A scientific theory of gist communication and misinformation resistance,with implications for health,education, and policy

A framework is presented for understanding how misinformation shapes decision-making, which has cognitive representations of gist at its core. I discuss how the framework goes beyond prior work, and how it can be implemented so that valid scientific messages are more likely to be effective, remembered, and shared through social media, while misinformation is resisted. The distinction between mental representations of the rote facts of a message—its verbatim representation—and its gist explains several paradoxes, including the frequent disconnect between knowing facts and, yet, making decisions that seem contrary to those facts. Decision makers can falsely remember the gist as seen or heard even when they remember verbatim facts. Indeed, misinformation can be more compelling than information when it provides an interpretation of reality that makes better sense than the facts. Consequently, for many issues, scientific information and misinformation are in a battle for the gist. A fuzzy-processing preference for simple gist explains expectations for antibiotics, the spread of misinformation about vaccination, and responses to messages about global warming, nuclear proliferation, and natural disasters. The gist, which reflects knowledge and experience, induces emotions and brings to mind social values. However, changing mental representations is not sufficient by itself; gist representations must be connected to values. The policy choice is not simply between constraining behavior or persuasion—there is another option. Science communication needs to shift from an emphasis on disseminating rote facts to achieving insight, retaining its integrity but without shying away from emotions and values.     

中医药阻断逆转肝纤维化的现状、希望与挑战

中医药辨证论治具有阻断逆转肝纤维化的整体治疗优势,是未来治疗肝纤维化候选药物的源泉。概述了中医药治疗肝纤维化的渊源和现状,重点论述了如何按照循证医学和国际认同的临床试验标准再评价中医药阻断逆转肝纤维化的临床疗效和安全性,介绍了最新临床研究成果。强调了发掘和认同中医药阻断逆转肝纤维化所面临的挑战与重要意义。     

INAUGURAL ARTICLE by a Recently Elected Academy Member:Accelerating ethics,empathy, and equity in geographic information science

Science has traditionally been driven by curiosity and followed one goal: the pursuit of truth and the advancement of knowledge. Recently, ethics, empathy, and equity, which we term “the 3Es,” are emerging as new drivers of research and disrupting established practices. Drawing on our own field of GIScience (geographic information science), our goal is to use the geographic approach to accelerate the response to the 3Es by identifying priority issues and research needs that, if addressed, will advance ethical, empathic, and equitable GIScience. We also aim to stimulate similar responses in other disciplines. Organized around the 3Es we discuss ethical issues arising from locational privacy and cartographic integrity, how our ability to build knowledge that will lead to empathy can be curbed by data that lack representativeness and by inadvertent inferential error, and how GIScientists can lead toward equity by supporting social justice efforts and democratizing access to spatial science and its tools. We conclude with a call to action and invite all scientists to join in a fundamentally different science that responds to the 3Es and mobilizes for change by engaging in humility, broadening measures of excellences and success, diversifying our networks, and creating pathways to inclusive education. Science united around the 3Es is the right response to this unique moment where society and the planet are facing a vast array of challenges that require knowledge, truth, and action.

Most scientific research has traditionally been fueled by the innate curiosity of the researcher, by the desire to generate replicable and generalizable knowledge, and by the need to address practical problems. While there are, of course, less-noble drivers of science, most often researchers nobly aim their tools at knowledge creation and measure contributions through publications, awards, the support of funding agencies and our institutions, and various less-tangible forms of personal satisfaction. Yet, today we find a groundswell of support for complementary norms which have been percolating in science for some time. Here we focus on the “three Es”—ethics, empathy, and equity—which have scientists reflecting on and responding to questions such as the following:

• •Given that we strive at all times for scientific practices to be ethical, how can science foster empathy and equity as well?
• •Will our syllabi and courses attract and address the needs of all of our students?
• •Does the culture of science that has evolved over the centuries truly reflect the needs and desires of all of humanity, or is science better at serving some segments of society than others?

