For Yet Better Science

Science is evolving. New tools and ideas are changing how discovery happens. Science Better is a collection of interviews with the vanguard — a repository of their best ideas and personal research habits.

R esearchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that  false news spreads “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth.” The reason is that people like novelty, and false stories are likely to be more novel, the authors suggested. 

Children are not just career interruptions, and parents can come back to work as more insightful and effective scientists.

Language implying that scientists have a special kind of identity (e.g., “Let’s turn on our special scientist brains!”) is prevalent in input to young children and has immediate negative consequences for children’s science behavior in laboratory studies. To test if these effects of language are powerful enough to shape child behavior as it unfolds in the natural course of development, we conducted a large field experiment with prekindergarten teachers and their students. Brief video-based training led teachers to change their language and increased children’s science persistence several days later but did not affect children’s feelings of science self-efficacy. These data reveal tools that could be used to increase science engagement in daily life.

Tools are not just developed by and for the professional scientific research community, but by a wide range of commercial, academic, nonprofit, and community enterprises operating at a range of scales. Here, we outline 16 tools for science that are causing us to rethink the boundaries of scientific research. Looking across these tools and their individual impact on science and society, we begin to ask questions about their collective impact. How do low-cost tools impact science? Do these tools accelerate scientific progress or expand access, and to what extent? Finally, is the impact, and potential impact, of these tools incremental, or potentially revolutionary?

A theory put forward in the 1930s by E. E. Just, embryologist and African American, shares surprising connections with our emerging understanding of development.

W hy give to Women’s Health Research at Yale? Here’s one reason: When researchers study the health of women and sex-and-gender differences in health, everybody benefits. This is because the more we know about the biology and health behavior of women and the differences between and among women and men, the more we can develop prevention and treatment strategies best suited for every person’s unique needs. This principle guides WHRY in our mission to better lives through better science.