In May of 2015, Jacqueline Chen could be seen at the National Science Bowl, a nationwide science and math competition, delivering a speech on how (1) research on turbulent flow can improve engine efficiency? Chen is a mechanical engineer who first became interested in turbulent flow-irregular fluctuations in the pressure and velocity of a liquid or gas-as a college student. Today, she is the founding director of an interdisciplinary team leading research in this area.

Modeling turbulent flow is important for understanding a number of complicated (2) systems, these include the flow of air in the atmosphere, the circulation of blood in the body, and the behavior of fuel and air in engines. (3) Chen uses computers in her work, which draws on computer science, mathematics, and chemistry to create computer simulations of the reactions that take place in internal combustion engines. Such engines, which are found in automobiles, airplanes, and power plants, rapidly mix a liquid or gaseous fuel with air and combust it to produce mechanical energy. With more precise models of the movement and interactions of fluids in engines, Chen and her team can help improve the design of these engines to reduce the buildup of pollutants in a system and increase the amount of usable energy they produce.

(4) The type of work Chen does has only recently become possible. While scientists have long understood the mathematics underlying turbulent (5) flow. They needed powerful supercomputers to apply that knowledge to real-world problems. As Chen puts it, "The basic equations governing flow and chemistry have been known for over a century. However, the ability to solve them-really solve them, in practical regimes and with chemical realism-is relatively new." Key to this new capability are petascale computers, which are capable of performing one quadrillion (one million billion) calculations per second. With turbulent flow models that utilize petascale computing, Chen and her team hope to improve the design of combustion (6) engines that they are as much as 50 percent more efficient than (7) prevailing engines.

In addition to being a science innovator, Chen (8) traces her fascination with chemical processes to her childhood. She encourages young people, young women in particular, to take math and science courses and learn a computer programming language. She believes that (9) doing so can help make science (10) apart of everyday life, expanding its ability to improve society. Throughout her work, Chen has done, and continues to do, precisely that: (11) helping her fellow citizens understand the complexities of mechanical engineering.

In 1972, the journalist Tom Wolfe wrote an article for New York magazine entitled "The Birth of 'The New Journalism,"' describing the ways he and his contemporaries had departed from conventional news reporting. The practitioners of "New Journalism," Wolfe explained, sought not only to relay information but also to entertain readers by incorporating literary features—such as dialogue, sensory detail, and dramatic tension—more characteristic of fiction than of traditional journalism.

(12) These literary features are now used by many writers of nonfiction. Mainstream journalists and critics accused Wolfe and his peers of concocting scenes and (13) dialogue merely for the purpose of the articles being more interesting. Wolfe vehemently retorted that by grounding their descriptions in exhaustive research, the New Journalists offered rich, truthful narratives about their subjects' emotional lives.

While the pioneers of New Journalism claimed a commitment to "objective truth," some recent practitioners of creative nonfiction—a modern term for the blend of storytelling and reporting Wolfe introduced—(14) questions whether pursuing objectivity is worthwhile. Essayist John D'Agata made headlines in 2012 for his provocative book The Lifespan of a Fact, in which he defended the altering or (15) collecting of details for the sake of art. Although D'Agata asserted that taking such liberties allowed him to produce a truer work of art, critics accused him of intentional deceit. The New Journalists, dedicated to factual accuracy even as they pushed stylistic (16) boundaries, would likely have distanced themselves from the nonfiction genre's latest provocateur.

(17) One might concede the notion that truth can be found in the most unexpected places. Decades before D'Agata, the New Journalists (18) will have recognized that mere fact gathering did not allow them to accurately portray the volatility of their era. They maintained that truthfulness could be better expressed by emphasizing individuals' subjective realities. New Journalist Michael Herr, (19) for instance, argued that in scrupulously compiling facts about the Vietnam War, the mainstream US media missed the truth that mattered: they failed to impart meaningful stories about individual Americans' experiences in Vietnam.

The task of creative nonfiction writers, like (20) the writers known as the New Journalists, is an inherently subjective one. These (21) writers neither: capture every objective detail, nor dispense with facts entirely. It is possible to use narrative techniques that can make fiction (22) engaging for readers and to maintain a commitment to veracity. It is unnecessary to aspire to perfect objectivity; it is equally unnecessary to fabricate the raw material.