These fundamental questions and many more like them are already the focus of long-standing initiatives such as the NSF’s “Broader Impacts” criterion for research proposals. There are also professional development programs and networks seeking to accelerate progress in these areas, such as the GeoEthics project of the American Association of Geographers (https://aag-geoethics-series.secure-platform.com/a); the American Geographical Society’s EthicalGEO initiative (https://ethicalgeo.org/); the American Geophysical Union’s LANDiNG (Leadership Academy and Network for Diversity and Inclusion in the Geosciences, https://www.agu.org/AGU-LANDInG); the University Consortium for Geographic Information Sciences’ TRELIS-GS (Training and Retaining Leaders in STEM-Geospatial Sciences, https://www.ucgis.org/trelis); the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences’ Project on Science, Technology, and Disability (https://www.aaas.org/programs/education-and-human-resources/project-science-technology-and-disability); and NorthStar, for increasing the representation, belonging, and inclusion of people of African descent in the geospatial industry and academia (https://gisnorthstar.org/). There are inclusive professional organizations such as the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (https://www.sacnas.org/) and the National Association of Black Geoscientists (http://www.nabg-us.org/). There has been recent proliferation of Twitter accounts such as @BlkinGeoscience and @BlackGeogorg that acknowledge, amplify, and support the work of diverse scientists from around the world. Finally, there is the work of dozens of individual scientists who create social media campaigns on the above questions in order to accelerate change, lead petitions against racist or unethical actions by the scientific community, create plans for cultural transformation within their departments, organizations, or professional societies, and much more.In this paper we explore the implications of the 3Es on science, using the example of our own field, which we term here “geographic information science,” or GIScience for short. We use its practices and research agenda (i.e., a geographic approach) as an example of how one branch of science is adjusting to changing norms, with a focus on how the 3Es might be implemented and accelerated, all in the hope that our discussion will also be helpful to readers in other fields. We recognize at the outset that the meanings of these three terms overlap substantially and are the subject of very extensive literatures. Rather than attempt precise definitions, we have chosen examples from our field that illustrate what each of them might mean in the practices and applications of our science. Some of these examples are specific to our field, but others are of more general significance. We first explain what we mean by GIScience and then discuss a number of examples to illustrate how work in our field is currently being impacted.GIScience is fundamentally the science of geographic information (GI), which can further be defined as information about what is where: about the locations of features, events, measurements, organisms, or observations on or near Earth’s surface—indeed, anything of interest that is tagged with geographic coordinates. It is thus a holistic way of thinking and problem solving rooted in the fundamental, integrative discipline of geography. The alternative terms “geospatial information” and “spatial information” are often used; geospatial information is virtually synonymous with geographic information, though spatial often implies any space, not only geographic space. Without a clear understanding of GI that structures so much of our knowledge of the world, any associated models, structures, and hypotheses may be erroneous, especially those about relationships among complex, multidimensional geographic variables (1).Such GI is now readily available in vast quantities, due to the advent of satellite remote sensing, the Global Positioning System (GPS) and its international analogs, smart phones, drones, social media, and the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) (2). A large industry has grown up around these sources of information and the analytics required to understand them. The size of the GI market is now estimated by ReportLinker (3) to grow from $59.5 billion in 2021 to $107.8 billion in 2026, with growth expedited by the increasing number of artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions for the development of smart cities, multidimensional, multidisciplinary scientific modeling systems, social media tracking, and the increased deployment of IoT sensors.Geographic information systems (GISs), the actual software and related technologies that apply and advance GIScience, evolved beginning in the 1960s as computer applications for the capture, synthesis, visualization, analysis, archiving, and sharing of GI (4). These systems were originally devised for the simple task of automated cartography but rapidly evolved into systems for managing and tracking spatially distributed activities such as transit use or crime, for situation awareness in the military and intelligence communities, for assessing the effectiveness of public-health systems, for emergency management, and for modeling social and environmental systems (e.g., refs. 5 and 6). GIS is today an important research tool in virtually all of the social and environmental sciences (e.g., ref. 7), an essential administrative tool, and a key design tool in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning (8–10).In 1992 Goodchild coined the term “GIScience” to encompass the rigorous scientific treatment of GIS design and methods (11); alternative terms with similar meaning include “geomatics,” “geoinformatics,” and “spatial data science.” GIScience is built on the idea that humans have specific ways of orienting themselves, acquiring and communicating spatial knowledge, and finding their way (12), and principles of spatial cognition are often important in the design of GIS. Elegant data structures and indexing schemes have been devised for spatial data (e.g., refs. 13 and 14), and powerful algorithms have been created for performing basic operations (e.g., refs. 15–18). Another unique aspect of GIScience is that it tends to adhere to specific principles, most notably spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity (19), and is impacted by unique uses such as the modifiable areal unit problem (20). These challenges require specialized treatment of statistical inference and uncertainties (21).Some of the first discussions of 3E issues in GIScience occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., ref. 22). GIS at that time was expensive and tended to be available only to governments and the military. At the same time, because of the limited levels of detail of many data sources and the limited power of computational systems, some GIS solutions could be seen as simplistic and naïve. GIS also allowed individual locations to be easily shared, raising questions about locational privacy (23). Pickles (24) and others argued that maps, at the time the primary source of much GIS data, are often to be interpreted as social constructions that represent the political, commercial, and other agendas of their makers, rather than as scientifically objective representations of reality. Social critiques of GIS, that evaluate GIS through the lens of critical theory, have highlighted the assumptions of the practitioners and shown how they are reflected in knowledge production (25, 26). These arguments had a significant impact on the development of GIS and on GIScience.Presently, however, it is hard to imagine any conversation in GIScience, or indeed in any other scientific community, that does not consider some mix of ethics, empathy, and equity. The new focus on the 3Es is, in part, a signal of the moment. The Black Lives Matter movement has brought systemic racism to the forefront of many conversations. The broader field of geosciences, in which GIScience often sits, acknowledges collective underperformance in training and amplifying scholars and professionals in Black and other underrepresented minorities (27, 28). As well, in GIScience we are reexamining GIS as a tool to support more equitable and inclusive design and decision-making (29) and highlighting the dangerous applications of GIS technology such as using spatial databases for policing (30). COVID-19 has also contributed to our focus on the 3Es, as GIS has been critical to the COVID-19 response (31). Discussions about how to build and implement spatial technology have highlighted the need to balance privacy and analytical power when working with locational data. For example, during the early days of COVID-19, spatial technology for digital contact tracing was an active topic of discussion. However, as the pandemic continued, we were reminded that widespread use of any technology requiring knowledge of individual locations is difficult to implement, and we now recognize the hazards associated with positional uncertainty.Our primary goal in this paper is to accelerate response to the 3Es in science by identifying priority issues and research needs that, if addressed, will advance ethical, empathic, and equitable GIScience and to stimulate similar responses in other disciplines. Action in GIScience will have broad implications for all science as spatial data, methods, and software have permeated across science, including to engineering (32), health science (33), ecology (34), and social sciences (35). We recognize that issues and potential responses to the 3Es are a vast canvas. In GIScience a sample of the relevant topics includes ethics (36–38); data representation (39); justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (40–44); location and privacy (45); inference from spatial data (46); provenance and uncertainty in data (47); teaching practices (48, 49); and reproducibility and replicability (50–54). As we cannot give adequate attention to all topics, we highlight those that either require a unique response from GIScience or where leadership from GIScience will have broad impacts for science, academia, and society. Topics are organized around each of the 3Es (Fig. 1).Open in a separate windowFig. 1.Organization of the paper around the 3Es: ethics, empathy, and equity.     

