This Week’s NOVA Next Feature Article
For developing countries, medical diagnostics can be expensive and impractical. A group of scientists is hoping to change that. NOVA Next contributor Jeffrey Perkel reports on innovative medical developments for countries where affordability matters the most.
In other news from NOVA and around the web:
- “Mother Nature has already put a psychotropic drug in the drinking water, and that drug is lithium .” Here’s why that might not be a bad thing.
- Physicists now know what a single atom sounds like.
- The N.F.L. has stated that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems . Learn about C.T.E., a preventable brain disease found in retired football players.
- “The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has the potential to alter history as much as any plague has ever done.” The mathematics of Ebola’s spread .
- A new bioinspired, nanoparticle-based blood filter could soon give doctors the upper hand when treating infections such as Ebola and HIV.
- Explore the world of coding, cyber scams, and online safety in NOVA Labs’ new Cybersecurity Lab .
- Peter Higgs, now 85, doesn’t own a television or use email or a cellphone. He’s too busy studying the universe around him.
- Tatooine may be fictional, but exoplanets in binary star systems are very real. And they might be extremely common.
- One expert says the world should start preparing for a population of 11 billion or more .
- Introducing Instagram for doctors .
- New MacArthur fellows include a materials scientist, an historian of science, and two mathematicians.
Did you miss "Ground Zero Supertower"? You can watch it streaming online here.
- There are too few university jobs for America’s young scientists.
- There are 10,000 times more microbes in our intestines than human beings on the planet.
- Every time this organism has sex, it re-invents its genome .
- Just three sweetener packets per day for a week may be enough to raise some people’s risk of diabetes.
- Take a look at the winners of this year’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.
- What’s behind flammable drinking water in some shale gas regions? A team of scientists thinks they know the cause.
- A 76-year-old woman has developed a rare disorder—an incredibly intense compulsion to write poetry .
- Wealthy L.A. schools’ vaccination rates are as low as South Sudan’s .
- Check out this density map of part of the Milky Way disk.