As the media spotlight shines on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and its high-profile hunt for a certain boson, other scientists are pressing forward with experiments that are just as challenging — and just as potentially transformative.
These often unsung researchers are willing to spend years or even decades getting a finicky instrument to run smoothly; setting up proper controls to minimize spurious results; beating back noise that threatens to swamp their signal; and striving for an ever more painstaking level of precision — a determination and single-mindedness that borders on heroic. Here, Nature describes five such quests.
