This Week’s NOVA Next Feature Article
To save the fearsome and elusive Bengal tiger, conservation geneticists have turned to an unlikely trove of data—its feces. NOVA Next contributor Kathleen Masterson chronicles wildlife biologists’ search for scat samples and what those samples are revealing about the big cats’ lives.
Missed this week’s NOVA broadcast, “Crash of Flight 447”? Watch the entire program online below.
Watch "Crash of Flight 447" to see forensic investigators reconstruct the final moments of the Air France disaster.
- If you liked Neil deGrasse Tyson in “Cosmos,” which premiered Sunday on FOX and the National Geographic Channel, watch “Origins”—also hosted by Tyson himself— streaming online .
- Nature has been building quantum computers for hundreds of millions of years. MIT’s Seth Lloyd tells us how .
- The Venus Express spacecraft was cruising around our solar systems’ second planet, analyzing its roiling atmosphere when it spotted something glorious .
- Clocks jumped forward last Sunday because Daylight Saving Time resumed. It’s not time travel, exactly, but is the real thing possible ?
- Bill Nye dances on TV while millions cheer him on in this Secret Life of Scientists video. Check out his full profile .
- Einstein dreamed of a unified theory of physics. To celebrate his birthday, which was Friday (same as Pi Day), learn how physicists are trying to realize that dream. Watch “The Elegant Universe” online .
- How big is space? BBC Future has the answer, in interactive form .
- Chemists have hacked a Blu-ray player —not for better picture quality, but as a cheap way to detect dangerous bacteria and toxins.
- A federal judge has denied Myriad Genetics’ request to stop Ambry Genetics from offering a breast cancer test similar to its own. Last March, NOVA Next contributor Amy Maxmen reported on the patents in question , along with an epilogue filed in May with coverage of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
- What do women in science look like? These 15 works of art paint a diverse picture.
- Tuesday marked the anniversary of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Watch “Japan’s Killer Quake” streaming online to learn how the country coped with disaster.
- A diamond traps a rare mineral, bringing to the surface tantalizing clues from the depths of the Earth .
- And finally, elephants can distinguish between humans based on our voices .