When Scientists Admit Mistakes, That Means Science Is Working - Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Image: Shutterstock.comWe all make them, and we all make them at work: mistakes on the job happen regardless of line of work, experience, and gender. How employees feel about them and how they are perceived by others, however, differs. Between men and women, the latter are more likely to perceive mistakes more negatively – but this depends on with whom they are sharing the office, a new Frontiers in Organizational Psychology study has shown. “On paper, a mistake carries the same consequences whoever makes it, and that is exactly what we found. But formal rules aren’t culture,” said lead author Dr Grace Lordan at the London School of Economics. “In teams that are three-quarters or more male, women told us they feel less comfortable admitting a mistake and less confident it will be treated as something to learn from. Where women are in the majority, that gap vanishes.”Women at workFor their study, the team surveyed how comfortable employees would be admitting mistakes, how likely they are to believe they’d be penalized for making them, and whether they’d consider them as a learning opportunity. Over 1,400 employees in the UK financial service sector participated.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.

Forests that stood on Mozambique's coast thousands of years ago now lie beneath shallow seas, and they have become fish-filled "peat reefs" with marine life comparable to coral reefs, researchers report in Scientific Reports. A team from the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies (BCSS) Ocean Observatory, led by Mario Lebrato, documented the submerged peat in the Bazaruto Archipelago in the Western Indian Ocean. BCSS, founded in 2017, describes itself as Africa's first permanent ocean observatory. Working with universities and institutions in the U. K., U. S. and Canada, the team believes it has carried out the first ecological study of peat reefs anywhere in the tropics. Old forests, new seafloorRadiocarbon dating shows the peat formed between about 300 and 5,000 years ago, and chemical analysis indicates it came mostly from coastal land plants and trees. Some samples contain up to 40% organic carbon by dry weight. Lebrato said the coastline has very little natural hard seabed, mostly shifting sand. As rising seas expose the old peat layers, they create rare solid habitat where marine life can settle, hide and feed.

Coral bleaching restoration at Stanford – by Dan Griffin / GG Films (via SWNS, cropped) Coral bleaching has been reversed at record speed using a new method developed at Stanford University.