TUCSON, Ariz. — A YouTube clip showing a faint light at the Catalina Foothills house of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie, circulated this week and revived online claims that someone had returned to the property. Authorities have not confirmed the footage or tied it to the investigation.

Guthrie was last seen Jan. 31 after a relative dropped her off following dinner. Her garage opened shortly before 9:50 p.m. and closed minutes later. She was reported missing Feb. 1 when she did not arrive at a friend’s house to watch a church service. Relatives found blood on the front porch. Pima County sheriff’s officials and the FBI have treated the case as a kidnapping for ransom. No suspect has been publicly named.

A content creator using the account marktheshark943 posted video he described as “breaking news,” pointing to a yellow glow near a door or window and saying a rock previously seen in the driveway was gone. Photos of the rock circulated online. Neither claim has been independently verified, and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department has not issued a statement about lights or landscaping at the house.

Similar videos appeared earlier this month. Another creator filmed illuminated windows and speculated on camera that timers or occupants could explain them. Neighbors and social media users have long watched the dark-sky foothills property. The house had multiple cameras and more than a dozen outdoor fixtures when Guthrie disappeared. That does not mean a new light equals a new lead.

Comments on the latest clip included “Someone is playing games!” and talk of taunting. Those are posts, not evidence. Family members, including daughter Annie Guthrie and her husband, Tommaso Cioni, live nearby. People online have guessed they visit to maintain the house. There is no public confirmation of who, if anyone, was inside.

Sheriff Chris Nanos said in February that relatives are not suspects. “To be clear, the Guthrie family, to include all siblings and spouses, has been cleared as possible suspects.” He has also said Guthrie was not wandering because of dementia. “She is as sharp as a tack.” She uses a pacemaker and daily heart medication and has trouble walking.

The last major public images remain doorbell video of a masked person, about 5-foot-9 to 5-foot-10, in gloves and an Ozark Trail backpack, at the door the night she vanished. The camera disconnected about 1:47 a.m. Investigators recovered some Nest data with Google’s help. Gloves found near the house were tested. A hair lead went nowhere, Nanos said later. Two ransom-style notes were released July 31; one claimed she had died. Human remains found in August near West Ajo Way and South La Cholla Boulevard were not linked to the case, the sheriff’s department said.

In July, Nanos told “Today” the file was still active. “We have so much DNA to sort through,” he said. “These are labs all across the country that are talking to one another about how best to look at what they have in front of them for DNA evidence. And, so I’m still positive we will resolve this case.” He added, “We’re working this as hard as we can. There’s no lead too small.”

Spokesperson Angelica Carrillo said in an email that a sheriff-FBI task force “remains committed to finding Nancy and providing answers to her family” and that DNA and digital work is “complex and time-intensive.” A department post said that when a significant development occurs, “it will be shared publicly.”

On Sept. 15, Savannah Guthrie thanked actress Allison Janney on air and said the family wanted to “give her a proper goodbye.” “We just want our mom home,” she said. Reward figures reported in coverage have ranged from an FBI offer of up to $50,000 to larger private totals; the department has not restated those figures in connection with the new video.

Seven months on, the official picture is unchanged: an 84-year-old missing from a dark foothills street, a masked figure on a doorbell camera, unfinished lab work, and no arrest. A YouTube drive-by of a porch light is not a status update. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Pima County Sheriff’s Department or the FBI.

The stock market is flashing a valuation warning that has appeared only rarely in its 155-year history. The S&P 500’s cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which measures prices against 10 years of inflation-adjusted earnings, has climbed to about 41. Its long-term average over 155 years is 17.8, while the only comparable extreme was the roughly 44 reading reached at the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, according to a report by Yahoo Finance.

That backdrop comes as Warren Buffett, one of the most closely watched investors in the world, has issued a blunt message about the current market mood. Between 1965 and 2025, Berkshire Hathaway, the company he once led, delivered an annual compound return of about 19.7%, compared with 10.5% for the S&P 500 including dividends.

In a recent conversation with CNBC’s Becky Quick, Buffett said, “It’s tough to find values when everybody is preferring gambling.” The Oracle of Omaha has made a similar point in recent months, describing the market as a church with a casino attached and saying he had never seen people in more of a gambling mood.

Buffets approach

Buffett’s approach to investing has long centred on businesses that can earn more than they spend over an extended period. That is why he places so much emphasis on economic moats and competitive advantages. A moat can come from a strong brand, scale, switching costs or a network that becomes more valuable as more people use it. Such advantages can support durable cash flow, which companies can use to pay dividends, buy back shares or reinvest in their operations. Over long periods, that compounding can drive portfolio returns.
Buffett has also generally preferred buying when investors are less interested or more fearful, rather than when a particular story has taken over the market. Berkshire Hathaway remained relatively cautious on the artificial intelligence (AI) trade for a long time as the frenzy pushed valuations higher. It was only about a year ago that Berkshire initiated a position in Alphabet.

What does that mean for investors?

That does not necessarily mean the current AI boom will follow the same path as the dot-com era. The two periods also have important differences.
A high CAPE ratio remains significant because elevated readings have generally pointed towards more modest future returns. The current level can therefore be viewed as a warning about valuations rather than a signal that a market crash is about to happen. Markets can remain expensive for extended periods, just as inexpensive markets can become even cheaper. The CAPE ratio is therefore more useful for considering the next few years than trying to predict the next few weeks.Buffett’s investment approach has instead focused on owning businesses that can compound through different market cycles, with attention to economic moats, quality management teams and durable cash flows. Those cash flows can either be returned to shareholders or reinvested in the business. Holding such positions over long periods also means that a few difficult years do not necessarily determine the overall investment outcome.

