ScienceDaily: Science & Society News

In one of the first studies to try to map a gun market using network science, researchers used the novel scientific approach to understand how close offenders are to guns in the city of Chicago. Recreating Chicago's co-offending network of approximately 188,000 people, the researchers used data on firearms recovered by the Chicago Police Department to locate who in the network possessed those guns.

Prescription cough and cold medicines containing the opioid hydrocodone were more likely to cause serious side effects in children than those containing codeine, according to a new study. The research supports recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) restrictions on prescription hydrocodone- and codeine-containing cough medicines for children and suggests that opioids in general should not be prescribed for coughs and colds in pediatric populations.

Studies have shown that for young people, simply being around peers from different ethnic and racial backgrounds may not be enough to improve attitudes toward other groups. Instead, children and adolescents also need to value spending time and forming relationships with peers from diverse groups. A new study examined how friends in middle school affect each other's attitudes about interacting with peers of different ethnicities and races, finding that they significantly influence each other's racial and ethnic views.

People who are more active when commuting to work by walking or cycling could be cutting their relative risk of developing ischaemic heart disease or stroke by 11 percent and their relative risk of dying from these diseases by 30 percent, suggests a new study.

Researchers have launched upgrades to two tools playing a major role in the fight against the spread of misinformation online.