Female peers in small work groups enhance women's motivation,verbal participation,and career aspirations in engineering

For years, public discourse in science education, technology, and policy-making has focused on the “leaky pipeline” problem: the observation that fewer women than men enter science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields and more women than men leave. Less attention has focused on experimentally testing solutions to this problem. We report an experiment investigating one solution: we created “microenvironments” (small groups) in engineering with varying proportions of women to identify which environment increases motivation and participation, and whether outcomes depend on students’ academic stage. Female engineering students were randomly assigned to one of three engineering groups of varying sex composition: 75% women, 50% women, or 25% women. For first-years, group composition had a large effect: women in female-majority and sex-parity groups felt less anxious than women in female-minority groups. However, among advanced students, sex composition had no effect on anxiety. Importantly, group composition significantly affected verbal participation, regardless of women’s academic seniority: women participated more in female-majority groups than sex-parity or female-minority groups. Additionally, when assigned to female-minority groups, women who harbored implicit masculine stereotypes about engineering reported less confidence and engineering career aspirations. However, in sex-parity and female-majority groups, confidence and career aspirations remained high regardless of implicit stereotypes. These data suggest that creating small groups with high proportions of women in otherwise male-dominated fields is one way to keep women engaged and aspiring toward engineering careers. Although sex parity works sometimes, it is insufficient to boost women’s verbal participation in group work, which often affects learning and mastery.In today’s globalized world, innovation in science and technology is vital for American economic competitiveness, quality of life, and national security. For the United States to maintain global leadership and competitiveness, the nation must invest in research and innovation and grow a talented, large workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Indeed, much of the future job growth in the United States is expected to be in STEM fields, and American businesses search globally for talent (1). This raises concerns about Americans’ preparedness for these jobs because too few domestic students enter STEM fields and among those who do, attrition is high. For example, only 28% of the STEM workforce is female (2), even though women represent 50% of the American population and 58% of its college-bound population (3). Clearly, women are untapped human capital that, if leveraged, could increase the STEM workforce substantially. Accomplishing this goal involves identifying academic stages in the STEM pipeline where women are less likely to enter STEM fields and more likely to exit these fields than men, and developing interventions to address this “leaky pipeline.” A lot of research has drawn attention to this problem, but far less research has tested solutions to this problem. The present study focuses on one solution targeting undergraduate students.In the first year of college, fewer women than men report intentions to major in STEM. Between 2009 and 2013, approximately, 22% of women compared with 29% of men intended to major in STEM (4, 5). These numbers dwindle quickly in the first few semesters of college as many students switch out of STEM (6, 7). In engineering, for example, 40% of students who initially intend to major in engineering switch majors (7). Even though women who initially intend to major in STEM tend to be well-qualified in terms of prior preparation in math and science (3, 8), they often report less confidence and motivation to pursue STEM careers compared with male peers (9, 10). These sex differences are often assumed to be driven by individual differences and a matter of free choice in selecting one’s own life path (11–13).We propose that what seems like a free choice is constrained by subtle cues in achievement contexts, such as its sex composition, that signal who naturally belongs in STEM and is likely to succeed and who else is a dubious fit. In STEM fields that have very small proportions of women (e.g., engineering), women’s lower motivation, participation, and career aspirations compared with men is likely to be driven by isolation and stereotype threat—the concern that one will be judged in terms of a stereotype—more than free choice (14, 15). If this is true, then systematically increasing the presence of female peers in learning contexts ought to have significant positive effects on young women’s engagement in STEM. The present study tests this and other related hypotheses about how sex composition of peers in academic contexts influence women’s engagement in STEM using the stereotype inoculation model as the guiding theoretical framework (10, 14).The stereotype inoculation model proposes that, analogous to biomedical vaccines that protect and inoculate one’s physical body against the threat of bacteria and viruses, exposure to in-group experts and peers act as “social vaccines” that inoculate an