Buffett steps down as chairman

Buffett, 96, is stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway after more than six decades at the helm of the company. He will become chairman emeritus with immediate effect and will remain a director.

His oldest son, Howard Buffett, will succeed him as chairman, marking another step in Berkshire’s long-planned succession. Howard has been a member of Berkshire’s board since 1993.

As he moves into the chairman emeritus role, Buffett said he remains confident about Berkshire’s future and will continue as a shareholder. “The company is in excellent hands, and I look forward to remaining a shareholder alongside you.”

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

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It is time to start year-end tax planning, and this year I’m doing something different. For the first time, I’m planning to owe taxes next April 15 instead of getting a refund.    

This means I’ll be parting company with most tax filers. Last year, nearly two-thirds of the nation’s 166 million filers of individual income-tax returns were owed refunds by the Internal Revenue Service. The average amount was $3,167. 

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Stanford University researchers have successfully transplanted lab-grown human brain tissue into genetically engineered mice, creating a new experimental platform scientists say could dramatically expand their ability to study neurological and psychiatric disorders that have long been difficult to research directly in living human brains.

The findings, published online September 16 in the journal Nature, describe an approach the research team calls “xenocortication.” Scientists engineered a strain of mice so that most of their neocortex and hippocampus, the brain regions responsible for higher cognitive functions and memory, never formed during early development. Researchers then transplanted human cortical organoids, self-organizing, three-dimensional clusters of laboratory-grown tissue that resemble specific regions of the developing brain, into the resulting cavity shortly after birth.

Cortical organoids are created by reprogramming human skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, which can then be coaxed to differentiate into most of the body’s cell types, including the specialized neurons and support cells found in the brain’s outer cortex. The technique builds on years of prior work by the study’s senior author, Sergiu Pașca, a neuroscientist and stem cell biologist who holds the Kenneth T. Norris Endowed Professorship in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and directs the university’s Brain Organogenesis Program.

According to Stanford’s own reporting on the study, the transplanted human tissue did not simply survive inside the mice; it expanded rapidly, eventually accounting for more than 90% of the total cortical tissue volume within the mice’s brains roughly three months after the transplant procedure. The human-derived neurons formed working connections both within the graft itself and with the surrounding mouse nervous system, with axons extending as far as the cervical spinal cord. Researchers also recorded coordinated electrical activity across the transplanted tissue, indicating the human cells were forming functional, organized circuits rather than simply existing as inert tissue.

Pașca described the significance of that integration directly. “In these mice, the human grafts generated a broad diversity of cortical cell types and established functional connections throughout the mouse nervous system,” he said. He was careful to characterize the limits of what the model represents, distinguishing it clearly from popular conceptions of “mini brains” grown in a dish. “They are not miniature brains and do not reproduce the full complexity of the human brain, but they allow us to study human neural cell types and developmental processes that would otherwise be extremely difficult to access,” Pașca said.

Remarkably, researchers found that the transplanted tissue contained detectable numbers of von Economo neurons, a rare and unusual type of nerve cell that had previously only been observed in postmortem human brain tissue and had never before been successfully generated either in laboratory culture or in earlier transplant experiments. Compared with previous cortical organoid transplant approaches, the xenocortical grafts also produced roughly three times more of a specific class of projection neurons that extend connections far beyond their region of origin, a feature researchers say makes the model considerably more representative of actual human cortical development than prior techniques.

Despite the scale of human tissue integration, the engineered mice retained largely normal function. Researchers found that so-called “apallial” mice, those genetically modified to lack most of their neocortex and hippocampus before any transplant occurred, were still able to move around their environment, see, hear and smell. Following the human tissue transplant, xenocortical mice performed on behavioral tests in a manner generally comparable to same-age normal mice by three to six months after surgery, despite carrying a brain composed overwhelmingly of human-derived cortical tissue.

To demonstrate the model’s potential research applications, scientists exposed xenocortical mice to five hours of low-oxygen conditions, designed to mimic aspects of the kind of oxygen deprivation that can occur around birth in human infants. That exposure caused substantial damage to the human-derived cortical tissue specifically, and oxygen-deprived xenocortical mice subsequently showed difficulty maintaining a steady gait and balance, a pattern researchers noted bears resemblance to symptoms seen in children with cerebral palsy. Normal mice and apallial mice lacking the human tissue transplant, by contrast, were largely unaffected by the same low-oxygen exposure. Pașca said understanding that difference could prove scientifically valuable well beyond the immediate experiment. “Finding out what accounts for this difference could yield clues about human neural susceptibility to oxygen deprivation, shed light on mechanisms underlying cerebral palsy and provide a platform for testing potential therapeutic strategies,” he said.

Researchers say the broader platform could eventually help scientists study a range of conditions that have historically been extremely difficult to investigate at the cellular and molecular level in living human brain tissue, including profound autism, schizophrenia, cerebral palsy and epilepsy. Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, described the potential significance of the approach for future precision medicine efforts. “The idea that you can make an organoid model with an individual’s unique genetic character and use that to learn what’s gone awry in that individual’s brain is a critical step toward precision medicine,” Singer said.

Given the ethical complexity inherent in transplanting human neural tissue into animal models, Pașca organized a conference in Asilomar, California, in November 2025 specifically to debate the ethical implications of this kind of research before the study’s publication. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing holds patents related to the generation of cortical organoids, with Pașca listed as an inventor, along with a separate provisional patent application covering the organoid transplantation technique itself.

Researchers say the xenocortical mouse platform will primarily serve as a tool for studying how disease-associated genetic changes alter human neural development and circuit formation, and for testing whether potential treatments can prevent or reverse those changes, offering scientists a living system in which to study human brain biology that was previously accessible only through limited postmortem tissue samples or simplified laboratory cell cultures.