Turning point: Planet navigator.

For the latest career listings and advice www.naturejobs.com ENTREPRENEURSHIP How to get a start-up company started go.nature.com/2actuzb AERONAUTICS A schoolgirl space enthusiast grows up to rescue a spacecraft p.241 T he clamour in a Panamanian rainforest is deafening to human ears: bugs shriek, birds sing and bats screech throughout the humid night. To avoid attracting predators, male katydids (Tettigoniidae) trill out short, infrequent mating calls less than a second long. Postdoc Laurel Symes, who studies sensory perception and decision-making at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, wants to understand how female katydids find their mates. She first thought they must have highly sensitive hearing. But she juggles other ideas at the same time: maybe katydids always meet up on a certain type of host plant, have neural mechanisms that filter out background noise or use another trick entirely. These aren't just idle musings: Symes's collection of hypotheses is an integral part of her research. The approach helps her to home in on answers and avoid investment in a sole idea — a common tendency in science that can lead to trouble. History contains numerous examples of scientists who missed important clues because they clung too tightly to a favourite hypothesis. One way to avoid this fate is to consider many potential hypotheses. Proponents of the multiple-working-hypotheses method say that it prevents scientists from developing 'tunnel vision' , and enables them to embrace the possibility that several hypotheses might be true at once. Practising the approach takes discipline: researchers must brainstorm possible explanations for a scientific phenomenon before collecting or analysing data, and use techniques such as scrambling the order of samples and blinding data to help to counteract favouritism. It also demands that scientists remain open-minded during the entire research process, and continually refine their hypotheses. The method of multiple working hypotheses was formally articulated 1 in 1890 by geologist Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, then president of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Building on the ideas of fellow geologist Grove Karl Gilbert, Chamberlin warned that when scientists come up with an original idea, they tend to develop affection for it, which can cloud their ability to do objective work. He argued that the solution was to generate and explore a family of hypotheses. By coming up with alternatives, he suggested, scientists would not be inclined to favour one idea. Although the concept has faced criticism, aimed mainly at the impossibility of conceiving …