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That’s only if current hospitalization rates continue, say researchers

Understanding the ebb and flow of the Ebola outbreak that erupted in West Africa last year—and continues to percolate in the three hardest hit countries—is critical to stopping it. That means knowing who’s getting infected, where the highest rates of transmission are occurring and which strategies work best to control its spread.

Scientists initially thought that even if almost every infected person could be hospitalized, it wouldn’t stop the rapid spread of the Ebola virus for months to come. But researchers in the U.S. are now predicting in the journal PLOS Biology that the epidemic in Liberia, which at one point had the biggest explosion in Ebola cases, could peter out by June 2015.

MORE: TIME Person of the Year: The Ebola Fighters

In coming up with their predictive models, the researchers, led by John Drake University of Georgia, took into account data from previous outbreaks of Ebola, as well as probabilities about infection rates among healthcare workers, family members of the infected and those who are exposed to the virus during burials.

In order for Liberia’s Ebola outbreak to end, new hospital beds would have to be added at the same current rate (300 were provided between July and September 2014), the study authors concluded. That would allow 85% of infected patients to be treated with the nutritional and hydration therapy that is critical to overcome the infection. If new beds aren’t continually added, then hospitalization rates could drop back down to 70%, and cases may start to outpace public health workers’ ability to contain the disease.

MORE: U.N. Official Says Ebola Can Be Beat in 2015

Burial practices need to change as well. Cultural norms include touching the bodies of the deceased, which spreads the Ebola virus in a community. Safer burial practices, in which infected patients are isolated from healthy people, are keeping transmission levels under control, the authors say.

MORE: Ebola Vaccine Is Safe and Effective, According to First Study

The key to reducing the number of Liberia’s Ebola cases by summer is ensuring that anyone who is sick is hospitalized. “These modeling exercises suggested that in the absence of rapid hospitalization of most cases, none of the proposed scenarios for increasing hospital capacity would have been likely to achieve containment,” the authors write. “Continuing on the path to elimination will require sustained watchfulness and individual willingness to be treated.”

Airlines are pushing for deregulation in Brazil

Call it the baby tax.

Brazilian airlines want to charge parents for bringing babies on planes, Bloomberg reports. Most carriers don’t impose full ticket prices for fliers under age 2, thanks to a cap on charges at 10% of the full adult fare. Only one—Avianca Brasil—charges a nominal fee for infants.

The Brazilian airlines’ new proposal, which will be decided on by the end of 2016, would require waiving the local cap on fees for children under 2 who sit in their parent’s lap.

In the United States, aviation regulators and airlines decided not to impose charges on infants a decade ago, arguing it would be better to encourage parents to fly with their infants rather than drive. Flying has a far lower accident rate than driving.

If U.S. airlines charged for lap babies, “it would be perceived as a money-hungry concept that jeopardizes children because certain people would be forced to drive,” said Alan Bender, professor of aeronautics, airline management and economics at Daytona Beach’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Read more at Bloomberg.

Consumers want good-quality sound and like the feel of vinyl records

Music purists and nostalgists alike have reason to rejoice: sales of vinyl records are on the rise.

According to data released last week by Nielsen Soundscan, more than 9.2 million vinyl records were sold in the U.S. last year, marking a 52% increase over the year before. The Wall Street Journal also reports that the vinyl sales are the highest numbers recorded by SoundScan since the music industry monitor started tracking them back in 1991. Meanwhile, data from the British Phonographic Industry revealed that for the first time in nearly 20 years, more than one million vinyl records were sold in the U.K. in 2014. (The last time the milestone had been achieved in Britain was in 1996.)

Even more startlingly are the figures on digital sales. While Nielsen revealed that streaming was also up, purchases of digital downloads dropped 9% for albums and 12% for songs in 2014.

Some are rejoicing at the new figures and anticipating a new trend. German-based company Optimal recently told the Guardian that they’re expecting to press 18 million records in 2015, while a new vinyl pressing plant called Canada Boy Vinyl (CBV) is scheduled to open in Calgary, AB, later this year.

But what’s behind this resurgence of vinyl? And why does the digital download industry seem to be floundering?

According to music industry experts in vinyl and digital, the answer is two-fold. Vinyl remains popular because the high-quality sound it delivers. While everyone from DJs to your grandfather has been saying for years that the sound on vinyl is richer, warmer and clearer than what’s being released online, it might not just be music snobbery talking. Most industry experts agree with them to an extent.

Jon Lloyd, a music genre specialist at Juno Records, an international online shop that sells both vinyl and digital music, tells TIME that in many ways digital music has been its own worst advertisement over the last decade. “You can set up a digital music label for a [relatively] very low cost meaning the market is flooded with record labels that aren’t particularly high on quality control,” he explains. That glut of low-quality, sloppily produced music has likely put off many music listeners who have turned away from downloading music online. Contrast that “throwaway culture of music,” as Lloyd describes it, to the labels that are putting out vinyl — which is expensive to produce — and sinking money into the product. “If there’s a serious investment, you have to have serious quality control because you have to know your vinyl is going to sell,” says Lloyd.

