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Airs Saturday, September 25, 2010 at 3 p.m. on KPBS TV

Millions of basketball fans will fill out NCAA tournament brackets this week and try to correctly predict the outcomes of every game. The chances of succeeding are about 1 in 150 quintillion. A group of computer scientists are trying to beat those odds by writing programs that learn to pick winners.

Basketball fans have one more day to fill out their March Madness brackets. They'll need to predict not just the champions and their route to victory, but also the paths of all the losers. It's not easy. In fact, no person or computer has yet been able to do it.

Neuroscientists have found that as we age, our brain's reaction time slows and our ability to multitask diminishes. But maturity also brings an enhanced ability to reason out problems and empathize. And the middle-aged brain can still strengthen neuron circuits associated with memory and decision-making.

American companies that do business with China make good money. They also lose a lot of money there to cyber thieves, who routinely hack into the computers of the U.S. firms and steal their trade and technology secrets.

For the past nine months, Princeton University in New Jersey has been trying to halt an outbreak of bacterial meningitis in its students without success. So it's going to offer students a vaccine that's not yet approved for broader use in the US.

Alan Furst's new thriller, Mission to Paris, follows a German-American film star to Europe on the brink of war. Fredric Stahl thinks he's going to make a movie in France, but he winds up caught between German and American forces who both hope to use his stardom for their own ends.

To better target non-English speaking communities nationwide, corporate giants like McDonald's and Wal-Mart are creating ads in different languages, including Mandarin, Korean and Vietnamese. As companies build these ad campaigns, they're learning what memes and mediums best appeal to different cultures.

New restaurants around town and new activities: from daily art assignments to dodgeball. Get ready to have your tastebuds tickled and your interest piqued in today's edition of the weekend preview.

As a journalist, I've used the phrase, "fourth estate" to describe the press for as long as I can recall. But when thinking about this blog, I realized that I couldn't clearly track its origin. A few minutes on Google, and