Finding the stories and growing the next crop of science journalists
By Nancy Shute
Editor in Chief
We get a lot of press releases about new research and products. But one recent missive caught our attention. It got us thinking about how handguns created by a 3-D printer could be used as a type of phantom gun, to evade traditional criminal investigations. We knew just the person to check it out: intern Carolyn Wilke.
Wilke recently graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., with a Ph.D. in environmental engineering. She knew that 3-D printing has the potential to make all kinds of manufacturing, from medical devices to food, cheaper and more accessible.
But she was surprised to find out that some people are using the printers to make plastic guns that could skirt standard law enforcement techniques, and she was intrigued to learn how chemistry plays into this new area of ballistic forensics.
“You’re always one step behind the people pushing the technology,” she says. To keep up, “you really have to get into the lab.”