As dawn spread over San Antonio on September 9, 2021, almond-colored smoke began to fill the sky above the city's Far West Side. The plumes were whorling off the top of a 132-foot-tall cell tower that overshadows an office park just north of SeaWorld. At a hotel a mile away, a paramedic snapped a photo of the spectacle and posted it to the r/sanantonio subreddit. "Cell tower on fire around 1604 and Culebra," he wrote. In typical Reddit fashion, the comments section piled up with corny jokes. "Blazing 5G speeds," quipped one user. "I hope no one inhales those fumes, the Covid transmission via 5G will be a lot more potent that way," wrote another, in a swipe at the conspiracy theorists who claim that radiation from 5G towers caused the Covid-19 pandemic. The wisecracks went on: "Can you hear me now?" "Great, some hero trying to save us from 5G." That self-styled hero was actually lurking in the comments. As he followed the thread on his phone, Sean Aaron Smith delighted in the sheer volume of attention the tower fire was receiving, even if most of it dripped with sarcasm. A lean, tattooed--and until recently, entirely apolitical--27-year-old, Smith had come to view 5G as the linchpin of a globalist plot to zombify humanity. To resist that supposed scheme, he'd spent the past five months setting Texas cell towers ablaze. Smith's crude and quixotic campaign against 5G was precisely the sort of security threat that was fast becoming one of the US government's top concerns in 2021.

Rafael Yuste thinks neuroscientists have been looking at the brain too close. "It's just like a TV screen--if you're watching a movie and could only look at an individual pixel, you would never understand what's going on," he says. "What neuroscientists have been doing since [the father of neuroscience, Santiago Ramon y] Cajal, is looking at the single pixels of the brain--one neuron at a time. So that's why we need these methods to see the whole screen, to see what's playing in our brains." The methods in question were on display in a recent study he and his graduate student, Christopher Dupre, conducted, recording the activity of all neurons in the Hydra vulgaris, a centimeter-long hydroid, while the animal swam between two pieces of glass.