In Tampa, the conference center’s roof leaked. In Austin, the airport flooded. In Reno, conference organizers had to wait until a motorcycle rally was over before they could do some setup.

During preparation for the SC Conference, a supercomputing meeting, there’s always something getting in the way of networking. But the conference, held annually in November, is perhaps more sensitive to water, delays, and herds of bikes than your average gathering. Because every year, a group of volunteers shows up weeks in advance to build, from the literal ground up, the world’s fastest temporary network. The conference's attendees and exhibitors—from scientific researchers to industry bigwigs—need superfast, reliable connections to stream in the results of their simulations and data analysis. Called SCinet, the network “takes one year to plan, three weeks to build, one week to operate, and less than 24 hours to tear down,” according to its catchphrase.

After all, what good is high-performance computing if its results can’t reach the wider world?

This year, in Denver, one difficulty was elevation—not of the city itself, but of the exhibit hall. The 188 volunteers built up the networks' 13 equipment racks on the floor below the big, main space, constructing the infrastructure that could eventually handle around 3.6 terabits per second of traffic. (For reference, that's probably around 400,000 times more powerful than your personal connection.) And then, after construction, they had to move those millions of dollars of delicate equipment—down a hall, into an elevator, up a floor, and across the exhibit hall.

On November 8, volunteers moved the equipment on customized racklifts. “Welcome to the crazy,” someone said, unprompted, as he rushed past. The SCinetters moved like tightrope walkers, servers in tow, toward the elevators.

One floor up, a guy wearing a Scooby Doo hat pulled up with a forklift, gingerly skewered one rack, and began to lift it to the central stage. As the rack approached the platform, other volunteers put their hands on it, like digital pallbearers. When they were done, eight racks sat on the stage—the beating, blinking heart of the network. Among other duties, it coordinates with the five other racks scattered strategically around the room, ready for the exhibitors that needed 100 gigabit connections, and those requiring mere 1 or 10 gigabit hookups.

The demonstrations started on November 13. NASA brought out a simulation of how shockwaves from meteorites affect the atmosphere—and then how their effects reach the ground, from impacts to tsunamis. Also on board: a simulation showing how person-transporting drones could work, and a global weather prediction model. The Department of Energy presented about particle accelerators, quantum computing in science, and cancer surveillance.

The company Nyriad Limited, meanwhile, has aligned its stars with the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research, to develop a "science data processing" operating system for a telescope called the Murchison Widefield Array, which itself is a precursor to the Square Kilometer Array. The Square Kilometer Array will require more computing power than any previous one: Its data rate will exceed today's global internet traffic. Nyriad, at the conference, revealed its first commercial offering, spun out of its SKA work: a fast and low-power storage solution useful beyond the world of astronomy.

But their talks would have been all talk were it not for the homebuilt network that let them show and tell. In the weeks leading up to the actual conference, the SCinet volunteers laid 60 miles of fiber and crafted 280 WiFi access points for the nearly 13,000 attendees and their attendant devices. Oh, also, they had to have a network service provider crack up a road to illuminate a dark fiber connection.

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SCinet requires lots of physical and mental labor, but people keep coming back because it's their brand of fun—and the kind of professional development they could never get at an individual institution. “They get to touch and play with equipment that they normally wouldn't get to touch and play with in their day jobs,” says Jackie Kern, former general chair of the whole conference and of SCinet. They learn new networking tricks, bring back big-kid versions of their knowledge base, and meet some of the world’s top network types. “It’s a Rolodex moment,” says Jeffrey Schwab, current SCinet chair.

Also, it’s summer camp for people who like to tape fiber to floors. “Everyone wants to be here,” says Schwab.

