‘Choice blindness’ can induce voters to reverse their party loyalty. When US presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that […]
Nature
Canada puts commercialization ahead of blue-sky research
Federal budget boosts clean-energy research and university infrastructure. Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty yesterday released the country’s 2013 budget, calling it “a plan for jobs, growth and long-term prosperity”, words that will please some of the budget’s main beneficiaries: those working in applied research. But for those who argue that investments in basic research are […]
Slow science
The world’s longest-running experiments remind us that science is a marathon, not a sprint. Although science is a long-term pursuit, research is often practised over short timescales: a discrete experiment or a self-contained project constrained by the length of a funding cycle. But some investigations cannot be rushed. To study human lifespans or the roiling […]
Extreme prospects
High gold prices are making it worthwhile to look for gold in some unusual places. Demand has never been higher, but nearly all the easy gold has already been mined. So, to maintain production, mining companies are turning to more difficult sources that would have been left in the ground if gold prices had been […]
Canada launches first asteroid-hunting space telescope
The first satellite designed to search for and keep track of asteroids and space debris was launched into orbit today. The Canadian Space Agency’s suitcase-sized Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat) will circle the globe every 100 minutes, scanning space to pick out asteroids that may one day pose a threat to Earth. Read more in Nature.
Canadian Space Agency chief quits unexpectedly
While Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been captivating the Internet with his live updates and photos from the International Space Station, his colleagues back on Earth are having a tough time. On Tuesday the president of the Canadian Space Agency, former astronaut Steve MacLean, announced he would be leaving the agency on 1 February. Read more in Nature.
The single life
Sequencing DNA from individual cells is changing the way that researchers think of humans as a whole. All Nicholas Navin needed was one cell — the issue was how to get it. It was 2010, and the postdoctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York was exploring the genetic changes that drive breast […]