I think that in many ways, the motivation of scientists is similar to that of prospectors in the 1800s. The prospectors had gold fever, grubstakes, the ability to persevere against long odds of success, and the rare peak experience of striking the mother lode. Scientists have idea fever, government grants as grubstakes, the ability to persevere against long odds, and the rare experience of having one of their ideas turn out to be truly significant, which might happen once in a scientific lifetime. I'll describe one such idea, then speculate on where it might take us in the next ten years. But first, a little background.

In a new Cerebral Cortex study, researchers say they can predict a person's performance on a video game simply by measuring the volume of specific structures in their brain. The authors found that nearly a quarter of the variability in achievement seen among men and women trained on a new video game could be predicted by measuring the volume of three structures in their brains.

The study adds to the evidence that specific parts of the striatum, a collection of distinctive tissues tucked deep inside the cerebral cortex, profoundly influence a person's ability to refine his or her motor skills, learn new procedures, develop useful strategies and adapt to a quickly changing environment.

In a new article published in WIREs Congnitive Science, researchers from Duke University and the NIH suggest that the latest cognitive science research has the potential to fundamentally change how the legal system operates.

The team explains that Neurolaw, also known as legal neuroscience, builds upon the research of cognitive, psychological, and social neuroscience by considering the implications for these disciplines within a legal framework. Each of these disciplinary collaborations has been ground-breaking in increasing our knowledge of the way the human brain operates, and now neurolaw continues this trend.

 According to a new study in Nature that analyzed large sets of ozone data captured since 1984, springtime ozone levels above western North America are rising primarily due to air flowing eastward from the Pacific Ocean, a trend that is largest when the air originates in Asia. These increases in ozone could make it more difficult for the United States to meet Clean Air Act standards for ozone pollution at ground level.

Some pyschologists suggests that too many choices can negatively impact our health. But a meta-analysis of 50 published and unpublished experiments that investigated choice overload  found that consumers generally respond positively to having many choices.

Across the 50 experiments, which depict the choices of 5,036 individual participants, the authors found that the overall effect of choice overload was virtually zero. "This suggests that adverse consequences do not necessarily follow from increases in the number of options," the authors write. "In fact, contrary to the notion of choice overload, these results suggest that having many options to choose from will, on average, not lead to a decrease in satisfaction or motivation to make a choice."

The most common form of  brain tumor in adults, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), is not in fact a single disease but appears to be four distinct molecular subtypes, according to a study by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Research Network. The researchers in this study also found