And the organization is trying to help make it more welcoming to more different kinds of people. Kate Petersen Mace helps run the Women in IT Networking at SC program, which has fully funded 19 women volunteers' attendance since 2015 (around 22 percent of the total number of volunteers, this year, were women). In the male-dominated networking network, that kind of professional opportunity can be rare. Mace says she has often been the only woman in a given professional space. “I got kind of used to it and didn’t think about it,” she says. But the differences and the deficits snap into relief once there are more women in the exhibit hall (real and proverbial), watching the blinking lights on a set of server racks together alongside their male colleagues. "You feel more empowered to speak up," says Mace.

A few hours after the first rack lift, Jim Stewart of the Utah Education and Telehealth Network, who co-chairs the architecture team, treks up to the exhibit hall. All of the equipment is on stage, and SCinet volunteers have installed mirrors behind it, so passersby can appreciate the effort in all dimensions. It won’t last long, though. Remember the catchphrase? “…less than 24 hours to tear down.”

Stewart surveys the hall, thinking, apparently, of creation and destruction. “We’re not even done turning it up, and we are talking about getting out,” he says.

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The West is burning, and there’s no relief in sight. More than 80 large wildfires are raging in an area covering more than 1.4 million acres, primarily in California, Montana, and Oregon, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Taken together, that’s a wildfire larger than the state of Delaware.

California has declared a state of emergency as wildfires burn outside Los Angeles and threaten giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park. In Oregon, the Eagle Creek fire is tearing through the scenic Columbia River Gorge. Seattle, Boise, and Denver are socked in under a haze of smoky air and ash that experts predict could linger until the first snowfall in the mountains.

But nowhere are the fires more devastating than in Montana, where more than 1 million acres of forest burned this summer, and more than 467,000 acres are currently burning in 26 large fires that line the mountainous western side of the state.

Philip Higuera, a professor of fire ecology at the University of Montana, is used to seeing smoky air from his office window in September, but nothing like the thick smoke filling Missoula Valley right now. He recently spoke to CityLab about the fires raging across the West, what we can do about them, and why this year’s big burn might be the new normal.

Breathing the air in Missoula today feels like chain-smoking Chesterfields. Schools aren’t letting the kids out at recess, and public health authorities are saying active adults and children should avoid outdoor exertion. It’s easy to get the impression that this is an extraordinary and unprecedented fire season. But you study forest fires over a timespan of thousands of years. How unusual or unique is this fire season?

It’s not—even in the context of the 21st century. In the Northern Rockies, we had a very large fire year in 2012, in 2007, in 2000, and to an extent in 2003. In this region, 1910 remains the record-setting fire season. If we surpass that, I would be surprised. Events like these are not common on a year-to-year scale. On the other hand, when you look at the role fire plays in ecosystems, you have to look at a longer timescale, and these rare events are what’s expected every once in a while.

Why is this fire season so dramatic?

The main reason there is so much burning right now is the strong seasonal drought across the region. The term we use is that these fires are “climate enabled.” The drought makes most of the vegetation, live or dead, receptive to burning. In Missoula, we had the driest July and August on record and the third-warmest July and August. With those types of conditions, we expect widespread burning. But people underestimate the role that seasonal climate plays in these events, and we start to grasp at lots of other things to explain it.

Aside from the bad air, are most urban residents in fire-affected parts of the West safe?

Aside from that really important impact, I give a cautious yes. There is a risk. And that risk is highest in the wildland-urban interface. If you are living there, you should know that you are living with a much higher risk for exposure to wildfire. And part of the job of educators and U.S. Forest Service outreach is to make that risk known. Eventually insurance companies will also get on board. Floods are obviously on insurance companies’ radar front and center. Wildfire is still not frequent enough that they design programs around it.

Should people in the fire-prone West be living in places like that—in the suburbs and exurbs out in the forested edges of urban areas?

Every place on our planet has some natural phenomenon that is not friendly to humans. If you live on the East Coast, you are going to experience hurricanes. If you live in the Midwest, you are going to experience tornadoes. If you live across forested regions in the West, you are going to experience wildfires. We need to develop in a way that is cognizant of these processes—that is not ignorant of the way the planet, and the environment you live in, works.

