The following infographic is based on the ScIU post “The highest price of fashion: Environmental destruction”
Infographic: Fast fashion and sustainability
Where did all the jobs go?
I was recently re-watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory, where the unfortunate passing of a colleague opened up a tenured position in the department that Sheldon, Raj, and Leonard were all vying for. While most people would find their various tactics to shmooze the tenure committee funny, the part that I found most hilarious was a tenure line being maintained instead of turned into cheaper, temporary adjunct positions. In reality, tenure is a dying position in academia, and it’s severely impacting the job market. This discrepancy between the number of tenure-track faculty positions available relative to doctoral degree graduates is so severe that current graduate students are warning undergraduates to stay away from graduate school, because there will be no jobs in academia for them by the time they graduate.
Scientists working in many sectors are motivated by a love of research, whether or not they hold PhDs or are tenured at research universities. However, many people seek doctoral degrees as a prerequisite for the typical academic career trajectory, which often culminates in a tenured full professorship with ample resources for both research and teaching. While this academic career trajectory has existed for decades, more and more higher education faculty positions switch from tenure-track to adjunct as each year passes. This trend can be dated back to the 1970s and can largely be linked to a combination of: 1) the significant increase in undergraduate students after the GI Bill was passed — more students = more classes and larger classes needing to be taught, 2) university business models focusing on bringing in as much money as possible (yay for capitalism…), and 3) economic recessions. When a recession hits, universities put tenure-track positions on hiring freezes and instead opt for filling the cheaper, temporary adjunct positions. Now, over 70% of higher education faculty are adjunct instructors, and tenure-track positions are becoming a rare find.
Do scientists get bad grades?
I wasn’t accepted into grad school when I first applied during my final year of college. The emails beginning with “We’re sorry to inform you” trickled one by one into my inbox, and I spent time frantically trying to figure out my post-graduation plans, since they were previously just ‘grad school.’ Fortunately, most of these emails had good suggestions about actions to take over the next couple of years, but one piece of feedback stung a little more than the rest. One program noted that while I had spent time doing research, my science grades were ‘quite poor.’
Honestly, they weren’t wrong.
Before college, I based a large portion of my self-worth and satisfaction on my ‘straight-A’ high school performance. However, a combination of unaddressed physical and mental health challenges really destroyed my GPA when I started taking higher-level science courses. I did well in calculus and general chemistry as a freshman, but was blindsided when I became completely overwhelmed by organic chemistry, molecular biology, and introductory neuroscience courses during my second year. As the semester drew to a close, I had to come to the cold realization that I was no longer a shiny straight-A student, a fundamental part of who I was. After that semester, I decided that science obviously wasn’t for me and started to explore other majors like linguistics and music production. (more…)
Putting it into context: How psychology has shaped our knowledge of universal emotions
What are common emotions experienced in your culture? In the United States, happiness, anger, sadness, and fear are considered common emotions. The traditional theory of emotion assumes emotions are universally recognized by all humans. This theory dominates pop culture, with movies like Pixar’s Inside Out, which features characters personifying five emotions that coordinate our every action, and items like Amazon’s Halo Watch, which claims to detect emotions based on tone of voice. Yet, it is not possible to determine what emotion someone is experiencing based only on their face or tone of voice. Instead, our brain makes a prediction that is influenced by past experience, the current context, and interoceptive signals from our body (e.g., heart and breathing rate, hunger cues) from a culture-specific perspective (Barrett, 2017). This prediction is made meaningful through language, such as emotion words. However, our brain’s predictions are not always accurate.
So, what does it mean for an emotion to be universal? A universal emotion is an emotion that is associated with a single facial expression across cultures. For example, an American adult, when angry, scowls with pinched eyebrows. If anger was a universal emotion, then a Chinese adult, when angry, would also scowl with pinched eyebrows.
![[Alt-text: Yellow painted eggs with various facial expressions.]](https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/files/2021/06/pexels-roman-odintsov-6898861.jpg)
Collecting drinking data: There’s an app for that
Why do college students really drink alcohol in excess, even if they probably shouldn’t? Addiction researchers have been studying this topic for decades. They’re interested in learning more about alcohol use, the reasons for drinking, and the consequences of heavy drinking. Typically, addiction is studied by having people come into a psychology lab, fill out questionnaires, or maybe do some computerized tasks.
