This Week’s NOVA Next Feature Article
With robots poised to enter the workforce en masse, is our society prepared for the transition? NOVA Next editor and NOVA Senior Digital Editor Tim De Chant reports on new developments in the robotics industry that could put robots and humans in competition with one another.
In other news from NOVA and around the web:
- There’s a fish that saves energy by forgetting that the sun rises.
- Ebola viruses are ancient, splitting off from other viral lineages at least 20 million years ago. And this particular strain is a pretty standard one.
- Elephants can sense rainstorms up to 150 miles away . Though it sounds like an impractical skill, it could help us protect them from poachers.
- “You know the image isn’t human, but you find yourself wondering about it,” Tim Flach says of his animal portraits .
- It’s National Cyber Security Awareness Month! Check out NOVA Labs’ Cybersecurity Lab , a virtual gaming platform designed to teach kids how to deal with online threats to privacy.
- An international expedition has uncovered new artifacts at the site of the Antikythera shipwreck. Watch “Ancient Computer” streaming online to learn about the clockwork machine they also found amidst the rubble.
- “Alzheimer’s in a dish” could rapidly test hundreds of thousands of potential drugs, hastening the search for treatments of the debilitating disease.
- This key Alzheimer’s researcher also plays keyboards for Aerosmith & the Joe Perry Project .
- Doctors need a better pain test, reports Vox. While brain imagining can help, chemicals could also speed up the process by erasing the physiological “memory” of chronic pain.
Did you miss "Why Ships Sink?" this week? Watch it streaming online.
- Scientists are getting closer to creating a laboratory-scale imitation of a black hole . But what would happen if you actually fell into one ?
- Advances in nuclear fusion are gaining speed. Here’s just one example . And here’s another . What should we make of these announcements?
- Technologists and non-profits are putting whole villages and neighborhoods “on the map” in an effort to fight Ebola.
- Bay Area cities are “overdue” for a major earthquake . Oklahoma’s had more quakes than California this year, partly due to fracking .
- A new line of insulin-producing cells has been shown to reverse diabetes in mice within 40 days.
- You are more likely to be killed by your own furniture than by terrorism or Ebola.