Why are these fires so hard to put out?

This goes back to why the fires are happening. The fuels are extremely dry. And most areas burn during extreme weather conditions—the days when it’s hot, humidity is low and there are high winds. These are the conditions in which fires quickly double in size. They are also the conditions where it’s most dangerous to put people in front of the fire. Also, a lot of these fires start in very remote areas with rugged terrain, and just putting people on the ground comes with some risk.

Montana alone has already spent tens of millions of dollars trying to suppress wildfires this summer, and two firefighters have been killed. Is that having any impact, or is it like driving down the expressway throwing bags of money out the window?

When you say it’s not working, the key question is, What’s the goal? “It’s not working” assumes the goal is to have no fires. We will fail if that is the goal. Most of these ecosystems that are burning have evolved with fire. We expect them to burn. We need them to burn if we want them to continue to exist.

So it’s like trying to stop rain?

It’s like trying to stop an earthquake. Trying to stop a volcano. To me, the goal can’t be to have no fire. That’s gotten us into trouble when we pursued that goal. I think the metric should be how much area has burned that we wanted to burn compared to how much burned that we didn’t want to burn. Or closer to the nugget, how many resources were harmed—how many houses were lost, how many people were either directly or indirectly killed?

You don’t see raging forest fires as a failure of suppression efforts?

No. Knowing how climate enables and drives these large fires, I think that it would be impossible to put these fires out.

There is a school of thought that says we should not suppress wildfire because it allows smaller trees and underbrush to accumulate, which leads to larger, hotter fires later. So why not just let it burn?

I think as soon as you live in these environments you will quickly abandon that too-simplistic view. Maybe when I was a graduate student living in Seattle that seemed more like a possibility, but you can’t just let it burn. That would not be wise. It really comes down to what you can afford to burn and what do you want to protect. If the fire is in the wilderness, that’s great. If it’s burning toward a community, that’s not so good.

There’s good fire and bad fire?

There is a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum would be the wilderness fire that is not going to impact anyone—good fire. The fire that burns down your house or kills people—bad fire.

Another school of thought says we should allow more logging to clear trees and help prevent wildfires. Does that hold water?

I don’t think that holds water. That is based on the assumption that fires are occurring because there is more fuel available to burn than in the past. That’s generally not what’s driving this. It’s the drought. It’s true that if cut, there is less fuel in the forests. But in a lot of cases, there is what’s called slash—woody debris—left on the ground that will carry fire across the forest floor, which is what you need for it to spread.

The simple answer—if you want to eliminate fire, then pave it. There will be no fire.

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Is climate change partly to blame for this year’s fires? Are wildfires in the West set to get worse because of it?

That’s what future climate models project. We can’t say this individual fire was because of climate change. We can’t say this year was because of climate change. But these types of years are what we expect to see more frequently. I heard an analogy that I think is useful. If a baseball player is using steroids and hits a home run, can you attribute that home run to steroids? You can’t—but you know that at some point some component of that was brought to you by this artificial input to the system.

There was a study that came out last year, which looked at fire occurrence in the Western United States over the last 40 years using climate modeling. The conclusion was almost half of burning we have seen over the past several decades can be attributed to climate change due to anthropogenic sources. The fire season has gotten significantly longer across the West, on order of 30 days or more during the past few decades.

What are you and your family doing to live through the fire season?

Personally, I made the decision to not live in the wildland-urban interface. I live in the urban part of Missoula. We had one HEPA air filter. Last week we ordered two more. That’s our adaptation.

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Atlas, the hulking humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics, now does backflips. I’ll repeat that. It’s a hulking humanoid that does backflips.

Check out the video below, because it shows a hulking humanoid doing a backflip. And that’s after it leaps from platform to platform, as if such behavior were becoming of a bipedal robot.

