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The human brain experiences five distinct eras as we age, and each is defined by changes in our neural architecture that influence how we process information, new research shows. The brain changes associated with these stages shape how our mind ages and ultimately declines.

In a study published on Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers compared the brain scans of 3,802 people between zero and 90 years old. By mapping the brain’s connections over time, the scientists detected four turning points in brain structure over the course of a human life: at age nine, 32, 66, and 83.

What this means, according to the researchers, is that our brain’s connections wire themselves in pretty much the same way from birth to nine years of age. Then our neural architecture starts to organize differently as we enter adolescence, continuing through age 32. At this point, the brain’s structural development appears to peak, according to the study.

“What we find suggests that the journey from childlike brain development to this peak in the early 30s is distinct from other phases in the lifespan,” says Alexa Mousley, the study’s lead author and a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge.

“This doesn’t mean that the brain of a 17-year-old and a 30-year-old look are the same—it’s specifically that the types of changes occurring … are consistent,” she adds.

At age 32, the brain’s longest rewiring era begins, marking the opening of the adult years. It’s at this point that brain architecture starts to stabilize compared with the previous phases, and Mousley says this corresponds to past research that found that there is also a “plateau in intelligence and personality around this time.”

After the mid-60s, brain connections start to deteriorate. And by the last turning point, 83 years old, connectivity declines even further.

In a recent statement, Duncan Astle, a professor of neuroinformatics at Cambridge and a co-author of the study, said these epochs of brain development may mirror how humans experience changes over time.

“Looking back, many of us feel our lives have been characterised by different phases,” he said. “It turns out that brains also go through these eras.”

It’s unclear what these major shifts can tell us about learning and development in the brain, Mousley says. Past research has also pointed toward distinct phases of brain development through the lifespan, and it remains unclear how lifestyle factors or other variables may influence brain aging in individuals. And while the new study finds an obvious peak in efficiency in one’s early 30s, that could be linked to evolution, lifestyle changes, or genetic factors.

“These are all just potential ideas—we truly don’t know,” she says.

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This holiday season, I am retiring my extra small knotless braids in exchange for creative low-tension styles. I knew it was time to reset when, this summer, I found a small bald spot, aka traction alopecia, at the crown of my head from back-to-back tight styles.

With scalp serums, a consistent routine, and a break from trendy high-tension styles, my scalp is healing. The simple pleated braids we wore in elementary school with bobos have reinvented themselves. Low-tension styles are no longer just a few neat plaits. They have evolved thanks to curly hair stylists and influencers. I am not alone. My feeds are full of curl friends choosing twist outs, flat twists, and braid outs to protect their scalps, maintain hair integrity, and minimize breakage.

Celebrity stylist and CEO of Texture Management, Felicia Leatherwood, knows ball when it comes to low-tension styles. Leatherwood has been mastering natural hairstyles for over 26 years and is known for Issa Rae’s soft, low-tension looks that fill our Pinterest board.

Below, she spoke with ESSENCE about why you should give your hair a break this season and prioritize hair health with low tension styles this season.

Curl Friends Are Letting Go

Curl friends are embracing low-tension styles because they are not seen as the hairstyle you only wear running errands. These styles are worn to the office, date nights, and formal gatherings. The shift is leading more people to integrate twist outs, mini braids, and soft curls into their everyday routine. Low-tension styles are gaining popularity because they are approachable, healthy for the scalp, and hold up well in colder temperatures when natural hair is more susceptible to breakage.

“I’m seeing people wearing their hair more natural and less structured, a bit more fluffy,” Leatherwood says. “Softer curls around the face feel cozy for the winter.” Many curl friends are also experiencing thinning edges and breakage from excessive protective styling this summer. Trendy styles often require tight hair pulling and manipulation to achieve the look. Although they are cute, they come with a steep price for hair health.  

“At the end of the day, it’s about maintaining hair that’s healthy,” Leatherwood explains. “We need to keep it from being pulled and manipulated too much.” She looks to some of her clients, like Issa Rae, for inspiration. Clients who understand how to keep their hair healthy under any circumstances. 

“I use Issa as my template, and Beyoncé, SZA, Yara Shahidi as references,” Leatherwood says. “They are doing more of that softer, low-tension looks that are easy to achieve.”

