Science News Research Articles

Preface

The XXIII International Youth Scientific School “Coherent Optics and Optical Spectroscopy” (COOS 2019) was held in Kazan, Russia, from October 29 to October 31 on the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences. The School follows the global tendency to comprehensive studies of matter properties and its interaction with electromagnetic fields. Since 1997 more than 100 famous scientists from USA, Germany, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia had plenary lectures presentations. This is the right place, where over 1000 young scientists had an opportunity to participate in hot discussions of the latest scientific news. Many young people have submitted interesting reports on photonics, quantum electronics, laser physics, quantum optics, traditional optical and laser spectroscopy, non-linear optics, material science and nanotechnology. Here we are publishing the full-size papers prepared from the most interesting lectures and reports selected by the Program Committee of the School. Plenary sessions were offered by the following invited speakers: Sergey Kozlov, ITMO University, Saint Petersburg, Russia. • Giant nonlinearity of the refractive index of water in the terahertz spectral range Andrei Naumov, Institute for Spectroscopy RAS, Troitsk, Moscow, Russia. • Optical echo spectroscopy of disordered solid media and composites with quantum dots Renat Gainutdinov, Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia. • Quantum electrodynamics in photonic crystals Oleg Khasanov, SPC NAS for materials science, Minsk, Belarus. • Nanocomposites with semiconductor quantum dots: applied aspects and characterization methods Svetlana Kotova, Lebedev Physical Institute, Samara Branch, Samara, Russia. • Vortex light fields in problems of laser manipulation of microscopic objects Andrey Maimistov, National Research University MEPhI, Moscow, Russia. • Nonlinear electromagnetic waves in waveguide arrays and optical plane zones Sergey Sazonov, National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute”, Moscow, Russia. • About optical bullets in a graded-index optical fibers Askhat Basharov, National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute”, Moscow, Russia. • Algebraic perturbation theory and stochastic differential equations in quantum thermodynamics Ivan Popov, Volga State University of Technology, Yoshkar-Ola, Russia. • Detection of trion condensate at room temperature in nanoscale traps on surface defects of the crystal structure of thin filmsList of Program Committee, Organizing Committee and Editorial Board are available in this pdf.

News at a glance.

In science news around the world, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issues an emergency use authorization to Abbott, a laboratory company, for a 15-minute test for the COVID-19 virus that could help expand the number of Americans regularly tested; the new diagnostic, called BinaxNOW, detects proteins, or antigens, that are unique to the virus with high accuracy and at a cost of $5 each. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention draws criticism for revising its guidelines to state that people exposed to the virus do not necessarily need a test if they lack symptoms and do not have medical conditions that make them vulnerable. The White House says it will establish a dozen centers to study artificial intelligence and quantum information science. China says it continued in 2019 its yearslong run of double-digit annual percentage increases in spending on R&D. Iran agrees to allow international inspectors access to two sites that were allegedly part of a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

Impacts of Attitudes Toward Government and Corporations on Public Trust in Artificial Intelligence

ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) has alarmed the society of Taiwan believing it is responsible for potential surveillance, data theft and abuse, and other privacy infringements. By adopting the theory of motivated reasoning, this study explores how Taiwanese people’s perceptions of AI are affected by their institutional trust, attitudes toward the government and corporations, which are the two most common sponsors of scientific development. First, findings establish that respondents’ science trust in AI is made up of perceptions of AI and its science community, and they have lower faith in the AI science community than in AI alone. Second, the perceptions of both AI and its science community are positively associated with trust in government and corporations. Third, scientific news has a direct bearing on AI trust, but not on either government or corporation trust. By contrast, political news has no effect on either trust in AI or its science community, yet trust in government and corporations mediates the influence of political news on trust in AI and its science community. Finally, demographic variables hardly predict trust in AI, AI science community, government, and corporations, but education and gender are directly related to news consumption, which further influences institutional and science trust.

Articulating Statistics in Science News in Arab Newspapers: The Cases of Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to understand how journalists engage with and use statistics to articulate science news in particular Arab countries with emphasis on the cases of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The study assesses the current capabilities of journalism and identifies key knowledge gaps in the area, while examining the nature of the news sources that provide this data and how journalists handle these sources in relation to the outputs that they produce. It does so by applying a mix-methods approach that triangulates content analysis, expert panel and semi-structured interviews with journalists and news editors in order to analyse outputs, organisational cultures and practices. The overall project suggests similarities in the existing gaps and causes of these deficits to those present among journalists in the West and highlights some important distinctive contextual features that hinder news reporting of science in the countries studied here.

