the time creatures have been living on land, according to new fossil evidence (that's waaaay earlier than previously thought)

41 degrees Fahrenheit: the temperature of a special cap that could prevent hair loss if worn during chemotherapy

$35: the price of Google's new Chromecast device, a small streaming TV stick