Jess Phoenix, a volcanologist and Democrat running for the US House, doing field work. It is always exciting (to me) when a scientist runs for public office — and doubly so if that person is a geologist. There have been a few geologists who made waves as politicians, including Colorado governor John Hickenlooper (we’ll leave you to sort out Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke’s claims of “being a geologist”). Now, imagine if that person was also a volcanologist. N ...read more

A scene from “Interview with the Vampire” featuring Christian Slater and Brad Pitt. (Credit: Warner Bros./Youtube) [Editor’s note: One of the most popular articles on our site is a piece by Georgia Institute of Technology researcher John Edgar Browning about his work with the real vampire community, published in March 2015. In it, Browning discusses what a real vampire is, how they live their lives, and what researchers are hoping to learn about them. Here, he expan ...read more

(Credit: Kokhanchikov/Shutterstock) Mosquito bites are like a gross form of French kissing — the insects swap your blood with their saliva, and leave a trail of salivary secretions behind like mosquito cooties. Some of those compounds prevent clotting as the insects slurp up your blood. Now researchers find mosquito spit aggravates your immune system for days afterward. The findings could help scientists develop vaccines for mosquito-born diseases like Zika. Rebecca Rico-Hesse, a vi ...read more

Ancient DNA from archaeological sites in Southeast Asia, such as Thailand’s World Heritage site Ban Chiang, has refined our understanding of how farmers and hunter-gatherers mixed and mingled millennia ago. (Credit Wikimedia Commons) Southeast Asia is home to scores of different languages and cultures, but the story of how such diversity blossomed in the region has always been unclear. A new study out today turns to ancient DNA — a rare find in hot and humid environments & ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) You know when you’re filling out your medical paperwork and it asks for your emergency contact? Sure, the process might be annoying, but that emergency contact could actually be put to good use by researchers. Since many of us use a family member, those contacts can help scientists create family trees. And they can also be used for genetics and disease research, according to a study released Thursday in Cell. Discovering what diseases are inheritable can b ...read more

Patent drawing from Cambridge Research & Development for an autonomous, battery-powered, drone-toting, delivery flatcar. (Credit: Cambridge Research & Development) A research company is seeking funding to build a prototype autonomous, battery-powered flatcar that would serve as a platform for package-delivery drones. Cambridge Research & Development in New Hampshire has applied for a patent for the concept. The vehicle, Cambridge founder and CEO Ken Steinberg says, could carry ...read more

(Credit: Bukhta Yurii/Shutterstock) Scientists today are searching for the “Golden Spike,” evidence for the presence of man that will show up even hundreds of thousands of years from now. Such a marker would officially kick off the Anthropocene, the epoch of man, and candidates include the presence of radiation from nuclear bomb tests in geological samples and elevated levels of CO2 preserved in ice cores. But even today, we can look back into the layers of Earth’s past and s ...read more

Thanks to lasers, this little robot finally lost its umbilical cord. (Credit: Mark Stone/University of Washington) We’ve seen robot insects fly, land and even swim. But they weren’t doing that all by themselves. Until now, a tether of wires held them back. A group of researchers from the University of Washington made the first wirelessly powered robotic insect. The bot, called RoboFly, weighs just 190 mg — it’s barely heavier than a toothpick and ...read more

With the help of the Atacama large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, astronomers have detected the earliest signs of oxygen (red) distributed in the galaxy MACS1149-JD1. The discovery provides the strongest evidence yet that stars in the fledgling universe started forming earlier than previously thought — when it was less than 2 percent its current age. (Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, W. Zheng (JHU), M. Postman (STScI), the CLASH Team, Hashimoto et al.) The ...read more

(Credit: Apple Records) How successful would the 1968 hit “Hey Jude” be if not recorded by The Beatles? At over 7 minutes long, the song shattered the notion pop tunes need be 3 minutes or less. More than half of “Hey Jude” is a fade-out coda of “na, na, nas,” a first for pop music. The song was No. 1 on the Billboard charts for nine weeks. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers from the University of California ...read more