individual’s mind against noxious stereotypes. Past research using the model found that contact with female experts in STEM (e.g., professors) enhanced female students’ liking for STEM fields, identification with these fields, confidence, and career aspirations in STEM (10). These findings are consistent with other data showing that individuals’ aspirations are positively influenced after seeing successful professional role models, especially if they relate to these role models (16–21). Collectively, past work demonstrates that exposure to same-sex experts who are at an advanced career stage enhances young women’s global attitudes toward the field and career aspirations.What remains unknown is whether same-sex peers in STEM contexts serve as social vaccines too, and if so, under what conditions. Two characteristics make same-sex peers different from experts. First, unlike experts who are successful and advanced relative to young students, peers are at the same stage of development, making their social influence psychologically different. Female peers may be less effective because they have not reached high levels of success as experts. Alternatively, peers may be more effective because of their greater similarity to young students. Second, although exposure to only one female expert is a sufficient social vaccine for young women in STEM (10), it is unclear whether one female peer will produce the same effect.What is the ideal proportion of female peers in sex stereotypic achievement contexts that is beneficial to women? Past studies have shown that when women are in situations where they are the only woman, the experience of being a solo reduces their sense of belonging and lowers confidence, performance, and satisfaction. For example, women performed significantly worse on a math test when they were in academic contexts where they were the only woman surrounded by male peers compared with contexts where all of their peers were women (22–25). Similarly, women’s learning and memory were disrupted when they were a female solo in an otherwise all-male group versus in an all-female group (26). Solo status decreased individuals’ task confidence and interest (24, 27), made them feel isolated and dissatisfied with the work environment (28–30), increased concern that others viewed them as representatives of their sex (25, 31, 32), and made them reluctant to enter situations where they would be a minority (33). The negative effects of solo or token status are particularly potent for historically disadvantaged groups (women and ethnic minorities) compared with advantaged groups (White men) and in domains where the solo or token’s social group is negatively stereotyped: for example, in STEM where women’s abilities are called into question and the ideal expert is assumed to be male (14, 22, 25).Surprisingly, all past experiments on group composition have been limited to extreme comparisons: peer groups where women were solos or tokens (25% or less) versus all women (100% of the group). None of these studies tested whether sex-parity contexts (50% women) would erase the impact of negative stereotypes. Moreover, past studies did not allow group members to interact. Typically, participants only saw photographs of alleged group members; thus, sex composition was a passive backdrop (22–26). In contrast, our goal was to assess how active interactions among individuals within groups that vary in sex composition influence women’s behavior in a stereotypic field. The closest approximation is a recent field study that compared women’s and men’s performances in student engineering groups. Students in an engineering class were assigned to groups based on instructors’ preferences (group assignment was nonrandom). Groups varied in sex composition, ranging from all male, all female, male-dominated, female-dominated, and sex-parity groups (34). Results showed that group sex composition had no effect on women’s behavior. However, because group assignment was nonrandom, it is possible that instructor preferences or unmeasured individual differences confounded the effect of group composition on women’s behavior. A few sociological studies have also compared women in large organizations who were solos or tokens. However, none of these studies examined organizations with sex parity and all involved large organizations rather than small groups.The absence of research examining how sex parity affects women’s behavior in masculine achievement contexts is surprising, given that educators and policy-makers commonly assume that achieving numeric sex parity at the recruitment stage will solve the subsequent retention problem of women in STEM. However, this assumption has not been tested and may or may not be borne out by actual data. The first goal of the present study was to test whether or not creating interactive STEM environments with numeric sex parity protects women from the impact of masculine stereotypes and enhances their participation, positive performance appraisals, and future career aspirations in stereotypic domains. A second important goal was to investigate whether women’s academic life stage affects their vulnerability to the sex composition of peer groups. Exposure to female peers may be more important to young women who are beginners in college compared with women who are advanced in their college career (14).     