These celebrities have redefined low-tension styles and made them more common on red carpets, television shows, and music videos, giving curl friends the confidence to wear them too.

Low-Tension vs Protective: Know the Difference

Protective styles shield the ends of your hair from daily wear and environmental damage. These styles include buns, wigs, stitch braids, updos, and sew-ins. While they do protect, many involve pulling the hair back tightly, which can sometimes create tension on the scalp. 

Low-tension styles leave ends exposed but reduce scalp tension. Twist outs, braid outs, Bantu knots, flat twists, and flexi rod sets all qualify—with more innovative low-tension styles being created every day. These styles are easier on the scalp, promote growth, and look natural, though they don’t last as long as high-tension styles.

Leatherwood notes that some people believe pulling hair back tightly protects it; instead of protecting, it splits the ends. She recommends more low-tension styles to recover from summer’s high-tension looks. 

“More twist outs or perm rod curls last with the right products, look natural, and are easier on the scalp,” Leatherwood said.

What Those Scalp Bumps Really Mean

Tiny bumps along the hairline or base of braids are warning signs. Those high-tension hairstyles? Most are linked to traction alopecia. Studies show this type of hair loss affects one in three Black women.

Leatherwood says repeated tension can also cause folliculitis, inflammation of the hair follicle. The fix is simple: avoid overly tight styles and give your scalp a break. If issues persist, consult your provider for treatments, including steroids or antibiotics.

She emphasizes that softer, low-tension styles give the scalp a chance to recover while keeping curls healthy and strong.

How to Keep Low-Tension Styles Fresh

Low-tension styles let you prioritize scalp health without sacrificing style. Leatherwood recommends products and techniques to maintain softness and curl definition. “Apply a butter or cream, massage and smooth it over the hair, then twist it,” Leatherwood says. “It keeps hair soft and reduce pulling.” 

Bantu knots, twist outs, and flat twists keep hair healthy and cute while giving the scalp a break. For long-lasting curl sets, Leatherwood loves Ampro Curl Wax. “After curl sets, I coat the hair with it. It opens up the curls and lasts for several weeks,” Leatherwood says. 

Low-tension styles are ideal for the colder months, when our hair is recovering from summer styling damage and preparing for the winter frost. By letting the scalp rest and reducing tension, these styles help restore growth, maintain hair integrity—ensuring that your curls stay strong this season

Low-Tension Style Inspiration

If you need hair inspiration, here are a few creative low-tension styles from my favorite creator curl friends that are making waves that you can share with your stylist or try at home.

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The Covid vaccine, like many other immunizations, carries some health risks in certain cases, and mainstream scientists have been studying the vaccine’s effects on people for years, especially the incidence of myocarditis in teenage boys and young men.

“This is a profound revelation,” Dr. Prasad wrote in a memo to staff members. “For the first time, the U.S. F.D.A. will acknowledge that Covid-19 vaccines have killed American children.”

Dr. Prasad said he would propose a range of new oversight and review of vaccines, though it was unclear whether the White House had been advised of the memo’s contents. The proposals could be refined by government officials or challenged by lawmakers and drug companies.

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the F.D.A., did not respond to a request for comment.

The memo represents another escalation of broadsides on vaccines by federal authorities under Mr. Kennedy, who has used his position as secretary to repeatedly raise doubts about inoculations and name other skeptics to positions of authority.

Mr. Kennedy’s team has issued new policies that are limiting access to the Covid shots to people 65 and older as well as to younger people with underlying medical conditions. He and F.D.A. officials have also called for more studies of existing vaccines that have been considered safe for decades.

Health officials in the first Trump administration, when the vaccines were developed during the pandemic, and in the Biden years, strongly endorsed the Covid shots as lifesaving measures. Public health experts have pointed to the number of lives saved by the Covid vaccine and to the fact that the virus caused more than a million deaths among Americans. About 2,100 children have died of COVID since the pandemic began, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Dr. Prasad’s memo is landing just before next week’s meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s influential vaccine committee. Mr. Kennedy’s handpicked panel includes supporters of the so-called medical freedom community, who often reject vaccination and oppose mandates. The committee is expected to discuss the children’s immunization schedule and the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns.

