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Currently, most diagnoses of Parkinson’s disease don’t occur until five to 10 years after initial onset. However, researchers at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe they have created an effective, non-invasive tool for detecting diseases such as Parkinson’s years earlier. By using an algorithm that spots subtle changes in keystroke patterns, the team behind neuroQWERTY hopes to jumpstart the detection of neurodegenerative disorders and, in doing so, accelerate treatment for sufferers.
Producer: Melanie Gonick
Website: MIT Media Lab
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
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Ecology and environmental sciences
The tree frog die-off that sparked a global mystery – and revealed a dark truth
15 minutes
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
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Technology and the self
Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California
24 minutes
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Childhood and adolescence
The police camp where tween girls enter a sisterhood of law and order
28 minutes