I’m doing a reporting internship at Nature’s London office for the next few months. Because the frequency of individual stories will be higher than usual for me, I’ll be rounding up each week’s stories into one handy update.
Working in an office full-time has been as illuminating as I hoped it would be, so far. I’m soaking up all kinds of newsroom wisdom culture and have even learned how to operate a cafetière, which one of my editors assures me is the path to winning friends and influencing people.
David Osterbur spent a decade pursuing an academic science career before tiring of the “never-ending cycle” of unfunded grant applications, he says. When his wife, like him a developmental biologist, accepted a job offer in Massachusetts, he took advantage of the change in location to weigh a change in career. He was considering a career in public health so he could continue using his science background, when his wife suggested he become a science librarian. “I had always enjoyed being in the library. In graduate school, people would always come to me when they couldn’t find something,” he says.
It was over drinks at a local pub in the spring of 2006 that cognitive psychologist Martin Conway of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom first told his colleague Chris Moulin about using a wearable camera for memory research. But it took more than a few pints of beer to convince Moulin that SenseCam, a camera that periodically takes still photos while worn on the user’s chest, might be a game-changer in the study of what psychologists call autobiographical memory. Although skeptical of the small device’s usefulness, Moulin did finally agree to take one for a test drive.
Before the reels on a slot machine stop spinning, a gambler’s brain is already anticipating the potential rewards. And although two bananas on the pay line with a third just barely visible won’t pay a gambler any more than three random fruits, such near misses have the well-documented, if irrational, effect of enticing gamblers to try again. The reason, according to a new study, is that these near misses activate the same reward signals in the brain as a win.
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Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.