2017 was a good year for ScIU. We exceeded our goal of publishing one post per week, and published a total of 56 blog posts! Traffic to our website has increased by 53% per post since fall of 2016, and our list of subscribers continues to grow!
A few posts in particular received a lot of attention from our readers – here are our Top Hits of 2017!
#10 Communicating about science: Tips for the checkout counter
This post by Emily Byers perfectly embodies our goals as a science blog. She writes about her experiences as a scientist communicating her work, and provides tips for explaining what you do to someone outside your area – communication is a useful skill for scientists and non-scientists alike!
#9 There’s no free lunch in nature: For plants, it takes carbon to make oxygen
Adrienne Keller wrote this fascinating post about how plants get nutrients from the soil by engaging in a tradeoff with underground microbes. She compares plants and microbes to grade school kids, sitting around the lunch table, trading and sharing items in their lunch boxes – a great analogy!
This post covered an event at one of our favorite places – WonderLab! Victoria Kohout describes their “Smell of Chemistry” exhibit, which introduced the concept of smell to WonderLab museum visitors. If you missed the exhibit, check out this post to get in the loop!
#7 Earth Day 2017: Reclaiming climate science
This post discusses a topic that was huge in 2017, and that we as scientists are still grappling with today: climate change. Here, Chris ChoGlueck talks about the intersection of politics and science in the context of climate science. This post went live shortly before the 2017 March for Science.
#6 A moving target: How reliable are dementia and assessments?
In this post, Emily Byers explains an interesting new trend: scientists who study dementia have been combining their behavioral observations with neuroimaging techniques. She introduces Eun Jun Paek, pictured below, who is investigating the reliability of neuroimaging data taken from patients with dementia.
#5 Seeking canine companions: A study on human decision making
Happy to see that one of my posts made it onto the list! In this post, I describe a research project run by Sam Cohen, who is a graduate student in cognitive science. She is working with a local animal shelter to study the decision-making strategies people use when they select new pets – I was lucky enough to tag along and meet some of her canine colleagues!
#4 Feeling stressed? Researchers at IU are studying how stress reshapes the brain
Another post by yours truly! Here, I describe how stress physically reshapes brain cells, and how this might influence behavior. This is one of my favorite topics in neuroscience!
#3 The process of science and politics and the risks to education
This post, co-written by Briana Whitaker & Chris ChoGlueck, takes an interesting position at the intersection of politics and science. They wrote about the proposed tax reform bill from a graduate student’s perspective, detailing how the bill could have impacted graduate students by placing them in a higher tax bracket despite their already low incomes. As graduate students make up a large part of the scientific community, this would have had a widespread, negative impact on science as a field.
In this post, Chris ChoGlueck answers a difficult but intriguing question: what are scientific facts? He walks us through the process, starting with important features of scientific claims, and detailing the process scientists use to gather evidence before presenting it to the public. Climate change, for example, is a scientific fact that Chris explores in this article.
#1 If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?
And now, for our most popular post of 2017! This post was sparked by a Tweet authored by Tim Allen. The Tweet read, “If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?” In his response, Fabio Mendes breaks down this fundamental misunderstanding of evolution, while explaining that evolution is not linear, but branching, and that humans are apes themselves.
We look forward to continuing these interesting conversations about science and can’t wait to see what new findings 2018 has to offer! To keep in touch, join our subscribers list – there’s a “subscribe” box at the bottom of the page and in our website menu.
Edited by: Jennifer Sieben and Fabio Mendes
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