In 1997, oceanographer Charles J. Moore was sailing in the North Pacific Ocean when he came upon a vast area full of debris. Moore described the debris field, which included such objects as a volleyball and a truck tire, in a 2003 article for Natural History magazine. By 2007 Moore's discovery had attracted additional media coverage and a compelling name: the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

Although the name was memorable, it was a misnomer. The patch was not, as some media reports implied, an "island of trash" piled high with conventional items of garbage. Rather, it was composed mainly of tiny plastic (23) particle's floating under the water's surface. Moore (24) distanced himself from the trash metaphors in 2011, calling them "media-concocted embellishments of the truth." Nevertheless, the "garbage patch" term endured, sparking new interest in the problem of marine pollution in general and microplastics in particular.

[l] The garbage patch is not the only (25) instance, in which a memorable metaphor has drawn attention to a complicated environmental problem. [2] In 1985, British researchers discovered abnormally low levels of   (26) ozone, a gas that protects the planet from harmful ultraviolet rays above the Antarctic. [3] NASA scientists (27) dreamed up the term "ozone hole" to describe the condition. [4] The members of the British team objected to the characterization of low ozone levels as a "hole," but even they acknowledged the power of the term. [5] According to Maureen Christie, author of a book on the ozone layer, while the British researchers were concerned that "the picture it provided was not a very accurate one," they "conceded that their paper received a lot more attention" as a result of the term than it would have otherwise. (28) 

In a 2001 study, sociologist Reiner Grundmann tracked newspaper coverage of the ozone issue around the time the "hole" was discovered. He saw media attention first pick up in the year (29) 1985, when more than twenty articles on the topic were published in three leading US newspapers. The number continued to rise until 1989, when it peaked at nearly (30) fifty articles. Attention to the ozone problem and public concern about (31) it's affects contributed to the development of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to phase out the use of certain ozone-depleting substances.

Science depends on factual precision, of course, and the distinction between microplastics and a "great garbage patch," or low levels of a gas and a "hole," (32) are not a trivial one. (33) However, as these examples show, misleading metaphors can be more effective than strictly accurate descriptions in drawing media attention and spurring people and governments to take action to address environmental problems.

For millennia, people have looked up at the stars and wondered how far away they are. But determining distances to stars is difficult because (34) they are so enormous. Indeed, people were unable to measure the distance to any single star with the exception of the Sun) before 1838. By 1900, the greatest measurable distance was still minuscule by today's standards—less than 1 percent of the diameter of the Milky Way. (35) It was like that when Henrietta Leavitt began working at the Harvard College Observatory.

[l] Leavitt searched for and cataloged Cepheid variable (36) stars: whose brightness varied from bright to dim to bright again over a regular time interval, or period. [2] Leavitt focused on Cepheids that she suspected (correctly, it turned out) to be about the same distance from Earth. [3] Within this group, stars that appeared brighter in a telescope had to be more luminous, meaning that they gave off more energy. [4] In the course of her observations, Leavitt discovered something simple yet striking: the more luminous stars had longer periods. (37)

Leavitt's finding enabled astronomers to determine the relative distances of stars from Earth. To understand how this works, imagine that two variable stars appear (38) equal bright or dim in a telescope, but one (39) had a longer period than the other. According to Leavitt's observations, the longer-period star is always more luminous than the shorter-period star. So why do the stars (40) appear so close? The longer-period star must be farther away.

(41) The particular stars Leavitt studied were known as the Cepheids. One year later, another astronomer used measurements of a different group of Cepheids to calculate the stars' actual distances from Earth. He then incorporated these distances into the formula that Leavitt had calculated. (42)Now for the first time; astronomers could determine the distances to a large number of stars, including some that were quite far away.

This development spurred others, and a series of momentous discoveries followed. About five years later, the first estimate of the size of the Milky Way was made. About five years after that, the distance to some celestial objects was determined to be much greater than the size of the Milky (43) Way that meant that there were other galaxies beyond our own. And in 1929, a mere seventeen years after the publication of Leavitt's paper, measurements of distances to faraway galaxies were used to show that the universe was expanding. (44) While at Harvard, Leavitt was known as a "computer"—a person hired to do calculations. Leavitt didn't just discover an interesting fact about a particular type of star. She, perhaps more than any other single person, discovered the "ruler" with which to measure the universe.