Should doctors allow their expertise to trump a patient’s personal goals — or should they yield to it? In this video, physician and author Matt McCarthy describes how doctors make difficult decisions in fast-paced environments.

Like many people, Barbara Greenberg wasn’t looking to unlock any deep, dark family secrets when she spit into a tube a few years ago and sent her DNA off to be analyzed. “I was just curious to see if I would find anything a bit interesting,” Greenberg says.

And at first, there were no real surprises; she was, as expected, 100 percent Eastern European Jewish. But she’d check back into her account now and then, looking for new matches to distant cousins, and eventually someone else popped up—an unknown female relative with a DNA match significant enough to indicate it was likely a half-sister.

As Greenberg and the other woman began communicating, their shared story took shape. Although the other woman had very little information about who her biological father might have been, Greenberg says the timing, location, and certain clues the woman’s mother had given over the years indicated that they did, indeed, share the same father.

A study in the British Medical Journal this week found a link between regular consumption of sugary drinks and cancer. Here’s what experts want you to know.

Scientist or not, we’re all familiar with X-ray imaging and perhaps its 3D cousin, computed tomography (CT), as well. These platforms are great for looking at bone and dense tissue—to see if there’s a fracture, or maybe a mass in the lung where it shouldn’t be—whereas molecular resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasonography are the go-to modalities for interrogating softer tissue, like muscle. And for knowing what is happening in the body—as opposed to just where something is—nuclear tracer technologies like positron emission tomography (PET), and to a lesser extent its cousin single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), are the way to go.

These self-same modalities can be found in more diminutive instrumentation for pre-clinical imaging—often equipped with heated beds or chambers, anesthesia and oxygen supplies, and other modifications—specifically designed for small animals. If you also consider instruments capable of optical modalities of fluorescence, bioluminescence and their derivatives—which generally don’t easily translate to the clinic—you find yourself awash in possibilities for in vivo imaging.