The perils of publish or perish

Posted on June 15, 2019 by Evan Arnet

Academia is a tough career choice. The pay is low (especially for graduate students), the hours are long, and the job market is uncertain. Those entering the field often receive this simple advice — “publish or perish.” Publications are the central method by which people are evaluated in academia. One either continually publishes papers, ideally before other researchers working on similar topics, or watches as their career tanks. They may miss out on a job, fail to secure resources for their research, or get passed over for tenure. In fact, a host of tools and metrics which let scholars evaluate their publishing success has developed alongside this pressure to publish in prestigious journals. These tools can track the simple number of publications, to the citation count of a paper (how many other papers cite it), to the journal impact factor, even to the convoluted h-index metric.

The arcane details of all these metrics are of little interest to anyone not seeking a career as a scientist or other academic, but what should matter to everyone is how the incentive to publish no matter what can lead to bad science. (more…)

A psychology commencement speech

Posted on June 8, 2019 by Guest Contributor

A brain sitting in front of the Psychology Building on the Indiana University Bloomington campus. — Psychology is brain science.

The author of this post is guest contributor Josiah Leong, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. He recently moved to Bloomington after finishing his graduate studies at Stanford University. He is excited to share insights from psychological science with his new community. Below is an unconventional commencement speech that may ring true for some students of psychology.

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A change of perspective

Posted on June 1, 2019 by Alexandra Moussa-Tooks and Guest Contributor

One author is ScIU guest writer Melanie Chin, a graduate student in IU’s Department of Biology and Program in Neuroscience.

This post is part of a series featuring amazing science images and the stories behind them. Comment below with your guess and read on to see if you are correct!

There is no argument that the photo below is beautiful, but you might be surprised by what it is depicting. In fact, I might argue that this photo shows us something we encounter almost every day and, unfortunately, is thought of as far less magical and majestic. It is funny how a new perspective really does change our view!

A colorful, symmetrical structure that resembles a butterfly with antennae on a black background. — What could this beautiful structure be!? Read on to find out. Photo taken by Biology and Neuroscience Dual PhD Student Melanie Chin.

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The early bird gets the worm, part II: How behavioral ecology is connecting the dots between early-life stress and aging

Posted on May 28, 2019 by Kat Munley

This is the second post of a two-part series on a day in the life of a behavioral ecologist, which features the stories and research of members of Dr. Kim Rosvall’s laboratory in the Department of Biology. Click here to read the first post of the series!

In Part I of this series, I discussed how research from the Rosvall lab is shedding light on the biological processes that enable animals to respond to changes in their social environment. Specifically, some members of the Rosvall lab are studying the hormonal mechanisms that females of a local songbird species, called tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor), use to regulate same-sex aggression across breeding stages and in response to social competition. However, competition is only one of many challenges these animals face during their lives, and some members of the Rosvall lab are studying how temporarily reducing parental care affects offspring development and physiology. This research takes place during the last breeding stage, called the chick provisioning stage (see timeline below), when females are caring for their chicks.

A timeline of different breeding stages is shown in black, which contains tick marks with text that describes each stage. In chronological order (from left to right on the timeline), the stages are territory establishment, mating/egg laying, incubation, and chick provisioning. A blue box with hatch marks is shown over the tick marks for the territory establishment, mating/egg laying, and incubation stages; and a solid red box is shown over the tick marks for the incubation and chick provisioning stages. Black text that reads “Nest Box Manipulations” is located over top of the blue box, between the territory establishment and mating/egg laying breeding stages. Black text that reads “Simulated Territorial Intrusions” is located over top of the blue box, between the mating/egg laying and incubation breeding stages. Blue text that reads “Part I: Seasonal Plasticity in Hormonal Signaling and Territorial Aggression” is located above the black text, and red text that reads “Part II: Effects of Early-Life Stress on Telomere Dynamics” is located over top of the red box. — Timeline of the breeding stages observed in a typical field season in Dr. Kim Rosvall’s laboratory overlaid with descriptions of the topics that will be discussed in this two-part series of posts on a day in the life of a behavioral ecologist. The current post (Part II, in red) discusses the experimental testing that occurs during the late stages of the field season, including the effects of early-life stress on chick development, growth, and physiology. The first post in this series (Part I, in blue) addresses the field manipulations and behavioral assays that are conducted during the early and middle stages of the field season, including nest box manipulations and simulated territorial intrusions.

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From Classroom to Community: IU clinical psychology students launch their careers through local internship

Posted on May 21, 2019 by Lana Ruck

In 2015, IU’s Department of Psychology and Brain Science (PBS) began a Clinical Psychological Science Certificate program for undergraduates, through which students interested in clinical psychology can learn the foundations of the field, participate in PBS research, and gain internship experience with local community partners.

