No one can see the future. But there's no harm in some enlightened and educated guessing. TIME presents a thinking person's guide to the year to come.

SCIENCE
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PLAGUE 2.0

Bet on this for 2007: there will be no outbreak of a newly mutated, extremely infectious and lethally virulent H5N1 bird flu. Millions will not die from H5N1. This strain of flu has been tracked for almost a decade. If it hasn't managed to mutate into a form that makes it easy for human-to-human transmission by now, odds are something else is going to take the glory: another flu variant or something like the SARS outbreak in 2003. Whatever it is, it will come out of nowhere.

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