W ork force studies often reflect common prejudices , cost-saving philosophies, rumor and innuendo , but little data. An exception to this rule exists in the recently published Committee on Manpower of Pulmonary and Critical Care Societies (COMPACCs) study. 1 As I read it, there is a shortage of pulmonary and critical care specialists now and this shortage will get worse in the future. These co...

In this issue of Neuron, Nandy et al. (2017) reveal a number of important new insights into the neural mechanisms that are responsible for attentional selection.

Traditional theories of attention rely on the idea that when we search for a target in a visual display the brain boosts the activity of neurons optimally tuned for the target features. In this issue of Neuron, Navalpakkam and Itti take a computational approach to show that this strategy is actually very inefficient when the target is surrounded by distractors with similar features. Instead, th...