(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

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

‘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