A Witness Function Based Construction of Discriminative Models Using Hermite Polynomials

In machine learning, we are given a dataset of the form $\{(x_j,y_j)\}_{j=1}^M$, drawn as i.i.d. samples from an unknown probability distribution $\mu$; the marginal distribution for the $x_j$'s being $\mu^*$, and the marginals of the $k^{th}$ class $\mu_k^*(x)$ possibly overlapping. We address the problem of detecting, with a high degree of certainty, for which $x$ we have $\mu_k^*(x)>\mu_i^*(x)$ for all $i\neq k$. We propose that rather than using a positive kernel such as the Gaussian for estimation of these measures, using a non-positive kernel that preserves a large number of moments of these measures yields an optimal approximation. We use multi-variate Hermite polynomials for this purpose, and prove optimal and local approximation results in a supremum norm in a probabilistic sense. Together with a permutation test developed with the same kernel, we prove that the kernel estimator serves as a ``witness function'' in classification problems. Thus, if the value of this estimator at a point $x$ exceeds a certain threshold, then the point is reliably in a certain class. This approach can be used to modify pretrained algorithms, such as neural networks or nonlinear dimension reduction techniques, to identify in-class vs out-of-class regions for the purposes of generative models, classification uncertainty, or finding robust centroids. This fact is demonstrated in a number of real world data sets including MNIST, CIFAR10, Science News documents, and LaLonde data sets.

Headline Format Influences Evaluation of, but Not Engagement with, Environmental News

ABSTRACT Sparked by a collaboration between academic researchers and science media professionals, this study sought to test three commonly used headline formats that vary based on whether (and, if so, how) important information is left out of a headline to encourage participants to read the corresponding article; these formats are traditionally-formatted headlines, forward-referencing headlines, and question-based headlines. Although headline format did not influence story selection or engagement, it did influence participants evaluations of both the headline's and the story's credibility (question-based headlines were viewed as the least credible). Moreover, individuals’ science curiosity and political views predicted their engagement with environmental stories as well as their views about the credibility of the headline and story. Thus, headline formats appear to play a significant role in audience's perceptions of online news stories, and science news professionals ought to consider the effects different formats have on readers.

COVID-19 After Effects: Concerns for Singers

COVID-19 After Effects: Concerns for Singers

HTSS: A novel hybrid text summarisation and simplification architecture

Text simplification and text summarisation are related, but different sub-tasks in Natural Language Generation. Whereas summarisation attempts to reduce the length of a document, whilst keeping the original meaning, simplification attempts to reduce the complexity of a document. In this work, we combine both tasks of summarisation and simplification using a novel hybrid architecture of abstractive and extractive summarisation called HTSS. We extend the well-known pointer generator model for the combined task of summarisation and simplification. We have collected our parallel corpus from the simplified summaries written by domain experts published on the science news website EurekaAlert (www.eurekalert.org). Our results show that our proposed HTSS model outperforms neural text simplification (NTS) on SARI score and abstractive text summarisation (ATS) on the ROUGE score. We further introduce a new metric (CSS1) which combines SARI and Rouge and demonstrates that our proposed HTSS model outperforms NTS and ATS on the joint task of simplification and summarisation by 38.94% and 53.40%, respectively. We provide all code, models and corpora to the scientific community for future research at the following URL: https://github.com/slab-itu/HTSS/.

Activities and assessment solutions for students in advanced molecular genetics and biochemistry to direct and engage with public communication in an online environment.

Apart from classroom presentations to their instructors and peer groups, STEM students have limited opportunities or encouragement to engage in guided communication of scientific concepts to others (family, friends, or the general public). A critical need exists for accurate, comprehensible science to be disseminated to these groups. To develop student proficiency in communication of complex biomolecular concepts impacting diverse audiences, I introduce learning approaches and assessments easily adapted to fit the needs of individual instructors and any molecular biology or biochemistry laboratory or lecture course in a remote/online environment. To help students develop an appreciation of the needs of different audiences and the nuanced drivers of clear communication, I provided them the choice of projects of similar length: Option (1) Create a scientific news release and short podcast or video clip newscast describing a recent advancement in understanding the molecular/biochemical basis of a disease; or Option (2) Create a lesson plan and mini-video designed to teach a simple biochemical or molecular mechanism of disease with learning objectives, a brief activity, and appropriate assessment mechanisms. Students who chose the scientific news release/newscast activity distilled complex biomolecular concepts using the 5 W's of journalism-who, what, where, why, when-and learned to accurately communicate the relevance of advanced scientific discoveries and recent events for a broader audience. Students who chose the lesson plan designed activities centered on biomolecular science concepts that build upon what their audience already knows, revealing possibilities for undergraduates to contribute to educational outreach to secondary school teachers and classes.