To be clear: Humanoids aren’t supposed to be able to do this. It's extremely difficult to make a bipedal robot that can move effectively, much less kick off a tumbling routine. The beauty of four-legged robots is that they balance easily, both at rest and as they’re moving, but bipeds like Atlas have to balance a bulky upper body on just two legs. Accordingly, you could argue that roboticists can better spend their time on non-human forms that are easier to master.

But there’s a case to be made for Atlas and the other bipeds like Cassie (which walks more like a bird than a human). We live in a world built for humans, so there may be situations where you want to deploy a robot that works like a human. If you have to explore a contaminated nuclear facility, for instance, you’ll want something that can climb stairs and ladders, and turn valves. So a humanoid may be the way to go.

If anything gets there, it’ll be Atlas. Over the years, it’s grown not only more backflippy but lighter and more dextrous and less prone to fall on its face. Even if it does tumble, it can now get back up on its own. So it’s not hard to see a future when Atlas does indeed tread where fleshy humans dare not. Especially now that Boston Dynamics is part of the Japanese megacorporation SoftBank, which may have some cash to spend.

While Atlas doing backflips is full-tilt insane, humanoids still struggle. Manipulation, for one, poses a big obstacle, because good luck replicating the human hand. And battery life is a nightmare, what with all the balancing. But who knows, maybe one day humanoids will flip into our lives, or at the very least at the Olympics.

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Nothing in robotics is as unintentionally hilarious as watching a biped fall. But roboticists are making progress- like with this machine named Cassie.

In 1891, a New York doctor named William B. Coley injected a mixture of beef broth and Streptococcus bacteria into the arm of a 40-year-old Italian man with an inoperable neck tumor. The patient got terribly sick—developing a fever, chills, and vomiting. But a month later, his cancer had shrunk drastically. Coley would go on to repeat the procedure in more than a thousand patients, with wildly varying degrees of success, before the US Food and Drug Administration shut him down.

Coley’s experiments were the first forays into a field of cancer research known today as immunotherapy. Since his first experiments, the oncology world has mostly moved on to radiation and chemo treatments. But for more than a century, immunotherapy—which encompasses a range of treatments designed to supercharge or reprogram a patient’s immune system to kill cancer cells—has persisted, mostly around the margins of medicine. In the last few years, though, an explosion of tantalizing clinical results have reinvigorated the field and plunged investors and pharma execs into a spending spree.

Though he didn’t have the molecular tools to understand why it worked, Coley’s forced infections put the body’s immune system into overdrive, allowing it to take out cancer cells along the way. While the FDA doesn’t have a formal definition for more modern immunotherapies, in the last few years it has approved at least eight drugs that fit the bill, unleashing a flood of money to finance new clinical trials. (Patients had better come with floods of money too—prices can now routinely top six figures.)

But while the drugs are dramatically improving the odds of survival for some patients, much of the basic science is still poorly understood. And a growing number of researchers worry that the sprint to the clinic offers cancer patients more hype than hope.

When immunotherapy works, it really works. But not for every kind of cancer, and not for every patient—not even, it turns out, for the majority of them. “The reality is immunotherapy is incredibly valuable for the people who can actually benefit from it, but there are far more people out there who don’t benefit at all,” says Vinay Prasad, an Oregon Health and Science University oncologist.

Prasad has come to be regarded as a professional cancer care critic, thanks to his bellicose Twitter style and John Arnold Foundation-backed crusade against medical practices he says are based on belief, not scientific evidence. Using national cancer statistics and FDA approval records, Prasad recently estimated the portion of all patients dying from all types of cancer in America this year who might actually benefit from immunotherapy. The results were disappointing: not even 10 percent.

Now, that’s probably a bit of an understatement. Prasad was only looking at the most widely used class of immunotherapy drugs in a field that is rapidly expanding. Called checkpoint inhibitors, they work by disrupting the immune system’s natural mechanism for reining in T cells, blood-borne sentinels that bind and kill diseased cells throughout the body. The immune cells are turned off most of the time, thanks to proteins that latch on to a handful of receptors on their surface. But scientists designed antibodies to bind to those same receptors, knocking out the regulatory protein and keeping the cells permanently switched to attack mode.

