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.

On my desk, brain slices, calcium traces, behavioural diagrams and actigraphy curves were piling up. Right in the middle: a fresh, delightfully demanding paper on astrocytes, those supposedly minor characters of the nervous system. The perfect basis for a new case, I thought: a proper neuro–crime story, built on a recent astrocyte review article in...

While half of London is wondering whether the bin collection will be on time, I, SherlockMS, self-appointed Chief Inspector for Cerebral Affairs, am occupied with a more elegant question: Who actually takes out the brain’s rubbish? 🧠🚮