Envisioning Tomorrow’s Earth (during a Rather Different Yesterday): Some Highlights of the 2020 AAAS Annual Meeting

Standing-room-only sessions. Crowds at receptions and forums. Clusters of people viewing exhibits and posters. Children, parents, and grandparents thronging to Family Science Days. Such was the 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Washington, on February 13–16. Themed, perhaps ironically, “Envisioning Tomorrow’s Earth,” the meeting occurred at a time very different from that weeks later, when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and organizations worldwide postponed their conferences or moved them online. The annual meeting content, which spanned many areas of science and its context, retains relevance, however. The current report presents highlights of some sessions on topics that are likely to interest science editors and others involved in the communication of science. Communicating Science Seminar A daylong seminar on communicating science preceded the formal opening of the annual meeting. The following sections discuss some highlights. In addition to the sessions summarized, the seminar included another plenary session, titled “Building Community for Inclusive Public Engagement with Science,” and other breakout sessions. Further information, including videos, is available at https://www.aaas.org/programs/annual-meeting/2020-communicating-science-seminar.1 Engaging with the Media on Science-Society Topics By Barbara Gastel This plenary session brought together researchers and practitioners to discuss communicating about science via popular media. It began with 3 presentations. Open discussion occupied the last half of the session. Robin Nabi, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, spoke on the role of emotion in influencing reactions to science news. She noted that although journalism research has focused largely on the cognitive aspect of […]

Let’s nab fake science news: Predicting scientists’ support for interventions using the influence of presumed media influence model

Fake science news is a type of fake news that can threaten the credibility of the scientific community. Scientists’ attention to fake science news can indirectly influence the way they react to tackling fake science news through socio-psychological factors. Applying the influence of presumed media influence (IPMI), this study examines how scientists’ attention to fake science news indirectly influences their support for initiatives to tackle fake science news through presumed harm of fake science news on other scientists and the general public, as well as their attitude and personal norm towards tackling fake science news. Specifically, this study explicates the behavioural outcome into support for education and support for legislation against fake science news. The results from a survey of 706 Singapore-based scientists supported the relationships posited in the IPMI. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Jovens, ciência e media: perceções sobre a Astronomia e Ciências do Espaço em contextos formais e informais

O papel transversal dos media na aquisição de conhecimentos e na formação de opiniões
 e representações de assuntos de ciência tem uma importância reconhecida. Porém, existem
 poucos estudos que se debrucem sobre o modo como os jovens acedem, compreendem e criam
 conteúdos relacionados com a ciência, utilizando diversas plataformas e acionando diferentes
 literacias. O presente estudo procura explorar algumas pontes nesse sentido. Tendo como base
 públicos jovens interessados em ciência, nomeadamente em Astronomia e Ciências do Espaço,
 o estudo pretende averiguar o que estes valorizam na ciência e como se apropriam da informação
 científica para a tomada de decisão e a formação de opiniões sobre ciência. Os resultados
 confirmam que as aprendizagens informais têm um papel relevante no desenvolvimento de
 uma identificação com a ciência e na escolha por percursos académicos e profissionais com ela
 relacionados. Apesar de não procurarem notícias de ciência em geral, pesquisam informação
 específica de ciência de acordo com os seus interesses. A ausência de uma reflexão sobre como
 os discursos e as notícias de ciência são produzidos e filtrados pelos media e outros agentes de
 comunicação de ciência faz ressaltar a relevância da promoção de uma literacia crítica de ciência,
 que implica a ligação a outras literacias, incluindo a literacia mediática.

Socio-Ecological Controversies in the News as Trigger of a Model-Based Inquiry Instructional Sequence about the Effect of Global Warming on the Great Barrier Reef

The use of socio-ecological controversies, such as global warming, in classrooms has been suggested to increase students’ awareness about complex issues, although detailed analysis of their implementation in classrooms are still scarce. This research shows a model-based inquiry approach (MBI) instructional sequence, using scientific news as a trigger, aimed at addressing a global problem on a real socio-ecological system: the effect of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef. Its implementation in a lower secondary school classroom allowed the assessment of the effectiveness of the instructional sequence designed, based on students’ perception of what secondary school students have learned and felt. Results show that the MBI instructional sequence seems to have favored the mobilization of students’ alternative conceptions about global warming, coral reefs, and symbiotic relationships. In addition, it contributed to increasing the students’ awareness of the problem of global warming and its effects on an essential socio-ecological system, such as coral reefs.

Two-sided science: Communicating scientific uncertainty increases trust in scientists and donation intention by decreasing attribution of communicator bias

Abstract Previous research has shown that uncertainty communication by scientists (i. e., expressing reservations towards their own research) increases the public’s trust in their work. The reasons for this have not been elucidated, however. In the present study, we provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon. Specifically, we expected that attributed communicator bias would mediate the effect of uncertainty communication on trust. Results from a mixed-design experiment (N = 88), using modified science news articles, revealed support for this hypothesis. Positive effects of uncertainty communication on trust and donation intention were both mediated by attributed communicator bias.

