Over the past three years, 300,000 gamers have helped scientists with genomic research by playing Phylo, an online puzzle game that is a cross between Tetris, Rubik's cube and an old-fashioned sliding-tile puzzle game.

As gamers line up colored rectangles that represent real genetic material (in the form of DNA sequences), they are helping to pinpoint the genetic anomalies that may be the key to a range of diseases that include diabetes, breast cancer and retinoblastoma, the most common form of malignant tumor in the eyes of children. 

A new paper describes an acoustic remote bomb detection system that can identify homemade bombs and determine the difference between those that contain low-yield and high-yield explosives.

A number of different tools are currently used for explosives detection. These range from dogs and honeybees to mass spectrometry, gas chromatography and specially designed X-ray machines.

In the past year, Google search has dramatically increased the speed of search results, not that you would notice, since they were already quite fast.

A common genetic variant, rs4143094, located on the same chromosome 10 region that includes GATA3, a transcription factor gene previously linked to several forms of cancer, is in about 36 percent of the population.  A study has linked it to an increased risk of colorectal cancer from the consumption of red meat and processed meat, according to a new study. The transcription factor encoded by this gene normally plays a role in the immune system 

The World Series begins in a few hours and while they have to play the games, math can project winners and losers - and the math says the Boston Red Sox have a 70% chance of winning it all.

Unlike a Presidential contest, which is one day and one winner but for which voters can be polled in advance, baseball incorporates a lot of variables and there are up to 7 games. And things happen during each game. There are only so many data points that can be factored in as parameters and using those parameters, statistical methods like Bayes and Markov can help you look smart at the sports bar.

Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin may be former football rivals, but There's a new most distant galaxy ever found, created within 700 million years after the Big Bang.

The galaxy is z8_GND_5296. Unlike our Milky Way, which creates about 1 or 2 Sun-like stars every year or so, this newly discovered galaxy forms around 300 per year and was observed by the researchers as it was 13 billion years ago. Because the universe has been expanding the whole time, the researchers estimate the galaxy’s present distance to be roughly 30 billion light years away.