Simon Cole, the CEO of 7digital, a U.K.-based platform for creating digital music and radio services, agrees that digital music has had a quality problem in the past, which he says are reflected in sales figures. But “let’s be clear about what is in decline. What is in decline is the download of low-quality MP3 files,” he says. “I don’t think many of us will regret its passing.”

Cole also believes that along with the decline of low-quality downloads, digital music is now starting — or perhaps being forced — to become a lot more sophisticated. He says that future of music will be “higher-quality [music] files” and people are starting to look for in digital music what they once looked for in analogue: sound quality.

Yet sound isn’t the only part of vinyl’s renewed appeal. Many agree that the tangible aspect of vinyl, its physicality, is a draw for most people. “There’s a physical thing about putting a record on a record table and dropping the needle,” Cole says. “I think that physical thing is great. I think there is a new generation that is discovering the physicality of playing a piece of music like that.”

Lloyd confirms that the physically owning a record offers a connection in a way that a digital file doesn’t, comparing the digital/physical divide in music to that in the book world. “People will buy a Kindle for convenience, but people will still want to have a bookshelf [on their home],” he points out. (Interestingly, U.K. book chains have recently reported an increase in sales of paper books and a decline in e-Readers such as the Kindle or the Nook.)

Part of that appeal could come down to good old fashioned consumerism — we allow our possessions to define us. Nik Pollinger, a digital anthropologist who advises companies on the factors that motivate consumer behavior, told TIME in an email, “What we display in public is used to send social signals about our identities. Making our taste in music visible has historically played an important role in such signalling for many people.” Owning a vinyl collection, of course, “restores this ability.”

Yet while the boost to vinyl sales has been welcomed by many, there are potential problems if the market continues to grow. Josh Lachkovic, the co-founder of Wax & Stamp, a vinyl subscription club launching this year in Europe, tells TIME that if vinyl sales continue to increase, the demand on the few pressing plants out there — not to mention on those plants’ aging presses — might surpass supply.

But while vinyl sales are seeing something of a renaissance, it’s still too soon to worry about excess demand. Yes, vinyl sales are surging, but their sales still only made up six percent of album sales last year. Even so, for the beleaguered music industry, it’s nice to see a bright spot — and important to understand what’s inspiring it.

From Russia and China back to America

A Bulgarian prosecutor announced they had a man in custody with ties to one of the brothers

(PARIS) — The weapons used by a terror cell to kill 17 people around Paris came from outside the country and authorities are urgently tracing the source of the financing, a French police official said Tuesday.

Christophe Crepin, a French police union representative, said several people were being sought in relation to the “substantial” financing of the three gunmen, as well as others in their network. He said the weapons stockpile clearly came from abroad and the amount spent shows an organized network.

The news came hours after a Bulgarian prosecutor announced they had a man in custody with ties to one of the brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo newspaper massacre.

French police say as many as six members of the terrorist cell that carried out the Paris attacks may still be at large, including a man seen driving a car registered to the widow of one of the gunmen. The country has deployed 10,000 troops to protect sensitive sites, including Jewish schools and synagogues, mosques and travel hubs.

Earlier in the day, in ceremonies thousands of miles apart, France and Israel paid tribute to the victims of the terror attacks.

At police headquarters in Paris, French President Francois Hollande paid tribute to the three police officers killed in the attacks, placing Legion of Honor medals on their caskets.

“They died so that we could live free,” he said, flanked by hundreds of police officers.

Hollande vowed that France will be “merciless in the face of anti-Semitic, anti-Muslims acts, and unrelenting against those who defend and carry out terrorism, notably the jihadists who go to Iraq and Syria.”

As Chopin’s funeral march played in central Paris and the caskets draped in French flags were led from the building, a procession began in Jerusalem for the four Jewish victims of the attack Friday on a kosher supermarket in Paris.

“Returning to your ancestral home need not be due to distress, out of desperation, amidst destruction, or in the throes of terror and fear,” said Israeli President Reuven Rivlin. “Terror has never kept us down, and we do not want terror to subdue you. The Land of Israel is the land of choice. We want you to choose Israel, because of a love for Israel.”

Defying the bloodshed and terror of last week, a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad is to appear Wednesday on the cover of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, weeping and holding a placard with the words “I am Charlie.” Above him is emblazoned: “All is forgiven” — a phrase one writer said meant to show that the survivors of the attacks forgave the gunmen.

“I think that those who have been killed, if they were here, they would have been able to have a coffee today with the terrorists and just talk to them, ask them why they have done this,” columnist Zineb El Rhazoui told the BBC. “We feel, as Charlie Hebdo’s team, that we need to forgive the two terrorists who have killed our colleagues.”

