This Week’s NOVA Next Feature Article
Prosthetic technology is advancing rapidly, but for most people, cutting-edge devices are neither attainable nor well suited for their lives. NOVA Next contributor Rose Eveleth investigates the idea that sometimes the most revolutionary device isn’t state of the art.
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Missed this week’s NOVA broadcast, “Mt. St. Helens: Back from the Dead?” Watch the program online below, and learn how one little pocket gopher became the hero of Mt. St. Helens.
Watch "Mt. St. Helens: Back from the Dead" to discover if an eruption like it could happen again.
- This coming Sunday marks the premiere of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s 13-part Cosmos on FOX and the National Geographic Channel, an homage and update to Carl Sagan’s original series of the same name. The New York Times has a great review of the program, and you can watch a fun profile of Tyson over at NOVA’s Secret Life of Scientists.
- Stretched like a noodle? Burnt to a crisp? The answer to how you would die in a black hole could revolutionize the fundamental laws of nature. Watch our new video .
- At 4 pm Eastern time on Wednesday, an asteroid passed between our moon and the Earth. Here’s why psychology, not technology, is delaying asteroid detection and deflection programs.
- Government agencies from around the world are launching new weather satellites to observe Earth’s water. But they had better hurry—our current Earth observing capabilities are facing an uncertain future .
- 250-dB blasts used for oil exploration could harm our ocean’s whales . Meanwhile, archaeologists found an ancient graveyard of whales in Chile.
- Though typically housed separately on farms, new research shows that cows learn better when they live together .
- Another farm animal, chickens, have what physicists are calling a new state of matter in their eyes.
- The largest known virus has been uncovered in Siberian permafrost. At the other end of the Earth, microbiologists are delve into the weird world of cold-loving creators, known as psychrophiles .
- An early treatment has rid a second baby of HIV. Learn more about scientists’ high hopes for a cure .
- And finally: Sometimes mind over matter, well, matters. Turns out that you can dilate your pupils just by thinking about darkness.