Awareness,Perception, and Practices Towards Blood Donation Among Undergraduate Health Science Students of India During the COVID-19 Pandemic

To assess the awareness, perception, and practices of health science students towards blood donation during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-sectional study was done among the undergraduate medical, dental, physiotherapy, and audiology, speech and learning pathology students in May 2021. A self-administered questionnaire designed using Google Doc was used for data collection. Out of the 461 participants, only 171(37.1%) knew that Coronavirus was not transmitted through blood transfusion. Only 125(27.1%) participants knew that a minimum of 14 days is required before a donor who tested positive for COVID-19 can donate blood. As many as 339(73.5%) participants expressed their willingness to donate blood during the current pandemic. Having donated blood in the past (p = 0.001), having vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines (p = 0.029), having taken both the vaccine doses (p = 0.0499), and absence of anaemia (p = 0.0159) were associated with willingness to donate blood during the pandemic. Only 83(18%) participants had donated blood after the onset of the pandemic. Out of the rest 378, 106(28%) participants did not donate blood due to the fear of getting infected with Coronavirus. Absence of chronic co-morbidities (p = 0.0288) was associated with the history of having donated blood after the onset of COVID-19 pandemic among the participants. Awareness of participants regarding certain key issues related to blood donation and COVID-19 were found lacking. Counselling services to alleviate fears associated with blood donation and awareness sessions to remove misconceptions are required among students to improve blood donation practices.     