Michael Osterholm, a critic of Mr. Kennedy’s health agency oversight and an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, said he believed the memo was intentionally released before the meeting.

“This is an irresponsible way to deal with a very critical public health issue like vaccination and adverse events,” he said.

Among the changes Dr. Prasad outlined for oversight and approval were requirements that studies looking at people using a vaccine or a placebo include all subgroups, such as pregnant women. In addition, he described the annual process of updating flu vaccines to match a circulating strain as a “catastrophe of low-quality evidence,” and said it would also be re-examined. (The chosen strain is at times a poor match.)

He also said companies would need to do larger studies before promoting vaccines as safe to administer together, such as the flu and Covid vaccines. And vaccine makers would need to conduct large, randomized studies of pneumonia vaccines to prove that they reduce cases of the disease rather than prove that they generate antibodies.

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Dr. Vinay Prasad, the F.D.A.’s top vaccine official, suggested in a memo that the deaths were related to vaccine-related myocarditis but did not offer data to support his conclusions. Credit…Hannah Beier for The New York Times

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Trillions of neutrinos whiz through our bodies every day, pulsing from the sun, outer space, and deep beneath Earth. Yet these elusive subatomic particles have proven difficult to study. That could soon change, however. Buried 700 meters beneath the rolling hills of southern China, an enormous neutrino observatory called JUNO has released its first results after a mere 59 days of operation. And so far, they are very promising, physicists say.

“The physics result is already world-leading in the areas that it touches,” says particle physicist Juan Pedro Ochoa-Ricoux of the University of California, Irvine, who co-leads a team on JUNO.

“In particular, we measured two neutrino oscillation parameters, and that measurement is already for both parameters the best in the world,” he says. The results were published in two separate preprints on arXiv.org.

JUNO—short for Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory—has been tasked with a tall order: determine the ordering of masses of the three types of neutrino. In other words, do they follow a “normal mass ordering,” where the first flavor of neutrino is the lightest and the third the heaviest, or an inverted one, in which the third neutrino mass state is the lightest?

The answer to this question holds myriad implications, from informing other experiments to uncovering new physics to explaining certain cosmological mysteries. That’s because, despite being such lightweights, neutrinos are so incredibly numerous that they may play an outsized role in the distribution of matter in the universe.

JUNO’s spherical detector, which is akin to a 13-story-tall fishbowl, primarily measures so-called electron antineutrinos spewing from the nearby Yangjian and Taishan nuclear plants. When the particles strike a proton inside the detector, a reaction triggers two light flashes that ping photomultiplier tubes and get converted into electrical signals.

The new measurements from these neutrino-proton collisions are now considered the most precise for two oscillation parameters, which act as proxies for differences in their mass, according to Ochoa-Ricoux.

“It is the first time we’ve turned on a scientific instrument like JUNO that we’ve been working on for over a decade. It’s just tremendously exciting,” Ochoa-Ricoux says. “And then to see that we’re able to already do world-leading measurements with it, even with such a small amount of data, that’s also really exciting.”

Still, the physicists will need years’ worth of neutrino detections to answer the mass-ordering conundrum.

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Recent high-profile visitors to the area, which straddles six counties, include Taylor Swift, Eve Jobs, who married here in July, and JD Vance, whose security checkpoints put the sleepy village of Dean on lockdown in August. Others, like Masur, are calling it home. Ellen DeGeneres has lived here since 2024, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z are rumored to be looking for property.

This is part of a lucrative boom in Americans heading to the UK. In 2024, there were a record 5.6 million visits from the US, up half a million on the previous year. Those visitors spent a record £7.3 billion, or about $9.5 billion, in 2024 — £1.1 billion more than in 2023, according to data from VisitBritain.

They’re also spending more: In 2024, adjusted for inflation, Americans spent £68 more per trip to the UK than they did in 2023.

Figures provided to Business Insider by the UK government show that the number of US nationals applying for British citizenship also hit a record high in the second quarter of 2025, following the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Between April and June, 2,194 Americans applied — up 50% on the same period last year.

From the sheer number of what sound like American accents I hear during my trip in late October — although I meet some Canadian ladies hurt by my assumption — it feels as though most have headed straight to the Cotswolds.

