When a group of gamblers gather around a roulette table, individual players are likely to have different reasons for betting on certain numbers. Recently, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Ireland's Trinity College Dublin hedged their bets—and came out winners—when they proposed that a certain region of the brain drives these different types of decision-making behaviors.

Caltech has announced the creation of the Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences. The initiative will bring together the best scientific minds and the best quantitative business practices, permitting a distinctive and targeted educational opportunity for Caltech's students and providing cutting-edge research opportunities for Caltech's faculty.

Michael Alvarez writes about Alaska's controversial and still-undecided Senate race between Republican Joe Miller and current Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski—who Miller beat in the primary and who then mounted a write-in campaign—and how it all may come down to a court challenge over the 92,500 write-in ballots cast. 

When it comes to making choices, say Caltech's Antonio Rangel and his colleagues, much depends on which items catch—and keep—your eye. "We're interested in how the brain makes simple choices, like which item to pick from a buffet table," says Rangel, professor of neuroscience and economics. "Why is it that when we look at the buffet table, our gaze shifts back and forth between the items in order to make a choice? What is the role of visual attention in all this?"