Numbers living with or dying from disorders such as stroke rises dramatically to 3.4bn people – 43% of global population

Neurological conditions ranging from migraine to stroke, Parkinson’s disease and dementia, are now the leading cause of ill-health worldwide, causing 11.1 million deaths in 2021, research has revealed.

The number of people living with or dying from disorders of the nervous system has risen dramatically over the past three decades, with 43% of the world’s population – 3.4 billion people – affected in 2021, according to a study published in the Lancet .

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In the near future humanity is doomed and our options are being determined by AI simulation – unfortunately for us, the AI doesn’t seem particularly bothered if we survive

This intriguing sci-fi thriller is a throwback to the kind of cerebral teleplays and low-budget movies that flourished in the 1960s: ripe with gloomy lighting and dystopian pessimism, but with barely enough money in the budget to pay for more than two sets. Think On the Beach from 1959, or Seconds from 1966 – but then lower your expectations because it’s not anywhere in their league. But it’s not bad, and the subject is timely.

The time is a couple of decades in the future, and humanity has accepted that we’ve messed up the planet beyond repair. The only answer is to start colonies off-world, starting with the moon. Helping to sow these seeds for the future is an AI called Jay that runs simulations to calculate risks and resolutions. All that is explained in a crawl and with faux news footage. The drama properly begins at a rural house that looks like something from Grand Designs; it’s the home of Jay-creator Sam (Kemi-Bo Jacobs) and astronaut Anderson (Simon Merrells, one of those actors you’re sure you’ve seen before even if you can’t quite place him). He is going to be the head of the next crucial mission to the moon, which launches tomorrow. The couple’s last night together is interrupted by the arrival of Sam’s employee Charlie (Hermione Corfield), who is troubled that Jay’s simulations posit not a trip of a few days but one going to the Jupiter moon Europa, and from there the titular million days journey to Alpha Centauri. Quicker than you can sing “Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do,” the trio start to suspect Jay has gone rogue and has her own agenda.

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From social communication therapy to drugs trials to help with mood, participatory methods are making a difference to autistic people’s lives

Kirsty Orton didn’t mind whether her baby was autistic or not – she just wanted her 12-month-old to enjoy being with his mummy: to notice her when she came into the room. To meet her eye when she talked to him and to be able to communicate.

“All I wanted to do was be able to connect and bond with Fynn,” she said. “But when your baby looks everywhere else in the room except at you and stays in their own zone, like you’re completely unimportant to them, it’s upsetting in a way that I struggle to put into words.”

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Implants like Elon Musk’s Neuralink offer great promise, but come with massive ethical questions

Are we on the verge of a new era in which brain disorders become a thing of the past, and we all merge seamlessly with artificial intelligence? This sci-fi future may seem one step closer after Elon Musk’s recent announcement that his biotech company, Neuralink, has implanted its technology into a human brain for the first time. But is mind-melding of this kind really on the way? And is it something we want?

Founded in 2016, Neuralink is a newcomer in the world of brain-machine interfaces, or BMIs. The core technology has been around for decades, and its principles are fairly straightforward. A BMI consists of probes – usually very thin wires – that are inserted into the brain at specific locations. These probes eavesdrop on the activity of nearby brain cells and transmit the infor­m­ation they gather to a computer. The computer then processes this information in order to do something useful – perhaps control a robot, or a voice synthesiser. BMIs can also work the other way round, driving neural activity through electrical stimulation carried out by the probes, potentially changing what we think, feel and do.

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Arguments about sex differences in the brain have raged for centuries. As intriguing as they are, it’s time we changed focus

There seems to be an insatiable public appetite for information about sex differences in the human brain, eagerly harnessed by the media in many forms. A paper out this week from a research group at Stanford University made headlines for its innovative contribution to this form: using an AI neural network model to look at brain scans to see if it could “reliably” and “robustly” tell female and male brains apart. In other – more neutral – words, could the algorithm tell whether the brain patterns being looked at were from women or men?

The answer was “yes”, though rather more guarded in the paper itself than in the reports about it. What was interesting about the study was that it seemed to have moved beyond the stereotypical “size matters” agenda – asking whether male or female brains are bigger or smaller in different areas – instead measuring differences in the working brain using a method that looked at differences in blood flow to various brain regions.

Prof Gina Rippon is emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, and the author of The Gendered Brain

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US researchers say findings could also enable doctors to predict progression of Alzheimer’s disease

Using a blood test to determine the biological age of a person’s organs could help treat them before they get sick, as well as predicting the progression of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, researchers have suggested.

A study by academics in the US found people whose organs were ageing faster than the rest of their body had a higher risk of developing diseases in that particular organ within 15 years.

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Experts says findings of dots tests are down to information processing not yet being fully developed

Babies really do see the world differently, researchers have found, after revealing that those under six months old do not fall for a visual illusion that can trick older children and adults.

Experts say that is because information processing in the tots’ brains is not yet fully developed, which means they make different assumptions about what they see.

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I felt as if my hands and arms started to grow, and the room was closing in on me

I was five or six, growing up in London, when the first strange episode occurred. Waiting to fall asleep, I suddenly felt as if my bed was enormous and I was tiny, and unable to move.

This sensation recurred a number of times. I remember telling my mum and her saying: “Oh, you were just dreaming.” But I thought: “Then why am I having this dream again and again, and why does it seem so real?”

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