The following are actual headlines from local, national, and international newspapers*: Kids Make Nutritious Snacks; Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft; Grandmother of 8 Makes Hole in One; Lack of Brains Hinders Research.

The Poster Puzzler image from the Summer 2013 edition is a frog statue, which sits under the tree between Buildings 324 and 319.

Last September, Nadya Tarasova, Ph.D., head, Synthetic Biologics and Drug Discovery Facility, Cancer and Inflammation Program, traveled to Nottingham, England, where she was an invited speaker and chaired a session on JAK/STAT signaling in cancer at the second special meeting of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies.

In Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet,” Polonius inquires of the prince, “What do you read, my lord?” Not at all pleased with what he’s reading, Hamlet replies, “Words, words, words.” I have previously described the communication model in which a sender encodes a message and then sends it via some channel (or medium) to a receiver, who decodes the message and, ideally, understands what was sent. Surely the most common way of encoding a message is in choosing the most appropriate words for the listener or reader.

Recently, I attended the annual meeting of the BioCommunications Association in Asilomar, Calif. Not surprisingly, the speakers, all professional communicators, were very good and spoke knowledgeably on their various topics. But something else impressed me during the informal times between presentations, and at mealtimes. These folks not only tended to speak well, but they also tended to listen well. And there’s a very strong case to be made for the importance of listening in effective communication.