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
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.
