By: Megan Ray Nichols
Genetics plays an enormous role in our lives, even if we don’t always realize it. Have you ever wondered why some people love cilantro, and it tastes like soap to others? While it might all be in your head, chances are it’s actually in your genes. 23andMe, the company offering a genetics kit to get your DNA mapped and explained, conducted a study to see if taste was genetic. They pinpointed the genes signifying cilantro should taste like soap instead of ta ...read more
The Small Business Administration says that companies that derive any portion of their revenue from marijuana are ineligible for loan assistance. ...read more
‘Wall-E’ is one of a pair of CubeSats that’s following a lander spacecraft as it cruises toward Mars
The first image captured by one of NASA’s Mars Cube One (MarCO) CubeSats. The image, which shows both the CubeSat’s unfolded high-gain antenna at right and the Earth and its moon in the center, was acquired by MarCO-B, nicknamed ‘Wall-E’, on May 9. (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
In 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was cruising outward in the solar s ...read more
Yanny! Laurel! (Credit: Tiko Aramyan/Shutterstock)
The infamous color-changing dress has been reincarnated in sound.
An audio clip that recently surfaced online asks listeners whether they hear the word “Yanny” or “Laurel,” and somehow the world can’t decide between those polar opposites. It’s dreadfully reminiscent of the blue-and-black dress (fight me) that split the internet in 2015.
What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I
— C ...read more
(Credit: yuRomanovich/Shutterstock)
By now, we’re all tired of hearing about the virtual currency turned investment craze known as Bitcoin. Created in response to the 2008 financial crisis, anarcho-capitalists hailed it as the decentralized future of commerce.
But as prices soared and the biggest names on Wall Street bought in, Bitcoin became mostly known as a speculative, unregulated investment. Think Beanie Babies, but you can also use them to buy drugs and engage in human trafficking. ...read more
The ash and steam plume from Kilauea’s Halema’uma’u caldera at the summit, seen on May 15, 2018. Image: USGS/HVO.
It seems like every day since the Leilani Estates eruption began, Kilauea has thrown something new at the people of Hawaii. The new fissure 17 that opened over the weekend has produced a lava flow that has traveled more than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles). However, the news today now comes from the summit of Kilauea in the Halema’uma’u caldera, where the ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Many stories about drones are sensationalized. It’s easy to use broad language that gives the impression that drones will soon be zooming over us delivering goods. That’s not true.
Now that I’ve beaten down your dreams, let me build you up just a little bit. A new program in the United States could actually lead to a life where drones drop medicine at your doorstep and are border patrol agents. Just not in the next year or two, or three, for that ma ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Phone apps often get a bad rap for being distracting time-wasters (I’m looking at you, Reddit), but some seek to challenge the minds of their users and put the resulting data to good use. And maybe even invent a new language in the process.
The Color Game app uses colors and symbols to study the evolution of language. Created by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, the app is looking to uncover clues to an age-ol ...read more
(Credit: Sofi photo/Shutterstock)
Sometimes, what’s not there can be just as important as what is. Jazz is famously all about the notes you don’t play, and Sherlock Holmes once solved a crime because of a dog that didn’t bark.
Scientists wanted to get in on that, so a paper appearing today in PNAS. takes a look at the sounds we don’t say — or, at least, don’t say as readily — with nouns winning out as the biggest obstacles to quick, unobstructed s ...read more
A sea slug. (Credit: Zuzha/Shutterstock)
Sea slugs aren’t the most exciting critters, but they’re certainly helping researchers make exciting new discoveries. Biologists from the University of California Los Angeles published a study in the journal eNeuro explaining how they “implanted” a memory from one slug into another.
In the first chunk of their study, the team, led by David Glanzman, worked with groups of a marine slug called Aplysia. One group of slugs got shocke ...read more
