Ripped from the Headlines: April 2021: This Week in Words: Current Events Vocab for April 24–April 30, 2021

NFL player Rob Gronkowski broke a Guinness World Record on April 24 when he caught a football that had been dropped from a helicopter hovering 600 feet above him. The Tampa Bay Buccaneer already held the record for the most single-season touchdowns by a tight end. Now, he adds the highest altitude catch in history to his list of achievements. The Latin source of altitude, altitudinem, comes from a root that means "grown tall."

On April 26, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take a case regarding a law in New York state that restricts openly carrying a handgun. The case will test the scope of the Second Amendment, an issue the court hasn't ruled on for over ten years. The most recent Supreme Court ruling to address the Second Amendment, in 2008, upheld the right of an individual to keep guns at home for self-defense.

The U.S. Census Bureau released its initial report from the 2020 Census. The data shows a dramatic slowing of population growth over the last decade, to the lowest rate since the Great Depression. It also revealed a continuing trend of Americans moving to Texas and Florida, and declining populations in New York and California, both of which lost congressional seats. In ancient Rome, the census was tied to property value and taxation, and the word also meant "one's wealth."

Prosecutors dismissed a case against a woman who was charged with embezzlement after she failed to return a VHS tape to a video store more than 20 years earlier. Caron Scarborough Davis only recently learned about an outstanding warrant for her arrest in Oklahoma dating from 2000. Davis's offense was not returning a copy of Sabrina the Teenage Witch that she rented in 1999, and the charge was "embezzlement of rented property."

For years, scientists believed that an ancient civilization at Cahokia, on the Mississippi River, destroyed itself through wood clearing, which devastated its environment. Recent excavations have forced researchers to reconsider this theory; no evidence was found of flooding or erosion caused by inhabitants. In fact, the excavations revealed that Cahokian farming and management methods stabilized their landscape. The Latin root of excavation means "to hollow out."

A team of astronomers observed an enormous flare erupting from a nearby star, one of the brightest and most violent ever seen in the Milky Way. The flare was 100 times larger than any our sun has ever released, and a researcher described it as going "from normal to 14,000 times brighter" in just a few seconds. The star, Proxima Centauri, is our sun's nearest stellar neighbor.

On April 24, President Biden issued an official declaration recognizing the Ottoman Empire's killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians more than 100 years ago as a genocide. It's the first time an American president has issued such a statement. Past administrations sought to avoid conflict with Turkey, whose leaders deny that the killings fit the criteria of genocide. The word literally means "killing a tribe," from the Greek genos, "race," and -cide, "a killing."

Bettina Forget, a Canadian artist and amateur astronomer, will highlight how rarely lunar craters are named for women by drawing the few that are. The International Astronomical Union officially baptizes moon craters, naming them after scientists and explorers. Out of 1,579 named craters, just 33 honor women. For her project, Women With Impact, Forget observes many of the craters through a telescope as she draws. Lunar comes from the Latin luna, "moon."

The first woman to complete an officially sanctioned marathon in the U.S. died at the age of 90. Arlene Pieper Stine finished the grueling Pikes Peak Marathon in Manitou Springs, Colorado in 1959. The race ascended and descended an 8,000-foot mountain, and Stine finished the course in 9 hours and 16 minutes. It was her first and final marathon — and more than 50 years passed before she learned she had made history.

The film Nomadland won Oscars for best picture, best director, and best actress at the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony on April 25. Starring Frances McDormand, writer/director Chloé Zhao's film follows a woman who embarks on a wandering lifestyle, living in a van and taking on itinerant work, along with other self-described nomads. Nomad derives from the Greek nomas, "roaming."

Recent discoveries of dozens of black holes at the center of a nearby star cluster has led astronomers to consider adding a plural term for a group of black holes to their official nomenclature. A collective noun — like a pride of lions or a gaggle of geese — would be useful as more and more groups of black holes are expected to be discovered using the newest gravitational-wave antennas. Crowdsourced ideas include scream, enigma, and void.

Beavers in British Columbia chewed through fiber cables and used them to build a dam, shutting down internet service for over 1,000 people. The outage lasted nearly two days, affecting about half the population of the town of Tumbler Ridge. The cable had been buried three feet deep near the creek where the beavers constructed their dam. A spokesperson for the telecommunications company described the outage as a "uniquely Canadian disruption."

The largest Indian reservation in the U.S., the Navajo Nation, has vaccinated over half of its adult population, outpacing the national rate. The Navajo Nation was hit particularly hard early in the pandemic; it had the country's highest infection rate last May and reported dozens of daily deaths for several months. In the early days of the pandemic, the reservation faced challenges including multi-generational households and a lack of resources.

According to the WHO, India's low vaccination rates, high incidence of mass gatherings, and more contagious virus variants led to the country's current surge of Covid-19 infections. New cases have topped 300,000 every day for a week, overwhelming hospitals and pushing total reported deaths over 200,000. The dire situation in India is contributing to a surge in infections worldwide. Surge originally meant "fountain," from the Latin root surgere, "to rise or ascend."

The United States has said it will share its vaccine surplus with other countries, an announcement that comes amid growing calls for equitable access to vaccines. The Biden administration said on April 26 that it will distribute as many as 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine over the next few months. Global health groups continue to pressure the U.S. to share even more of its vaccine surplus and to waive patents so other countries can more easily produce their own.