Month: May 2019

Enlarge / German Health Minister Jens Spahn wants to fine parents for failing to vaccinate their children. (credit: Getty | Felix Zahn)

Germany, like the US, is facing a resurgence of measles. But the country’s health minister isn’t taking things lightly.

Health minister Jens Spahn is proposing a blanket fine for any parents of unvaccinated children. The fine run up to 2,500 euros ($2,790). He also suggests banning unvaccinated children from all kindergarten and daycare facilities to protect those who are too young to vaccinate and those with medical conditions that prevent them from being vaccinated.

In an interview published over the weekend, Spahn explained that immunization is a "social responsibility," adding that "measles vaccinations save human suffering. We protect ourselves and others."

Enlarge / Firefox wasn't feeling well over the weekend. The problem may not be fixed for everyone. (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, the expiration of a Mozilla certificate used to check the signatures of add-on codes in Firefox desktop and Android Web browsers caused a nearly universal failure of Firefox plug-ins and extensions as browsers detected them as invalid and disabled them.

The bug, dubbed "armagadd-on 2.0," was addressed by a hot-fix issued over the weekend, and a new version of the browser has been pushed out to some users. But users of the Android and Extended Support Release do not yet have a fix, and the workaround may not help them.

This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened with Firefox. The original "armagadd-on" happened almost exactly three years ago, on May 2, 2016, when an expired certificate caused signature verification errors for add-ons.

Detective Pikachu, the first live-action film inspired by the classic Nintendo game Pokémon, hits theaters on May 10. So it's timely that a new paper has just appeared in Nature Human Behavior, concluding that people who avidly played the game as children have developed a unique cluster of brain cells devoted to recognizing the hundreds of different Pokémon species.

It's well known that human beings are remarkably adept at visually recognizing faces, words, numbers, places, colors, and so forth thanks to a constellation of regions—small clusters of neurons about the size of a pea—in the temporal lobe, located just behind the ears. Those regions show up in the same place in most people, despite differences in age, sex, or race. There's even a so-called "Jennifer Aniston neuron," (aka the "grandmother cell") discovered by a UCLA neuroscientist in 2005, whose primary purpose seems to be to recognize images of the famous actress. Similar neurons have also been found for other celebrities like Bill Clinton, Julia Roberts, Halle Berry, and Kobe Bryant.

"This is quite remarkable, and it's still an open mystery in neuroscience why these regions appear exactly where they do in the brain," said co-author Jesse Gomez, a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted the experiments while a grad student at Stanford University. One way to answer this question, and determine which of several competing theories is correct, is to study people who, as children, had a unique experience with a new type of visual stimulus. If those people were shown to have developed a new brain region dedicated to recognizing that new object class, that would offer useful insight into how the brain organizes itself.