The first checkpoint inhibitors just turned T cells on. But some of the newer ones can work more selectively, using the same principle to jam a signal that tumors use to evade T cells. So far, checkpoint inhibitors have shown near-miraculous results for a few rare, previously incurable cancers like Hodgkin’s lymphoma, renal cell carcinoma, and non-small cell lung cancer. The drugs are only approved to treat those conditions, leaving about two-thirds of terminal cancer patients without an approved immunotherapy option.

But Prasad says that isn’t stopping physicians from prescribing the drugs anyway.

“Hype has encouraged rampant off-label use of checkpoint inhibitors as a last-ditch effort,” he says—even for patients with tumors that show no evidence they’ll respond to the drugs. The antibodies are available off the shelf, but at a list price near $150,000 per year, it’s an investment Prasad says doctors shouldn’t encourage lightly. Especially when there’s no reliable way of predicting who will respond and who won’t. “This thwarts one of the goals of cancer care," says Prasad. "When you run out of helpful responses, how do you help a patient navigate what it means to die well?”

Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb have dominated this first wave of immunotherapy, selling almost $9 billion worth of checkpoint inhibitors since they went on sale in 2015. Roche, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Eli Lilly, Abbvie, and Regeneron have all since jumped in the game, spending billions on acquiring biotech startups and beefing up in-house pipelines. And 800 clinical trials involving a checkpoint inhibitor are currently underway in the US, compared with about 200 in 2015. “This is not sustainable,” Genentech VP of cancer immunology Ira Mellman told the audience at last year’s annual meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer. With so many trials, he said, the industry was throwing every checkpoint inhibitor combination at the wall just to see what would stick.

After more than a decade stretching out the promise of checkpoint inhibitors, patients—and businesses—were ready for something new. And this year, they got it: CAR T cell therapy. The immunotherapy involves extracting a patient’s T cells and genetically rewiring them so they can more efficiently home in on tumors in the body—training a foot soldier as an assassin that can slip behind enemy lines.

In September, the FDA cleared the first CAR-T therapy—a treatment for children with advanced leukemia, developed by Novartis—which made history as the first-ever gene therapy approved for market. A month later the agency approved another live cell treatment, developed by Kite Pharma, for a form of adult lymphoma. In trials for the lymphoma drug, 50 percent of patients saw their cancer disappear completely, and stay gone.

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Kite’s ascendance in particular is a stunning indicator of how much money CAR-T therapy has attracted, and how fast. The company staged a $128 million IPO in 2014—when it had only a single late-phase clinical trial to its name—and sold to Gilead Science in August for $11.9 billion. For some context, consider that when Pfizer bought cancer drugmaker Medivation for $14 billion last year—one of the biggest pharma deals of 2016—the company already had an FDA-approved blockbuster tumor-fighter on the market with $2 billion in annual sales, plus two late-stage candidates in the pipeline.

While Kite and Novartis were the only companies to actually launch products in 2017, more than 40 other pharma firms and startups are currently building pipelines. Chief rival Juno Therapeutics went public with a massive $265 million initial offering—the largest biotech IPO of 2014—before forming a $1 billion partnership with Celgene in 2015. In the last few years, at least half a dozen other companies have made similar up-front deals worth hundreds of millions.

These treatments will make up just a tiny slice of the $107 billion cancer drug market. Only about 600 people a year, for example, could benefit from Novartis’ flagship CAR-T therapy. But the company set the price for a full course of treatment at a whopping $475,000. So despite the small clientele, the potential payoff is huge—and the technology is attracting a lot of investor interest. “CAR-T venture financing is still a small piece of total venture funding in oncology, but given that these therapies are curative for a majority of patients that have received them in clinical trials, the investment would appear to be justified,” says Mandy Jackson, a managing editor for research firm Informa Pharma Intelligence.

