Prosthetic Legs, Deadly Black Holes, and 250-dB Blasts: NOVA Next Week in Review

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.

This surfer competes at the 2011 Big, Bad, and Ugly Surf Contest, in Morro Bay, California, using a durable prosthetic leg. Conditions like these would damage today's myoelectric legs.

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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.