Baffled Scientists Detect Massive Unexplained Radiation From the Sun, Study Reports

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 102 points – Baffled Scientists Detect Massive Unexplained Radiation From the Sun, Study Reports
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Baffled Scientists Detect Massive Unexplained Radiation From the Sun, Study Reports::"The Sun’s emission at high energies challenges present models," scientists say, and "decisive" new probes are needed to solve the mystery.

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This constant gamma-ray flux—which does not pose a threat to life on our planet—is far brighter than expected based on models of the Sun’s behavior, raising new questions about the mechanisms that are fueling the radiant glow.

Could they not have led with that? I hate that sites feel they need to imply an existential threat to drive clicks to a science article.

Welcome to the modern news media, where everything's a crisis and words don't mean anything.

In a headline, as soon as I see "scientists" instead of "researchers" I start getting doubtful. If scientist is preceded or followed by the word "baffled" or any of its synonyms I go straight to ignore. It's all clickbait these days

I don’t disagree (I actually do the exact same thing when I see the word “baffled”) but I’m interested in your distinction between researchers and scientists. Is it a common tactic for news articles to use “scientists”as a buzzword instead of “researchers”?

I'm not him, but now that I think about it, there is a tendency for many people to prefer the more generalized term.

Where scientists don't tend to use the word scientist as much, I can't recall ever seeing the term in a journal article for instance. (I don't read many, but I'll read an abstract here and there) I'm not sure why. I expect it's some categorization thing, where not all scientists perform research, so researcher is the more precise term. I'm just guessing as to the reason though, I do not have a PhD.

I would guess because "scientist" has no qualifying definition and is also vague. I just conducted an experiment to see if a McDonald's cups bottom would retain 4oz of Coca-Cola over the course of 5 days in a hot car (it didn't). Yay I am a scientist.

At least researcher or "research scientist" gives some idea of what the title is implying.

Late reply, sorry. Basically what others have said, "scientist" is used as a buzz word. I don't have any issue with the word itself, just how it's used in news media