Two real estate professionals told me they are seeing the spoils of this trend: more American tech founders, media moguls, and billionaires looking for historic properties in the region.

“Once there’s a critical mass of like-minded people in the area, it draws more and more people of that profile,” says Harry Gladwin, a Cotswolder and partner at The Buying Solution, which advises wealthy foreigners on finding homes here.

Armand Arton, the founder of Arton Capital, which helps ultra-high-net-worth clients secure second homes and citizenships, says US politics has motivated a lot of his clients to seek homes in this part of rural England. But owning heritage properties — castles and country estates that many British aristocrats can no longer afford to maintain — is also about status.

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D’Ambrosi Fine Foods is an American-run business in Stow-on-the-Wold, the Cotswolds. Frederick Hunt for BI

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This triple cantilever was an engineering marvel when it was built from concrete and steel more than 70 years ago.

But the structure was designed for far less traffic than the 130,000 cars and trucks that cross it every day.

It’s now exceeded its lifespan, and decades of increasingly heavy trucks have caused the concrete to weaken.

Hundreds of steel mesh sheets keep crumbling concrete from falling on drivers below.

City officials declared in 2016 that this decrepit cantilever needed to be completely overhauled. It hasn’t happened.

The triple cantilever runs along the edge of Brooklyn Heights, a wealthy and politically connected neighborhood. It stands as a symbol of resistance to Robert Moses, the power broker who rammed highways through communities.

When Mr. Moses tried that approach here in the 1940s, Brooklyn Heights residents pushed back, and Mr. Moses rerouted the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway around them.

At the top sits the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, a cherished landmark with skyline views where generations of New Yorkers have come for their first date.

Below, two levels of traffic jut out like drawers pulled from a dresser. The highway is the main artery between Brooklyn and Queens, and it is part of Interstate 278, the only road that connects New York’s five boroughs.

The cantilever, which opened in 1954, was designed to be used for 50 years. The risks only go up as it continues to deteriorate year after year, even as its life span has been extended with interim measures. While city officials and transportation engineers say imminent collapse is not a threat, other catastrophes could still strike, like concrete falling off and hitting vehicles.

Since 2018, two New York City mayors — Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams — have announced that they would fix this vital artery. But both administrations were unprepared for the ferocious community opposition to their ideas on how to proceed. Both struggled to build any consensus at all as local residents countered with their own ideas. The endless back and forth led to more delays and inertia.

The standoff over the B.Q.E. has become, more broadly, a symbol of the power that local communities wield over critical infrastructure projects around the nation.

Though community opposition is hardly new, it is thriving today as residents have become more nimble and sophisticated at influencing projects, or halting them entirely. They strategize about just who to target with their ads and protests, assemble technical experts and consultants to argue on their behalf, and extend their reach with email blasts, online petitions and social media.

In Los Angeles, a plan to widen the 710 Freeway, one of the nation’s busiest freight corridors, was canceled in 2022 amid community opposition. A major street improvement project in Detroit was paused last summer, in part over the public’s concerns about its design, while state officials took another approach. And a Buffalo project championed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to reconnect communities divided by a highway stalled recently after a state court ruled in favor of critics.

This community pushback is often characterized as NIMBYism — the “not in my backyard” impediment to change — but the reality is more nuanced. Many Brooklyn residents say they are not against improving the B.Q.E., and, in fact, are fighting for a better future with less traffic and more space for people.

But now, time is running out for the triple cantilever.

A highway in decay

The cantilever structure anchors a 1.5-mile stretch from Atlantic Avenue to Sands Street that is owned by the city. The rest of the 16-mile highway belongs to the state.

Even before the latest effort, state transportation officials had sought to rehabilitate the cantilever section in 2006. They dropped the project in 2011, citing fiscal concerns and other priorities. That left the problem to the city.

The triple cantilever was increasingly flagged for potential safety hazards, said Bojidar Yanev, a former city transportation official who oversaw inspections from 1989 to 2018. “The structure was unraveling,” he said.

Since at least 1996, the city has fastened metal mesh sheets to the underside of the roadway, particularly below joints, as a stop-gap measure to hold crumbling concrete in place and prevent accidents.

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