PCST 2025 took place in the silver city of Aberdeen, Scotland. Named for the sparkle of the mica in the granite of which it is largely built, Aberdeen was first scheduled to host the PCST conference in 2020, when it was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic. The conference was then hosted online in 2021, coming back to Aberdeen in person in April of 2025.

SciArt is an evolving field that seeks to bring together art and science. Numerous SciArt spaces and initiatives exist, bridging the gap between the two and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations. However, personal and interpersonal obstacles have been identified for both artists and scientists within the context of SciArt collaborations and environments. Here, we first introduce key concepts about SciArt and then leverage theories from social psychology in the study of group dynamics, including social and group identity, group norms, and minority dissent and influence, to examine artist-scientist collaborations and their challenges. Drawing on social psychology frameworks, our goal is to inform and encourage the creation of Third Spaces that identify common ground between practitioners, foster balanced interactions, build shared group identity and new group dynamics, and ultimately move beyond discipline-specific identities and institutionalized environments.

In their book Women Scientists in American Television Comedy, the three authors Karina Judd, Bridget Gaul, and Anna-Sophie Jürgens, present their study on how humor is used to portray women scientists in American television comedies such as The Big Bang Theory. The underlying theory and results are interesting to the wider science communication community, but this book might not be the best way to present them.

In an era of digital fragmentation and contested expertise, mediated public trust is under pressure. This study examines how journalists in Germany, Italy, and Lithuania perceive their role amid structural media shifts, politicized environments, and the rise of alternative sources. Drawing on 14 focus group discussions and 8 narrative interviews, we explore how national media systems and professional cultures shape journalistic strategies. Rather than a uniform erosion of trust, journalists report polarization shaped by ideology, platform dynamics, and shifting audience expectations. Many strive to act as trust brokers but face constraints from precarious working conditions, editorial pressures, and fragmented publics. We argue that trust in science journalism depends not only on journalistic practice but on broader systemic conditions, including institutional support, media infrastructures, and audience trust cultures (i.e., prevailing trust norms among different publics). This cross-national comparison advances a more differentiated understanding of how trust is negotiated in contemporary science communication.

The book edited by Moreno-Castro, Krzewińska and Dzimińska intends to “contribute to the general discussion on the public perception of science, the issue of information overload, trust in science sources and the most effective ways of communicating science information”. The book presents the main results of the CONCISE project funded by the European Commission. In 2019, just before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, five public consultations were conducted with citizens in Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal, involving a total of 497 citizens. Four specific topics were at the centre of discussions and consultations with the citizens involved: vaccines, climate change, GMOs, “complementary and alternative medicine”. The European study is documented in detail in the book and conveys the impression of a well thought-out, organised and concerted set of activities. The list of authors includes several well-known researchers in the field of science communication in Europe.

The purpose of this scoping review is to examine the available research on the relationship between research and practice in the field of science communication, identifying barriers and solutions to their disconnect. This scoping review was conducted using the Arksey and O'Malley framework. Results indicate that the main barrier is the inefficient communication between the two domains, and that the main solution lies in changing some modus operandi in science communication. In conclusion, this scoping review provides novel insights to build bridges between research and practice for the advancement of science communication.

Universities and funding agencies are increasingly expecting research teams to include initiatives promoting public engagement, which often require public science communication. However, developing science communication skills can be challenging for researchers due to the limited availability of training opportunities. This practice insight documents the experiences of researchers participating in action-learning science communication workshops developed for the VLIR-Teams Active Parks research group in Cuenca, Ecuador. Through learning activities, researchers developed interdisciplinary science communication skills, including self-reflexivity, crafting speeches, and content creation for social media, to effectively communicate their study's outcomes on public park usage to stakeholders and various community audiences. The workshops proved effective in building public engagement skills and developing self-reflexivity, enabling researchers to create impactful, audience-centered initiatives that fostered meaningful connections with the community.

This response addresses George Claassen's review of The Palgrave Handbook of Science and Health Journalism. The review raises several salient points; however, the biggest criticism of this work arises from a misunderstanding of the purpose of the Palgrave Handbook series. We wholeheartedly agree that there are lessons for the field of science communication. Engaging with more diverse perspectives and adopting a global lens for exploration of science and health journalism are priorities for the field. These are common themes in the Handbook, which we believe is still a useful resource to help facilitate these much-needed explorations.

 

Publisher's note: this letter refers to Book Review: Palgrave Handbook of Science and Health Journalism

This is the age of exoplanets. Thousands of planets around other suns have been discovered, upending settled science. Unlike spectacular imagery of other phenomena (e.g., nebulae), exoplanets are difficult to `directly' image, and exoplanet scientific imagery is visually limited. This practice insight is a qualitative case study of how artists and scientists at NASA's Exoplanet Travel Bureau co-imagined exoplanets as destinations of the future, with the artists playing an essential role of clarifying and extending scientific thinking. Using textual/visual analysis of how the Bureau's iconic series of exoplanet posters (launched in 2015) invited the public to visit exoplanet landscapes, this practice insight reflects on a recent historical instance of how exoplanets were visually communicated to the public in innovative ways, using overlapping scientific and artistic practices.

This study explores how YouTube content creators integrate scientific evidence into their videos by analyzing citation patterns across disciplines. The role of other alternative metrics is also considered. We apply Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to compare the citation count of 12,005 research articles from Biotechnology, Psychology, Astrophysics, and Ecology published between 2014 and 2023, including citations sourced from YouTube videos. Our findings provide a characterization of two principal components in evidence citation employed by various science communication stakeholders. The first component enhances a paper's visibility by driving social attention, while the second focuses on its social influence and impact, determined by the paper's quality and scientific relevance.