Modern general anesthesia is a much more preferable alternative to the old remedies, such as alcohol, opium, or just gritting your teeth and bearing it. But despite anesthesia’s wide use, little is known about how these drugs exactly manage to shut off the conscious processes of the brain while leaving nonconscious brain activity undisturbed.

Earlier this month, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol were close to death. The two American aid workers infected with the deadly Ebola virus were flown from Liberia to Atlanta, Georgia, where they were promptly sent to the Emory University Hospital. At the moment, there is no officially approved treatment or vaccine for the Ebola virus, which has a 50 to 90 percent mortality rate. But Brantly and Writebol were each given doses of an experimental anti-Ebola serum that had never been tested in humans. Soon after, according to Emory University doctors, both patients were improving. Named after the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near where the first outbreak occurred in 1976, the Ebola virus causes fever, muscle pain, vomiting and diarrhea, among many other symptoms. The Zaire strain at the center of the current outbreak in West Africa is the most fatal of the five known strains. Though highly pathogenic, the virus is not airborne and can only be transmitted via bodily fluids. The experimental drug administered to the infected aid workers, called ZMapp, is one of a number of treatments that have shown some promising results in animal models. Developed by San Diego-based company Mapp Biopharmaceuticals Inc., …

In the 1997 film Dante’s Peak, the volcano is really the star, stealing the show from all the merely human subplots of romance, stubborn grannies, and the inevitable dog that needs to be rescued. Our human protagonist, Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan), is a lone, workaholic volcanologist who gets sent out to the Cascade Range in Washington State by the U.S. Geological Survey to check up on a mountain which has been rumbling. The town on the slopes of Dante’s Peak has just been honored with the “second most desirable place to live in the United States, population under 20,000″ award and the mayor (soon to become Harry’s love interest) has done a great job in making the town a prosperous, happy place to live. It’s the perfect setting for a natural disaster.

Death and life might seem like pretty stark categories, but modern science is finding ways to bring people who are, as Miracle Max might say, only “mostly dead,” back from the brink. We got a chance to talk with University of Pennsylvania physician David Casarett, whose new book Shocked: Adventures in Bringing Back the Recently Dead explores techniques of resuscitation from the outlandish (blowing smoke up where the sun don’t shine) to the cutting-edge (cooling and cryopreservation).

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a way to bring silent video footage to audible life, using a very high-tech analogue to lip-reading. Instead of watching mouth movements, the scientists are detecting the minute vibrations that sound waves make when they strike an everyday object—anything from a house plant to a potato chip bag. “People didn’t realize that this information was there,” MIT researcher Abe Davis said in a statement. Davis and colleagues presented their findings in a paper for the 2014 Siggraph computer graphics conference. The researchers trained a high-speed camera on a potted plant that was placed near a speaker playing the song “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” The vibrations of the plant’s leaves caused by the song are extremely tiny—enough to nudge a leaf by just one one-hundredth of a pixel—making them invisible to the naked eye. But the researchers can use computer programs to filter through all the minute variations passing through the video and extract what is unmistakably the audio of that song. To kick the research up a notch, the scientists managed to catch traces of a human voice singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by filming a potato chip bag …