Improving Nursing Facility Care Through an Innovative Payment Demonstration Project: Optimizing Patient Transfers,Impacting Medical Quality,and Improving Symptoms: Transforming Institutional Care Phase 2

Optimizing Patient Transfers, Impacting Medical Quality, and Improving Symptoms: Transforming Institutional Care (OPTIMISTIC) is a 2‐phase Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovations demonstration project now testing a novel Medicare Part B payment model for nursing facilities and practitioners in 40 Indiana nursing facilities. The new payment codes are intended to promote high‐quality care in place for acutely ill long‐stay residents. The focus of the initiative is to reduce hospitalizations through the diagnosis and on‐site management of 6 common acute clinical conditions (linked to a majority of potentially avoidable hospitalizations of nursing facility residents 1 ): pneumonia, urinary tract infection, skin infection, heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or asthma, and dehydration. This article describes the OPTIMISTIC Phase 2 model design, nursing facility and practitioner recruitment and training, and early experiences implementing new Medicare payment codes for nursing facilities and practitioners. Lessons learned from the OPTIMISTIC experience may be useful to others engaged in multicomponent quality improvement initiatives.     

Incursions from the epicentre: Southern theory,social science,and the global HIV research domain

Research about HIV constitutes a global domain of academic knowledge. The patterns that structure this domain reflect inequalities in the production and dissemination of knowledge, as well as broader inequalities in geopolitics. Conventional metrics for assessing the value and impact of academic research reveal that “Northern” research remains dominant, while “Southern” research remains peripheral. Southern theory provides a framework for greater critical engagement with knowledge produced by researchers within the global South. With a focus on HIV social science, we show that investigators working in and from Africa have produced and disseminated knowledge fundamental to the global domain of HIV research, and argue that their epistemological contribution may be understood within the framework of Southern theory. Through repurposing a bibliometrical measure of citation count, we constitute a new archive of highly cited social science research. With a focus on South Africa, we situate this archive within changing historical contexts, connecting research findings to developments in medicine, health sciences and politics. We focus on two key themes in the evolution of HIV knowledge: (1) the significance of context and locality — the “setting” of HIV research; and (2) sex, race and risk — changing ideas about the social determinants of HIV transmission.     

Evolution and structure of sustainability science

The concepts of sustainable development have experienced extraordinary success since their advent in the 1980s. They are now an integral part of the agenda of governments and corporations, and their goals have become central to the mission of research laboratories and universities worldwide. However, it remains unclear how far the field has progressed as a scientific discipline, especially given its ambitious agenda of integrating theory, applied science, and policy, making it relevant for development globally and generating a new interdisciplinary synthesis across fields. To address these questions, we assembled a corpus of scholarly publications in the field and analyzed its temporal evolution, geographic distribution, disciplinary composition, and collaboration structure. We show that sustainability science has been growing explosively since the late 1980s when foundational publications in the field increased its pull on new authors and intensified their interactions. The field has an unusual geographic footprint combining contributions and connecting through collaboration cities and nations at very different levels of development. Its decomposition into traditional disciplines reveals its emphasis on the management of human, social, and ecological systems seen primarily from an engineering and policy perspective. Finally, we show that the integration of these perspectives has created a new field only in recent years as judged by the emergence of a giant component of scientific collaboration. These developments demonstrate the existence of a growing scientific field of sustainability science as an unusual, inclusive and ubiquitous scientific practice and bode well for its continued impact and longevity.     

Setting the Terms for Zoonotic Diseases: Effective Communication for Research,Conservation, and Public Policy

Many of the world’s most pressing issues, such as the emergence of zoonotic diseases, can only be addressed through interdisciplinary research. However, the findings of interdisciplinary research are susceptible to miscommunication among both professional and non-professional audiences due to differences in training, language, experience, and understanding. Such miscommunication contributes to the misunderstanding of key concepts or processes and hinders the development of effective research agendas and public policy. These misunderstandings can also provoke unnecessary fear in the public and have devastating effects for wildlife conservation. For example, inaccurate communication and subsequent misunderstanding of the potential associations between certain bats and zoonoses has led to persecution of diverse bats worldwide and even government calls to cull them. Here, we identify four types of miscommunication driven by the use of terminology regarding bats and the emergence of zoonotic diseases that we have categorized based on their root causes: (1) incorrect or overly broad use of terms; (2) terms that have unstable usage within a discipline, or different usages among disciplines; (3) terms that are used correctly but spark incorrect inferences about biological processes or significance in the audience; (4) incorrect inference drawn from the evidence presented. We illustrate each type of miscommunication with commonly misused or misinterpreted terms, providing a definition, caveats and common misconceptions, and suggest alternatives as appropriate. While we focus on terms specific to bats and disease ecology, we present a more general framework for addressing miscommunication that can be applied to other topics and disciplines to facilitate more effective research, problem-solving, and public policy.     

