Using a soapbox to plug a leaky professional pipeline

image courtesy of Isla Watton of Soapbox Science

Rebecca Dang, guest contributor   Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have a gender diversity issue. The professional pipeline, stretching from high school and undergraduate university through graduate school to post-doctoral fellowships and positions in academia, leaks. Especially at the early career stage, a higher proportion of women (cis gender, transgender, asexual, heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, […]

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Ecosystem services: Determining the full value of the land

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Jenna Finley, Biology & Life Sciences editor   On January 5, 2021, researchers at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and the universities of British Columbia, Carleton, and McGill released a ground-breaking study that expands our understanding of ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are important but overlooked aspects of conservation and protection research. Ecosystem services are […]

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On good science journalism: Why it’s important and how to produce it

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Abbas Mehrabian, guest contributor   On November 9, 2020, when Pfizer and BioNTech announced their COVID-19 vaccine had a 90 per cent efficacy rate without publishing a peer-reviewed study to support their claim, many media outlets covered it as glorious news. Fox News’s headline “Pfizer vaccine proves 90% effective in latest trials” took the companies’ […]

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Bioplastics may be the answer to Canada’s plastic waste problem

Photos by Silvie Harder

Katie Compton and Silvie Harder, Policy and Politics editors When COVID-19 reached Canada in the spring of 2020, the Government of Canada was on track to ban single-use plastics. But in the scramble to reduce the spread of the virus, grocery stores and coffee shops discouraged people from bringing their cloth bags and travel mugs. […]

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A beginner’s guide to multilingual science communication

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Alice Fleerackers, Science in Society editor English is the language of science, and, too often, science communication. We publish our results in English, host our conferences in English, and promote, share, and tweet about our research in English. This reliance on a single language cuts out wide swaths of the population, including critical demographics who could […]

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