Bad news: Science now confirms that scientific studies are getting harder to understand. New research in eLife looked at more than 709,000 scientific abstracts published between 1881 and 2015, and found that the use of scientific jargon — clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, anyone? — is becoming more common. More than 20 percent of scientific abstracts now have a readability level that's considered beyond college graduate-level English. That makes it harder for the public and policymakers to understand scientific research. One of the authors' suggestions: Include a "lay summary" that makes a paper easier for people to understand.