More recently, however, scientists wanted to step out of their offices and understand real-world drinking behavior. But, how do they do that? Picture these scenarios:
Scenario 1: Sally, a recent college graduate, goes out drinking with her friends on Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday. On all of these nights, a team of 8 scientists follows her, documenting the type of alcohol she drinks, keeping track of her alcohol intake, asking her about her motivations, observing her environment, and assessing her overall mood. This team of scientists follows her every move and observes all of her drinking tendencies. They want to learn more about what makes people really drink so much, what else is a scientist going to do?!
This first scenario is obviously unnatural, maybe a little bit uncomfortable, and could even influence Sally’s drinking behavior.
Now, picture this second scenario:
Scenario 2: Sally, a recent college graduate, goes out drinking with her friends on Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday. On all of these nights, she responds to a notification on her mobile phone to confirm “I am drinking tonight.” Throughout the night, she gets a handful of notifications inquiring about the number of drinks she’s had, why she’s drinking, what’s going on in her environment, and her mood. Later, a team of 8 scientists downloads her data over the week to explore commonalities in her behavior and compare her drinking behavior to others in the study.
Most likely, the second scenario sounds more natural, comfortable, and feasible. Sally’s probably checking her phone throughout the night anyways.
Viral variants: What are they, and how do they form?
Because the COVID-19 pandemic has been raging for almost 2 years now, most people have heard of the different viral variants that threaten the effectiveness of full protection with vaccines. This topic can be confusing to anyone who is not familiar with viruses or virology. This article will: 1) help you understand what viral variants are, and 2) explain where they come from.
Viruses rely on host organisms (e.g., people and/or animals) to make more copies of themselves so that they can infect more hosts. However, hosts typically mount an immune response to clear a virus, which creates a challenge for viruses to overcome. Many viruses have tools that enable them to change their genetic information, which helps them overcome the host’s immune response and transmit and infect other hosts more effectively. These genetically-modified viral forms are called variants. Different viruses change their genetic information at different rates, meaning that certain types of viruses are better at this task than others. The emergence of viral variants also depends on other factors, like how many hosts have already been infected with the virus (the more hosts that have been infected, the greater the opportunity for the virus to produce genetic variants).
What does it mean for science to be falsifiable?
Science is falsifiable. Or at least, this is what I (like many Americans) learned in many of my high school and college science classes. Clearly, the idea has appeal among scientists and non-scientists alike:
But what exactly does “falsifiable” mean? And why is it valued by some scientists, but dismissed or even considered actively harmful by others?
Seeing science in a different light
This post was written by Hunter Herriage, a student in the Basics of Science Communication class (MSCI-M509) taught by ScIU blogger Vaishnavi Muralikrishnan and Dr. Claire Walczak.
The first time I remember my malfunctioning eyes affecting my life was when I was younger than 5 years old. I was riding in my grandfather’s truck; we had reached a stop light, and my grandfather said we could go when the light turned green. I remember thinking, “Green? That light is white.” This problem persisted all through K12 school, when a sea of classmates flashed colored pencils at me and asked, “What color is this?” I tried to explain that the issue isn’t interpreting a single pencil of stark shade, but that it’s distinguishing combinations of colors that are close together, like reds vs. greens, greens vs. browns, or purples vs. pinks. This explanation often fell on deaf ears.
As a scientist, it is essential to see details in scientific figures in order to interpret scientific findings. Scientists like to label proteins of interest with things that make them look bright green or red in a microscope, which is a good way to make these features easy to find. While the inability to distinguish between certain colors would seem like an impediment towards understanding the scientific literature, there are numerous scientists with color vision deficiencies.
Infographic: Seven tips to help the environment
The following infographic is based on the ScIU post “7 Tips on How You Can Help the Environment”
Do chameleons change their color to match their environment?
This post was written by ScIU undergraduate student, Sara Hipsher.
Hopefully, we’ve all seen Disney’s Tangled, featuring the cute little chameleon Pascal. Throughout the film, Pascal takes on a range of colors depending on his background as well as his emotions. We see him blending in with teal walls and purple flowers, but we also see him turning red with anger. We’ve grown up thinking chameleons are able to blend into any background, but you may be wondering, is this true? Do chameleons really change their color to match any background or emotion? (more…)