Basic science research and education: a priority for training and capacity building in developing countries

This article provides evidence that basic science research and education should be key priorities for global health training, capacity building, and practice. Currently, there are tremendous gaps between strong science education and research in developed countries (the North) as compared to developing countries (the South). In addition, science research and education appear as low priorities in many developing countries. The need to stress basic science research beyond the typical investment of infectious disease basic service and research laboratories in developing areas is significant in terms of the benefits, not only to education, but also for economic strengthening and development of human resources. There are some indications that appreciation of basic science research education and training is increasing, but this still needs to be applied more rigorously and strengthened systematically in developing countries.     

Surface chemistry: key to control and advance myriad technologies

This special issue on surface chemistry is introduced with a brief history of the field, a summary of the importance of surface chemistry in technological applications, a brief overview of some of the most important recent developments in this field, and a look forward to some of its most exciting future directions. This collection of invited articles is intended to provide a snapshot of current developments in the field, exemplify the state of the art in fundamental research in surface chemistry, and highlight some possibilities in the future. Here, we show how those articles fit together in the bigger picture of this field.     

(Mis)informed about what? What it means to be a science-literate citizen in a digital world

Science literacy is often held up as crucial for avoiding science-related misinformation and enabling more informed individual and collective decision-making. But research has not yet examined whether science literacy actually enables this, nor what skills it would need to encompass to do so. In this report, we address three questions to outline what it should mean to be science literate in today’s world: 1) How should we conceptualize science literacy? 2) How can we achieve this science literacy? and 3) What can we expect science literacy’s most important outcomes to be? If science literacy is to truly enable people to become and stay informed (and avoid being misinformed) on complex science issues, it requires skills that span the “lifecycle” of science information. This includes how the scientific community produces science information, how media repackage and share the information, and how individuals encounter and form opinions on this information. Science literacy, then, is best conceptualized as encompassing three dimensions of literacy spanning the lifecycle: Civic science literacy, digital media science literacy, and cognitive science literacy. Achieving such science literacy, particularly for adults, poses many challenges and will likely require a structural perspective. Digital divides, in particular, are a major structural barrier, and community literacy and building science literacy into media and science communication are promising opportunities. We end with a discussion of what some of the beneficial outcomes could be—and, as importantly, will likely not be—of science literacy that furthers informed and critical engagement with science in democratic society.     

Pregnancy plasma glucose levels exceeding the American Diabetes Association thresholds,but below the National Diabetes Data Group thresholds for gestational diabetes mellitus,are related to the risk of neonatal macrosomia,hypoglycaemia and hyperbilirubinaemia

Aims/hypothesis Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is a risk factor for perinatal complications. In several countries, the criteria for the diagnosis of GDM have been in flux, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) thresholds recommended in 2000 being lower than those of the National Diabetes Data Group (NDDG) that have been in use since 1979. We sought to determine the extent to which infants of women meeting only the ADA criteria for GDM are at increased risk of neonatal complications. Materials and methods In a multiethnic cohort of 45,245 women who did not meet the NDDG criteria and were not treated for GDM, we conducted nested case–control studies of three complications of GDM that occurred in their infants: macrosomia (birthweight >4,500 g, n = 494); hypoglycaemia (plasma glucose <2.2 mmo/l, n = 488); and hyperbilirubinaemia (serum bilirubin ≥342 μmol/l (20 mg/dl), n = 578). We compared prenatal glucose levels of the mothers of these infants and mothers of 884 control infants. Results Women with GDM by ADA criteria only (two or more glucose values exceeding the threshold) had an increased risk of having an infant with macrosomia (odds ratio OR = 3.40, 95% CI = 1.55–7.43), hypoglycaemia (OR = 2.61, 95% CI = 0.99–6.92) or hyperbilirubinaemia (OR = 2.22, 95% CI = 0.98–5.04). Glucose levels 1 h after the 100-g glucose challenge that exceeded the ADA threshold were particularly strongly associated with each complication. Conclusions/interpretation These results lend support to the ADA recommendations and highlight the importance of the 1-h glucose measurement in a diagnostic test for GDM.