Two masked gunmen opened the onslaught in Paris with a Jan. 7 attack on the paper, singling out its editor and his police bodyguard for the first shots before killing 12 people in all. Ahmed Merabet, a French Muslim policeman, was one of the victims, killed as he lay wounded on the ground as the gunmen — brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi — made their escape.

Charlie Hebdo, which lampoons religion indiscriminately, had received threats after depicting Muhammed before, and its offices were firebombed in 2011.

France’s main Muslim organization called Tuesday for calm, fearing that a new Muhammad cartoon could inflame passions anew.

Amid the hunt for accomplices, Bulgarian authorities said Tuesday they have a Frenchman under arrest who is believed to have links to Cherif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers.

Fritz-Joly Joachin, 29, was arrested Jan. 1 as he tried to cross into Turkey, under two European arrest warrants, one citing his alleged links to a terrorist organization and a second for allegedly kidnapping his 3-year-old son and smuggling him out of the country, said Darina Slavova, the regional prosecutor for Bulgaria’s southern province of Haskovo.

“He met with Kouachi several times at the end of December,” Slavova said.

The Kouachi brothers and their friend, Amedy Coulibaly, the man who killed four hostages in the Paris grocery, died Friday in clashes with French police. All three claimed ties to Islamic extremists in the Middle East — the Kouachis to al-Qaida in Yemen and Coulibaly to the Islamic State group.

Two French police officials told The Associated Press that authorities were searching around Paris for the Mini Cooper registered to Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly’s widow, who Turkish officials say is now in Syria.

One of the police officials said the Paris terror cell consisted of about 10 members and that “five or six could still be at large,” but he did not provide their names. The other official said the cell was made up of about eight people and included Boumeddiene.

Video has emerged of Coulibaly explaining how the attacks in Paris would unfold. French police want to find the person or persons who shot and posted the video, which was edited after Friday’s attacks.

Ties among the three attackers themselves date back to at least 2005, when Coulibaly and Cherif Kouachi were jailed together.

Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten, Nicolas Vaux-Montagny, and John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris and Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria, contributed.

Read next: Mentor of Charlie Hebdo Gunman Says He Was Obsessed With Violence

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An avalanche of almost-classified info sows confusion

The Pentagon held its breath Monday when Islamic State sympathizers hacked into U.S. Central Command’s Twitter and YouTube accounts and began posting internal U.S. military documents on the Twitter feed.

Could this be another Snowden job? Was any of the material classified? After all, they were posting the names, addresses and phone numbers of senior U.S. military officers.

Within an hour, the Pentagon’s sigh was audible. While there was a lot of official-looking, internal documents posted before both social-media accounts were shut down, none of it appears to have been classified.

Many sported the officious-sounding but non-classified For Official Use Only label.

Monday’s bullet-dodging highlights the U.S. government’s preoccupation with secrecy, and its downside: when nearly everything is classified, it can be harder to protect real secrets.

Think of the government’s penchant for secrecy like an iceberg: what’s showing above the water line is that tiny share that’s classified Confidential, Secret and Top Secret.

But underwater—where, strangely, you can’t see—are more than 100 different designations that boil down to “Don’t let the public see this.”

For example, the non-profit Project on Government Oversight grumbled last year about the Pentagon inspector general’s routine requirement that any member of the public wishing to see some of its more interesting reports file a formal Freedom of Information Act request. “As anyone familiar with the FOIA process knows, turnaround on a request can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years,” POGO’s Neil Gordon noted. “So, it’s reasonable to assume that the DoD IG is indeed trying to bury the report to spare the Pentagon and … its … contractors the embarrassing publicity.”

The varying labels—and each agency’s rules for releasing non-classified information—is confusing, as the Obama Administration itself conceded in 2010:

At present, executive departments and agencies (agencies) employ ad hoc, agency-specific policies, procedures, and markings to safeguard and control this information, such as information that involves privacy, security, proprietary business interests, and law enforcement investigations. This inefficient, confusing patchwork has resulted in inconsistent marking and safeguarding of documents, led to unclear or unnecessarily restrictive dissemination policies, and created impediments to authorized information sharing. The fact that these agency-specific policies are often hidden from public view has only aggravated these issues.

That’s why it wants to toss all those agency-specific labels into the trash and designate them all as Controlled Unclassified Information. Perhaps the reduced profusion of almost-classified labels will help reduce confusion like Monday’s (the Pentagon, of course, has its own process underway for all its non-classified technical data). And having the word Unclassified in the designation should make it clear to even cable-news anchors what’s up.

The Administration plans to issue a proposed regulation to funnel all the labels into that single Controlled Unclassified Information designation this spring. It’s slated to be fully operational in 2018.

Obviously, in addition to craving secrecy, the government abhors alacrity.

Read next: Twitter Hacking Gives Pentagon a Black Eye

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