Nobel rewards two laboratory revolutions

Technological Revolutions

In skill-biased (de-skilling) technological revolutions learning investments required by new machines are greater (smaller) than those required by preexisting machines. Skill-biased (de-skilling) revolutions trigger reallocations of capital from slow(fast-) to fast(slow-) learning workers, thereby reducing the relative and absolute wages of the former. The model of skill-biased (de-skilling) re...

Two systems drive attention to rewards

How options are framed can dramatically influence choice preference. While salience of information plays a central role in this effect, precisely how it is mediated by attentional processes remains unknown. Current models assume a simple relationship between attention and choice, according to which preference should be uniformly biased towards the attended item over the whole time-course of a d...

Philosophical Revolutions

Oogenesis: Matrix Revolutions

The mechanism of egg-chamber elongation during Drosophila oogenesis has always been mysterious. A new study shows that the egg chambers spin around their long axis laying down polarised extracellular matrix, which acts as a molecular corset to restrict radial expansion.

Debating the Color Revolutions

In Lucan Way’s insightful, highly structural account of the color revolutions, they had to happen.1 Each was separately determined by the weakness of the authoritarian regimes. As Way puts it, “regime collapses have resulted more from authoritarian weakness than opposition strength” (62). For Way, it is even misleading to conceptualize these events as revolutions; they were authoritarian turnov...