This Week’s NOVA Next Feature
What will it take to prepare for future infectious disease outbreaks? To find out, we collaborated with The GroundTruth Project on a in-depth, multi-part investigation called Next Outbreak .
Our second feature asks: why do know so little about MERS, the slowly simmering virus that threatens to boil over into a full-blown pandemic? GroundTruth correspondent Alisa Reznick reports .
Also, don’t miss our exclusive story behind the promising, but fundamentally flawed, diesel Volkswagen engine that cheated on emissions tests—reported by NOVA Next editor Tim De Chant.
In other news:
- Robots are now smart enough to take the SAT .
- To move faster, London’s Tube needs to slow down.
- Meet Helheim, a glacier of exquisite beauty at every scale.
- Doctors have been slicing into eyeballs for over 2500 years.
- A unique perfume-cloud of bacteria follows you wherever you go.
- Given equal healthcare access , black patients’ mortality rate is lower than whites’.
- Only 40% of Americans attribute global warming to human activity, according to a recent poll.
- Pope Francis said this week that technology can help combat climate change. He’s right. Here’s one way you can help .
What We’re Reading
- If Ebola was rampant in Ancient Greece , why didn’t it reappear anywhere on Earth until 1976? [The Atlantic]
- Up to one in 400 women is BRCA-positive, as opposed to one in 40 Ashkenazi Jews . [The New York Times]
- Exercise could help shield children from the harmful effects of bullying . [New York Magazine]
- This forgotten project could have saved America from drought . [Buzzfeed]
- Our perception of pain can depend on expectations, a new study reports. [Scientific American]
- Scientists have thousands of cells that exist in either a “summer” or “winter” state. [BBC News]