Imagine trying to learn biology without ever using the word "organism". Or studying to become a botanist when the only way of referring to photosynthesis is to spell the word out, letter by painstaking letter.

For deaf students, this game of scientific "Password" has long been the daily classroom and laboratory experience. Words like "organism" and "photosynthesis"to say nothing of more obscure and harder-to-spell termshave no single widely accepted equivalent in sign language. This means that deaf students and their teachers and interpreters must improvise, making it that much harder for the students to excel in science and pursue careers in it.

Now thanks to the Internet resources for deaf students seeking science-related signs are easier to find and share. Crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, enabling people who are deaf to coalesce around signs for commonly used terms.

This year, one of those resources, the Scottish Sensory Centre's British Sign Language Glossary Project, added 116 new signs for physics and engineering terms, including signs for "light-year", (hold one hand up and spread the fingers downward for "light", then bring both hands together in front of your chest and slowly move them apart for "year"), "mass" and "X-ray" (form an X with your index fingers, then, with the index finger on the right hand, point outward).

The signs were developed by a team of researchers at the centre, a division of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that develops learning tools for students with visual and auditory impairments. The researchers spent more than a year soliciting ideas from deaf science workers, circulating lists of potential signs and ultimately gathering for "an intense weekend" of final voting, said Audrey Cameron, science advisor for the project. (Cameron is also deaf, and answered questions via email.)

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