At the height of the West African Ebola outbreak it took, at the very least, eight hours to find out if a patient had the disease or not. Part of the problem was that a blood sample had to be sent to a lab for analysis. Now Sterghios Moschos and colleagues have developed a portable test that is seven times faster, ten times cheaper and 700 times safer than the old lab-based method. What’s more, the test can be tweaked to detect other viruses such as Zika and MERS.

The world’s largest river has many indigenous names yet the one that most people know it by is the Amazon. The fact that it’s not generally referred to as a “Solimões Rainforest” or the mighty “River Cuyari” is one example of how maps have always reflected the worldview of European colonisers. James Angus Fraser looks at how modern-day Amazonians are resisting the Brazilian state by ‘counter-mapping’ their ancestral lands.