Here are some words and phrases you have probably been misusing: comprise, fulsome, foundering, begging the question. Here are some others: comorbidity, latent construct, hierarchical stepwise regression, principal components factor analysis. That second list comes from a review titled “Fifty Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid: a List of Inaccurate, Misleading, Misused, Ambiguous, and Logically Confused Words and Phrases”, which was published in Frontiers in Psychology by researchers from Emory University, Sacred Heart College, Georgia State University, and SUNY–Binghamton.
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In Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens, Steve Olson focuses on the 57 people killed in the volcano’s eruption, the morning of Sunday, May 18, 1980. Those who lost their lives included volcanologists, loggers, conservationists, and other area residents, some as far as 13 miles from the summit. Had it been a weekday, Olson notes, far more people would have died, as hundreds of loggers would have been working in the area.
Over recent years, more and more research institutions seem to be adopting a corporate marketing approach to their communications. You can recognize these marketers by their use of such buzzwords as branding, messaging, market penetration, and cost-benefit analysis. It’s an approach that risks compromising research communications, and more broadly a research institution’s missions to create and disseminate knowledge. But corporate marketing is by definition shallow marketing. By aiming to sell the institution as a branded product, it fails to serve the intellectually rich marketplace of ideas in which researchers operate.
Melissa Sevigny interviewed more than 50 scientists engaged in solar system exploration, asking each of them to describe the first moment they saw a new world revealed. Their first sights ranged from the Moon to Mars, from asteroids to the moons of asteroids, and more. In Under Desert Skies: How Tucson Mapped the Way to the Moon and Planets, Sevigny shares their “inexhaustible sense of wonder.” Minor Planet (15624) Lamberton is named for Sevigny, who earned the honor as Melissa Lamberton in 2001, when she was a finalist in the Discovery Young Scientist Challenge, a middle school science competition.
Physicists are trying to find an elusive new type of particle called sterile neutrinos. But it's hard, because the particles only interact with other matter through gravitational force, the weakest of all known forces: Since their masses would be so tiny, their gravitational effects would be impossible to observe.
Tiny brains made cookie-cutter style could speed discoveries and complement — or some say, replace — mouse models now routinely used in laboratory research on neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
World wars and complicated collaborations formed the backdrop of Einstein’s general relativity theory
NASW helped 10 undergraduates majoring in biology, English, physics, journalism, mathematics, neuroscience, and environmental studies by awarding them fellowships to attend the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As part of their fellowship obligations, the students filed reports on selected AAAS sessions. You can read their reports on our event coverage page.
New multidisciplinary research facilities in Jordan could help reduce the Middle East’s brain drain.