Although many departments offer internships, the main goal of the program is unique. As Ke Anne Zhang, Assistant Clinical Professor and Director of the Certificate Program explains, the goal of the Clinical Psychological Certificate program is “recognizing the barriers to delivering the most effective mental health care to the people who need it most.” Through cultivated community partnerships, Zhang hopes to provide students with more than a window into the profession; she wants them to envision how they can contribute to reducing such barriers in the future. (more…)

The Quest for Alien Swimming Pools

Posted on May 14, 2019 by Jennifer Sieben

Water is essential to life on Earth. So, if we are searching for life off-world, it would make sense to look for signs of water. Astronomers have been doing exactly that: employing different methods to find the first signs of life outside of our own world. Until recently, it wasn’t known whether there is water anywhere else besides our home planet, let alone water in liquid form. Only with improved radar systems and satellites that travel beyond the moon have we finally found the water we were searching for.

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Can science be value-free? The “gap” argument

Posted on May 7, 2019 by Chris ChoGlueck

If scientists are in the business of facts, is there still space for human values? Like many other scientists-in-training, I used to think of the sciences as ideally free from societal values, such as environmentalism and feminism. Sure, our ethical or political biases might guide what scientists study or how others use that knowledge. But, during the “nitty gritty” of science—when researchers collect data, analyze statistics, and test hypotheses—they should not rely on the values of society. Many people agree with this value-free ideal of science: public trust decreases in scientists who mention their own biases & values.

Many scientists, however, prefer a greater role of values in science and acknowledge that their objectivity does not require complete detachment from bias. The history of science also provides countless examples of “good science” based on cultural values, including reprehensible ones. For instance, Nazi scientists were the first to discover that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer, in part because of their horrid beliefs about “racial hygiene.”

If values and biases don’t necessarily result in “bad science,” then why do people hold the value-free ideal? More importantly, is this ideal of science even possible? Many philosophers of science, myself included, do not think so. I’ll spend the rest of this post explaining one of the main lines of reasoning against the value-free ideal called the “gap” argument (or the argument from underdetermination).

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‘Oumuamua: What’s in a Name?

Posted on April 30, 2019 by Jennifer Sieben

Dinosaur skeleton, neanderthal skeleton, and model of a chemical structure — Clockwise from the top: Sue the T Rex at the Field Museum in Chicago (Image Credit: Connie Ma, CC BY-SA 2.0), Lucy at Naturmuseum Senckenberg (Image Credit: Gerbil, CC BY-SA 3.0), and a model of a buckyball (CC0). These are just a few examples of discoveries that have been given names that stick in people’s memories.

Sue the T Rex. Lucy the early human ancestor. These are scientific discoveries that are remembered and even loved. They have names and feel real despite being collections of bones. Even the buckyball evokes the idea of fun where other structures of molecules do not. Names are important.

Astronomy has been doing this for a long time. The Greeks looked up in the night sky and observed the planets ‘wandering’ unlike other stars. Then they named them after their gods. The red planet is named after the god of war, Aris, in Greek, and the planet with the fastest orbit, the one that seems to zip across the sky, is called Ermis, for the messenger god with wings on his shoes. The modern names of Mars and Mercury are only changed to use the Roman names rather than the Greek. These names give character to the planets and also honor early astronomers.

However, astronomy can often have a very Western-centric way of naming objects. For example, the constellations most people know are based on what the Greeks observed, yet the Greeks weren’t the only people who studied the motions of the heavens. As astronomy continues to be a global science, we are trying to reverse this trend. Astronomers are trying to be more cognizant when naming new discoveries. One place that is spearheading this effort is in Hawaii. (more…)

The cycle of life… and death… below your feet

Posted on April 23, 2019 by Adrienne Keller

As an ecosystem ecologist, I study how the cycle of life and death influences forest structure and changes over time. A walk in the woods might illuminate the forest’s dynamism as you observe squirrels tending to their buried acorn caches and listen to woodpeckers feasting on grubs. In contrast, the plant community may appear more static to the average aspiring Thoreau. However, as you traverse the forest floor, the cycle of life and death is working on overdrive right beneath your feet.

As soon as a leaf drops to the forest floor in autumn, soil microbes immediately begin dining on that leaf. The carbon and nutrients within the dead leaf – elements which only a month earlier fueled photosynthesis and plant growth – are now used on the forest floor to fuel microbial growth. Eventually, as the microbes process these nutrients, eating what they can and spitting out what they can’t, the nutrients that originated from the dead leaf will be taken up by plant roots to build new leaves, and the cycle of life will continue.

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When the things we can’t see matter: the plant vs. environmental change edition

Posted on April 16, 2019 by Abby Kimmitt

Farmers are facing new challenges in the age of global change. Drought is a major stressor for crops in Indiana and other regions of the U.S. and is forcing farmers to face the question: to irrigate or not to irrigate? Irrigation equipment is incredibly expensive, but is often the best quick solution to water crops and guarantee their survival during the growing season. Research in the Lau lab may be able to provide some answers about the effects of irrigation on plant survival under drought stress and how microbes may be another important player in this story.

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