Academia is supposed to foster innovation, free-thinking, and novel, impactful ideas. But if all of that happens in the Ivory Tower, what's the point?

Dr. Venter is a biology guru. Not only his team, together with the US government, was the first to sequence the human genome, but (in 2010) they had managed to create what had been called the first synthetic life form.

Without a new generation of scientists who can communicate clearly to the public and to other scientists, we are going to be in for some difficult times ahead in which our progress as a nation will be hindered.

We have worked with scientists for 15 years, and we've noticed some common mistakes scientists make when they communicate. Here are the top four, and what scientists can do to fix them.