Gerhard Giebisch (1927–2020): A Leader in Kidney Physiology

Gerhard Giebisch (1927–2020): A Leader in Kidney Physiology

Growing Influence of University PR on Science News Coverage? A Longitudinal Automated Content Analysis of University Media Releases and Newspaper Coverage in Switzerland, 2003‒2017

Universities have expanded their public relation (PR) departments in recent years. At the same time, news media have had to cope with reduced resources. This has led scholars to assume a growing influence of university PR on a weakened journalism. However, research on this phenomenon is scarce, and longitudinal research is missing entirely. The study at hand looks at the influence of university PR on science journalism in Switzerland by measuring the effects of media releases on media coverage. It uses large-scale, automated text comparisons combined with manual content analyses. The results show that an increasing amount of media coverage is based on media releases, and that the tone of this portion of media coverage is significantly more positive toward the university. Overall, our findings suggest an increasing influence of university PR on (science) journalism.

Source Attribution: Recovering the Press Releases Behind Health Science News

We explore the task of intrinsic source attribution: inferring which portions of a derived document were adapted from an unobserved source document. Specifically, we model the relationship between news articles and their press release sources using a dataset of 64,784 health science news articles and 23,068 press releases. We approach the problem at the sentence level and work with science journalism professors to develop a four point Likert scale describing the extent to which a news article sentence is derived from the content in the corresponding press release. Because manual annotation of news article - press release pairs is time-consuming, we turn to a mix of expert, non-expert, and heuristic-based annotation to label our dataset. After a small pilot study, which found that humans, when only able to view the text of the news article, struggle to identify which content is derived or not, we compare four different sentence regression models on the task. We find that modeling a sentence's context in the entire document is important, with the best performing model, a sequence regression model with BERT token representations, achieving a spearman's ρ of 0.49 and NDCG@1 of 0.60 on the expert-labeled test set. Examining the model's predictions, we find that it successfully identifies copied or closely paraphrased sentences in articles with a mix of derived and original content, but struggles to differentiate between loosely paraphrased and original sentences in articles with mostly original writing.

COVERAGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ON OPINION PAGES OF LEADING DAILIES

We live in a modern world which is full with a lot of inventions and techniques. Our lives are largely facilitated by scientific inventions. Media is also a by-product of scientific inventions i.e. printing press, radio, television, internet etc. The connection of media and the society is of huge importance. Media is a mirror image of the society which represents the overall picture of society. Beside this the media educate and inform the people about certain realities and different spheres of society. In today’s world we largely depend on science & technology and also very much aware of the point that how crucial is the science in economical development of the country. Being an underdeveloped country we need to focus more on science & technology and for this our media has to play a decisive role of opinion maker. Through extensive coverage to science and technology sector we may be able to construct a scientific culture in our society which will resultantly be helpful to achieve the goal of knowledge economy. This study has examined the role of media specifically print media through measuring the frequency of coverage it give to science and technology on opinion pages. As Pakistan is a developing country and the majority of population generally understand national language so it is worth mentioning that the role of media is to ascertained through classification of Urdu and English print media. In this study we have chosen one year publications i.e. 360 editions of the year 2017 of two newspapers, one Urdu and one English to analyze the trend of media that which language gives more coverage to science and technology news, resultantly, it will be helpful for us to construct an appropriate opinion regarding media coverage of science and technology.

Science Communication Meets Consumer Relations: An Analysis of Twitter Use by 23andMe

For-profit organizations play a considerable role in the dissemination of scientific research and information. In the case of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, this is important because how consumers learn about genetic science can influence health decisions and support for science. Through a content analysis of Twitter posts ( N = 1,000), this study examined how 23andMe balances traditional promotion, communicating product benefits, and sharing scientific research. Results indicated that about half of all posts share science news but sharing science has declined over time. Far fewer posts communicate about the products or their benefits, but these posts garner more retweets and replies.

The Emotional Effects of Science Narratives: A Theoretical Framework

Stories have long been discussed as a tool to make science accessible to the public. The potential of stories to stimulate emotions in their audiences makes them an emotional communication strategy <em>par excellence</em>. While studies exist that test the effects of stories in science communication on the one hand and the effects of emotions on the other hand, there is no systematic elaboration of the mechanisms through which stories in science communication evoke emotions and how these emotions influence outcomes such as knowledge gain and attitude change. In this article, we develop a theoretical framework of the “Emotional Effects of Science Narratives” (EESN-Model), which includes a typology of emotions likely to arise from reading science communication as well as mechanisms for each of the emotions to evoke the (desired) outcomes. The model serves as a heuristic to delineate the emotional effects of narratives in science coverage and will help guide research in this domain to provide a deeper understanding of the role of emotion in science news.