Substituting Senses, "Making" Metabolism, and Rewriting the Tree of Life: NOVA Next Week in Review

This Week’s NOVA Next Feature Article

Carl Woese pioneering the use of gene sequencing, discovered a third domain of life, and upended an entire field. But, as NOVA Next contributor Carrie Arnold reports , it would be decades before people believed him.

Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is home to many species of thermophilic archaea, bacteria central to Woese's findings.

In other news from NOVA and around the web:

Watch rare footage of a male marmoset comforting his dying partner. A new paper says this could be a very real example of animal grief, says anthropologist Barbara King .
Ravens display a kind of intelligence that only humans can match: a complex awareness of social order outside their own communities.
What’s the pressure inside of an exploding whale ?
Lab rats experience more stress in the presence of men than of women.
Check out these deep-sea creatures experiencing bright light (from NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer) for the first time.
This 270-foot-deep, 72-foot-tall sea cave has walls of perfectly hexagonal columns .
“Quantum information is like the information in a dream ,” says scientist Charles Bennett. “In describing it, you change your memory of it.”
Erik Weihenmayer is blind, but that hasn’t stopped him from climbing mountains.

Did you miss "The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies" this week? Watch it streaming online.

An estimated 75,000 patients with infections picked up in health care facilities die each year . Soon, though, we may be able to manipulate an entire building’s microbiome to prevent such tragedies.
A graduate student who took a shortcut during a quality control procedure accidentally discovered the first evidence of metabolism occurring outside a cell.
The World Health Organization is saying that “Without urgent action, we are heading for a post-antibiotic era .”
A new study says victims of the 1918 flu may have died because they had antibodies to a different flu strain . Learn why scientists are studying the 1918 flu .
50 royal mummies have been discovered in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.
How many people are wrongly convicted of crimes? Researchers do the math .
“A Rubik’s cube can be twisted and twiddled in 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 ways.” But only one is right .
The inventor of the treadmill desk talks to NOVA’s Secret Life of Scientists about his journey from inactive, serial sitter to anti-obesity crusader.
Taking a walk can boost your creativity .
In a small town near the U.S.-Mexico border, a lofty dream could become a towering reality .