To coincide with the 200th anniversary of the publication of An Essay on the Shaking Palsy by James Parkinson, Goedert and Compston explore the origins of the eponym 'Parkinson's disease'. Although Jean-Martin Charcot is often credited with introducing the name in the 1880s, it can actually be traced back to an 1865 publication by William Rutherford Sanders.

The contribution of genomics to drug discovery and development so far has not yet lived up to the initial high expectations. Goldstein and colleagues discuss the reasons for the limited progress and review how recent advances — particularly in oncology and rare genetic diseases — may enable precision medicine strategies to harness the therapeutic potential of genomic knowledge.

In this Review, Kivimäki and Steptoe assess the current evidence on the association between stress and cardiovascular disease, covering the multiple roles of stress in the development and triggering of disease and as a determinant of prognosis and outcome. In addition, they discuss the clinical and public health importance of major stressors and the implications for prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease.

The brain uses predictable temporal structure to anticipate and select relevant events in time. Nobre and van Ede introduce different types of this 'temporal expectation' and its neural underpinnings, and describe how temporal expectation interacts with other forms of expectation in guiding adaptive behaviour.

A nucleotide repeat expansion in C9orf72 is a common genetic cause of neurodegenerative disorders. Here, the authors provide insight into the molecular mechanism by which this repeat undergoes Repeat-Associated Non-AUG (RAN) translation, implicating the integrated stress response and eIF2α phosphorylation.

Sensory input and neuronal activity are crucial for proper morphological development of neurons. Here, Frangeul and colleagues show that membrane excitability is a critical component of dendritic development in mouse somatosensory thalamocortical neurons.