A courier handed me an envelope: “Urgent. Research center. Scanner suite. Unexplained fear responses.” I smiled. “Unexplained” is what people say when they can’t be bothered to look closely.

A case that didn’t smell of gunpowder, but of time. ⏳And of a tiny, unremarkable thread buried deep inside nerve cells. “How tedious,” I muttered. “A witness who shows up months too late.”

On my desk lay a stack of brain-things: colorful calcium traces, mouse mazes, synapse sketches. Right on top: a fresh Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper titled “Astroengrams: rethinking the cellular substrate for memory.” That paper sparked the case I’m about to tell you; one where the prime suspects aren’t gangsters, but astrocytes: our star-shaped...

Me? I had something far more interesting: a Nature Medicine paper with a mega-dataset: thousands of MS cases, tens of thousands of visits, and an algorithm that calculates with more sense than most textbooks.

More than 600 people with MS. Same diagnosis, wildly different trajectories. Some collect new lesions like parking tickets. Others lose brain volume quietly, efficiently, almost politely. The old drawers labeled “relapsing” and “progressive” help… but only up to a point.

No murder weapon. No fingerprints. Just: tattoo ink, a swollen lymph node, and vaccine responses acting like someone had been secretly tinkering with the immune system.