CAR-T, with its combination of gene and cell therapies, may be the most radical anticancer treatment ever to arrive in clinics. But the bleeding edge of biology can be a dangerous place for patients.

Sometimes, the modified T cells go overboard, excreting huge quantities of molecules called cytokines that lead to severe fevers, low blood pressure, and difficulty breathing. In some patients it gets even worse. Sometimes the blood-brain barrier inexplicably breaks down—and the T cells and their cytokines get inside patients’ skulls. Last year, Juno pulled the plug on its lead clinical trial after five leukemia patients died from massive brain swelling. Other patients have died in CAR-T trials at the National Cancer Institute and the University of Pennsylvania.

Scientists don’t fully understand why some CAR-T patients experience cytokine storms and neurotoxicity and others come out cured. “It’s kind of like the equivalent of getting on a Wright Brother’s airplane as opposed to walking on a 747 today,” says Wendell Lim, a biophysical chemist and director of the UC San Francisco Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology. To go from bumping along at a few hundred feet to cruise control at Mach 0.85 will mean equipping T cells with cancer-sensing receptors that are more specific than the current offerings.

Take the two FDA-approved CAR-T cell therapies, he says. They both treat blood cancers in which immune responders called B cells become malignant and spread throughout the body. Doctors reprogram patients’ T cells to seek out a B cell receptor called CD-19. When they find it, they latch on and shoot it full of toxins. Thing is, the reprogrammed T cells can’t really tell the difference between cancerous B cells and normal ones. The therapy just takes them all out. Now, you can live without B cells if you receive antibody injections to compensate—so the treatment works out fine most of the time.

But solid tumors are trickier—they’re made up of a mix of cells with different genetic profiles. Scientists have to figure out which tumor cells matter to the growth of the cancer and which ones don’t. Then they have to design T cells with antigens that can target just those ones and nothing else. An ideal signature would involve two to three antigens that your assassin T cells can use to pinpoint the target with a bullet instead of a grenade.

Last year Lim launched a startup called Cell Design Labs to try to do just that, as well as creating a molecular on-off-switch to make treatments more controlled. Only if researchers can gain this type of precise command, says Lim, will CAR-T treatments become as safe and predictable as commercial airline flight.

The field has matured considerably since Coley first shot his dying patient full of a dangerous bacteria, crossed his fingers, and hoped for the best. Sure, the guy lived, even making a miraculous full recovery. But many after him didn’t. And that “fingers crossed” approach still lingers over immunotherapy today.

All these years later, the immune system remains a fickle ally in the war on cancer. Keeping the good guys from going double-agent is going to take a lot more science. But at least the revolution will be well-financed.

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The Big Show Journal is no ordinary gun magazine. The print periodical, which appears on newsstands nationwide six times a year, is also, according to its website, "America’s most interesting gun and knife magazine" and "America’s most accurate and complete gun and knife show calendar." Gun enthusiasts may dispute the former claim—but the latter is less subjective than you might think.

In fact, The Big Show Journal might be the closest thing researchers have to a comprehensive record of gun shows in the US.

"There’s no readily compiled, publicly available database of where and when gun shows occur," says UC Berkeley epidemiologist Ellicott Matthay, who recently found herself in want of such a database. That includes the internet. When Matthay used the Wayback Machine to scour archived web pages for the dates and locations of past shows, she found gaps in the historical record; events she knew had happened were nowhere to be found. So she turned to trade magazines instead. The Big Show Journal, true to its claim, proved more comprehensive than competing publications like Gun List Magazine and Gun and Knife Show Calendar.

