Good morning. Here is what caught our eye in the last 24 hours, a handful of stories worth carrying into your Monday.

Japan is now officially the world’s best place to travel. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Travel and Tourism Development Index puts Japan at number one, followed by the United States, Spain, Australia and France, with 101 of 110 ranked economies improving their scores since 2024. Albania is the fastest-improving destination, up 7 percent. The real lesson underneath the rankings is worth keeping: a great destination is measured by what travel leaves behind for the people who live there.

Brooklyn is about to become the Museum of Us. CultureCon’s 2026 festival lands on October 3 and 4, with a full CultureCon Week of dinners, screenings and community events running now through October 2. Michael B. Jordan just joined a lineup that already includes John Legend, Mahershala Ali, Daniel Kaluuya and Colin Kaepernick. The theme is creatives and founders turning talent into sustainable careers, exactly the kind of gathering we wish there were more of.

A quantum computer just ran in space for the first time. A University of Vienna team operated a quantum processor in orbit, opening a new chapter for satellites and for computing itself. It is the kind of quiet milestone that reads small today and looks enormous a decade from now.

Scientists cleared a major hurdle for self-amplifying vaccines. A Queen Mary University of London team, publishing in Nature Communications, found a way to boost how much medicine self-amplifying RNA can produce. If it holds in the body, it could mean more potent vaccines and more affordable gene therapies, the patient’s own cells generating the treatment themselves.

Rare disease patients just gained a third treatment option. The FDA approved Atebrioz, a once-daily oral drug for fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, the rare disorder that turns soft tissue into bone. In trials it slowed abnormal bone growth where the placebo let it advance. For a disease with almost no options, one more matters enormously.