This Week’s NOVA Next Feature Article
Frustrated by unsolved medical mysteries, some patients are turning to a crowdsourcing site for answers. Will they find them there? NOVA Next contributor Carrie Arnold reports on this rising trend.
In other news from NOVA and around the web:
- Good news! The chikungunya vaccine passed phase 1 clinical trials. The bad news? It’s still years away from clinical use.
- Our microbiome may be influencing our behavior. But at the same time, we’re trying to coax microbes into doing our bidding.
- A professional musician played his violin during brain surgery to correct hand tremors.
- Go inside the fascinating early searches for life beyond Earth.
- In a new study, people with more social cohesion in their neighborhoods also had 67 percent reduced risk of a heart attack.
- This remarkable plant is changing our sense of what it means to be old .
- This map is a mosaic of more than 3,150 individual, high-resolution images of Antarctica.
- A white hole is, basically, the opposite of a black hole. It’s still a theoretical concept. But if loop quantum gravity is real , then white holes could be, too.
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Some doctors aren’t promoting the HPV vaccine. But why? They hesitate to talk about sex, argues an op-ed in The New York Times.
But Dr. Amy Middleman says physicians can separate the “sex talk” from the first dose of the HPV vaccine. Hear more from Middleman and other experts by watching “Vaccines—Calling the Shots,” airing September 10 at 9/8c on PBS. - The University of Cambridge is looking to fill a PhD multidisciplinary studentship in the science of chocolate .
- There are cognitive advantages to being dyslexic.
- The risk level of an eruption at Iceland’s Bardarbunga volcano has been raised to orange .
Did you miss "Finding Life Beyond Earth" this week? Watch it streaming online.
- The practice of quarantine has been around a long time. Here’s a short history .
- Neanderthals in Europe died out thousands of years earlier than we thought , narrowing the period that Homo sapiens coexisted with them. But do Neanderthals belong *within* Homo sapiens? Scientists can’t agree .
- The first transmission of tuberculosis to humans in the New World may have come from an unlikely source: seals.
- New research has found that corals send out “distress” signals when they’re in trouble.
- The brains of children with autism may have an oversupply of synapses . There may be sensory-social dimensions of autism, too.
- Facial symmetry doesn’t live up to all the hype .
- Buried in the remnants of a rare supernova is one of our universe’s earliest stars .
- Monitoring Twitter for food poisoning reports led to 133 restaurant inspections in Chicago.
- A town in the Solomon Islands just decided to relocate because of sea level rise from climate change.