Like birds and other flying animals, the robot uses perching as a way to conserve energy.

The characteristics of gun violence, risk and protective factors, prevention, gun safety technology, and the influence of video games were identified as key research priorities by a committee of the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, chaired by AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner.

“The complexity and frequency of gun-related violence combined with its impact on the health and safety of the nation’s residents make it a topic of considerable public health importance,” Leshner said.

For three years as science adviser at the U.S. State Department and USAID, Nina Fedoroff urged the world research community to collaborate on “truly global problems that do not respect political boundaries or political positions.”

For many lizards, global climate change is a matter of life and death. After decades of surveying Sceloporus lizard populations in Mexico, an international research team has found that rising temperatures have driven 12% of the country’s lizard populations to extinction. An extinction model based on this discovery also forecasts a grim future for these ecologically important critters, predicting that a full 20% of all lizard species could be extinct by the year 2080.