Matthay needed that data to test a hypothesis about gun violence in America. Gun shows—of which the US sees about 4,000 per year—account for between 4 and 9 percent of firearm sales. As a public health researcher, Matthay knew that gun ownership increases the risk of suicide, homicide, and unintentional casualties in the home, and that firearms acquired from gun shows are disproportionately implicated in crimes. Matthay wanted to know if gun shows could lead to increased rates of gun violence, specifically in her home state of California. And the numbers she needed to find out were buried not in a government database, but in back issues of a big, glossy gun magazine.

But magazines are hard to mine for data. So Matthay set to work, scanning issues of The Big Show Journal published between 2005 and 2013 in the copy room at UC Berkeley's school of public health. She used optical character recognition software to convert the scans into alphanumeric data. Then she trained an algorithm to isolate the dates and locations of gun shows in California and neighboring Nevada, which shares the largest border with the state.

When Matthay was finished, she cross referenced her database with death records from the California Department of Public Health, along with ER and inpatient hospitalization records collected by the state. By comparing death and injury rates for the two weeks before and after each gun show, Matthay could see whether firearm casualties increased in nearby California areas in the wakes of California and Nevada gun shows.

Her hypothesis turned out to be half right: California gun shows did not appear to have a significant effect on local gun violence. But in regions near Nevada shows, rates of death and injury due to firearms spiked by 70 percent.

That staggering disparity could boil down to policy differences. California's gun laws are among the most stringent in the country. Nevada, in contrast, has some of the least restrictive—and no explicit regulations on gun shows. Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—which monitors where guns originate and where law enforcement recovers them—shows that firearms have a knack for flooding into states with tough gun laws from those without. (To cite just one example: Sixty percent of guns used to commit crimes in Chicago between 2009 and 2013 originated outside of Illinois.) A state's gun laws, it seems, can be undermined by those of its neighbors.

But that kind of inter-state analysis isn’t always possible. Many states—Nevada among them—don't require documentation of private gun sales.

"If a gun originated in Pennsylvania, changed hands between private parties at a Nevada gun show, and resulted in a firearm death or injury in California, even if we were to trace it, we'd have no way of knowing it was ever in Nevada," Matthay says. What's more, ATF only tracks the provenance of guns recovered from crime scenes. But not all crimes involving guns result in injury or death. Conversely, not all firearm casualties—particularly unintended injuries—are logged as crimes.

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So researchers like Matthay have to use trickier methods to understand the impact of firearms. "The biggest challenge, when it comes to understanding gun violence, is money—but the second biggest is data," says Frederick Rivara, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and an expert on gun violence. The NRA's efforts to stymie gun research are extensive, palpable, and well documented: When a car kills somebody in the US, the details of the incident go into a massive government database. No such database exists for gun deaths. If you want to study firearms in this country—how they move, the way they're used, how often they murder and maim—you have to get creative. See: scanning old gun magazines by hand.

But with limited data comes limited information. Matthay's study didn't trace any guns, so it's unclear whether California's post-show spike in gun violence is tied to an inundation of Nevada firearms. (It could be due to an influx of ammunition, for example.) Neither did the study examine associations with firearm casualties in Nevada. (“We could do that,” Matthay says, for Nevada and neighbor states like Oregon and Arizona, “but we would need additional funding.”) Likewise, there's no telling if the link between gun shows and gun violence is causal. A randomized controlled trial—the gold standard of evidence in medical and epidemiological circles—could help isolate the signal. But researchers can't exactly go around exposing random populations to gun shows. "That would not be ethical," Matthay says, not to mention unfeasible.

Still, the study does paint a more nuanced picture of the relationship between gun shows and gun violence. By accounting for deaths and injuries ATF's data overlooks, Matthay's research points not only to the effectiveness of California's gun laws, but the pitfalls of porous borders—two valuable insights that policy makers can use to inform laws at the state and federal levels.

"That's our job as investigators—to see if those laws help or not and determine whether they should be more widespread, to reduce the total gun violence," Rivara says.

With the help of Congress, researchers like Matthay could do that job much more effectively. Until then, they'll make do with the data they have.

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