Of every 1,000 people the measles virus infects, it may kill as few as one to three. In a way, this can seem merciful. But the mathematics of measles is also unforgiving. The virus is estimated to infect roughly 90 percent of the unimmunized people it encounters; each infected person may pass the infection on to as many as 12 to 18 others. In large part owing to an ongoing outbreak in South Carolina, the United States is watching those risks unfold in real time. As of last Thursday, the CDC is reporting 982 cases of measles. That count is expected to break 1,000 this week; a tracker run by researchers at Johns Hopkins University that many experts consider more reliable has ticked past 1,000 already. By the numbers alone, another death seems inevitable, and inevitable soon. Probabilities aren't guarantees, of course. So far, 2026 may be seeing some improvements over 2025, when the U.S. documented more than 2,200 measles cases'more than in any year since 1991. This year, just 4 percent of measles cases have led to hospitalization, compared with 11 percent last year. Several factors could be contributing to that discrepancy, including how hospitals in South Carolina are reporting measles admissions or of more mild cases being diagnosed to begin with; experts aren't yet sure....
Our thoughts are specified by our knowledge and plans, yet our cognition can also be fast and flexible in handling new information. How does the well-controlled and yet highly nimble nature of cognition emerge from the brain's anatomy of billions of neurons and circuits' First proposed in 2023 by Picower Professor Earl K. Miller and colleagues Mikael Lundqvist and Pawel Herman, spatial computing theory explains how neurons in the prefrontal cortex can be organized on the fly into a functional group capable of carrying out the information processing required by a cognitive task. Moreover, it allows for neurons to participate in multiple such groups, as years of experiments have shown that many prefrontal neurons can indeed participate in multiple tasks at once. The basic idea of the theory is that the brain recruits and organizes ad hoc 'task forces' of neurons by using 'alpha' and 'beta' frequency brain waves (about 10-30Hz) to apply control signals to physical patches of the prefrontal cortex. Rather than having to rewire themselves into new physical circuits every time a new task must be done, the neurons in the patch instead process information by following the patterns of excitation and inhibition imposed by the waves....
Some 150 million years ago, Europe was tropical ' and mostly underwater. The entire continent was closer to the equator than it is today, and what is now Germany and its neighbouring countries was submerged under a shallow inland sea, dotted with islands. On one cluster of islands, there were unusual creatures that didn't fit in with the rest of the fauna. These were some of the earliest birds on the planet: about the size of crows, with black feathers, and probably partial to eating insects. They weren't great fliers, spending most of their time on the ground and occasionally flapping into the air ' perhaps to escape sneaking predators1. They also didn't look like modern birds. They had teeth in their jaws and claws at the ends of their wings ' features seen on no adult birds today. These German animals were Archaeopteryx, and they bore many traces of their dinosaur ancestors. Fossils of Archaeopteryx are some of the most famous in history, but this creature is also an enigma. For more than a century, Archaeopteryx has been the only known bird genus from the Jurassic: the period when birds first evolved. Many other dinosaur-era birds have been discovered over the past few decades, but they are all from the subsequent period, the Cretaceous: a time when many diverse types of bird lived around the world. The group's origins remained lost in time....
Before a car crash in 2008 left her paralysed from the neck down, Nancy Smith enjoyed playing the piano. Years later, Smith started making music again, thanks to an implant that recorded and analysed her brain activity. When she imagined playing an on-screen keyboard, her brain'computer interface (BCI) translated her thoughts into keystrokes ' and simple melodies, such as 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', rang out1. But there was a twist. For Smith, it seemed as if the piano played itself. 'It felt like the keys just automatically hit themselves without me thinking about it,' she said at the time. 'It just seemed like it knew the tune, and it just did it on its own.' Smith's BCI system, implanted as part of a clinical trial, trained on her brain signals as she imagined playing the keyboard. That learning enabled the system to detect her intention to play hundreds of milliseconds before she consciously attempted to do so, says trial leader Richard Andersen, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena....
