Start: "Every week, I see headlines in the mainstream media (as well as the “social” and online media outlets) that say something like “NASA Scientists Baffled at….” or “Scientists Bewildered by…”. It’s annoying and tells me that the writer and/or the headline writer is a) lazy and b) doesn’t have a clue about science or scientists. "
What's really happening is that the headline writer knows what wording gets clicks.
They're not fools. Their job is just different from what you think it is.
> "We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled."'
Scientists are baffled. It's what gets us out of bed. If we knew everything, we'd be called oracles or something. If we stuck to the comforts of the known, applicable facts, we'd be called engineers.
Humans are curious beings. We enjoy the trivia at the forefront of science, even if we won't read the boring details of the precise scientific answer. Mulling the questions that scientists are investigating is a delight. And yeah, sometimes it's a lazy editor who exploits that curiosity, editorializing without verification, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
seriously? you are showing off your knowledge of science by displaying an ignorance of engineering... engineers don't live in emotional comfort, and the best experimental scientists are engineers or they'd never create novel equipment to test ideas.
There's a new PBS science show hosted by a "journalist" (rather than a scientist) called "H2O: the molecule that made us".
When talking about the atmosphere of the early Earth, she referred to it as "mostly CO2". That's so egregious an error, I rewound and rechecked it five times. The highest CO2 content we know of was 0.04%. "Mostly"?! This means that nobody with fairly basic science knowledge (I don't even have a degree in hard sciences, and this hit me like fingernails on a chalkboard) reviewed the script, or caught it in production, or caught it in previews.
In this specific case, it is an example of baffling.
After all, scientists like to be baffled ... if you're not, you're probably not looking hard enough. (Ask any cosmologist ;-)
So scientists employed a device to prevent the slosh dynamics caused by fuzzy green mice from affecting glaciers! Now THAT is an article I'd like to read!