I can relate to Charlie Brown’s teacher. She speaks — and Charlie and his pals in the “Peanuts” cartoon hear noise without words.

As a coach of numerous teams, I have seen that blank look, recognized the glare and the stare and wondered if anyone would notice if I switched to a discussion of lollipops and subatomic particles.

I am near the end of a basketball season. As we were winning a recent game by 20 points, one of the boys on the bench confided that he wished the game was more competitive.

In our next game, he got his wish. In a physical contest, the officiating seemed unbalanced. How, several parents articulated with increasing volume as the first half drew to a close, did we get so few foul calls when we could see the red marks on our children’s arms and necks from contact with the opposing players?

With concerns about calls, parents and the kids became increasingly vocal. During my halftime talk, I could see the hurt and anger in the kids’ eyes. “How come he can keep pushing me and he doesn’t get called for a foul, and I go near him and the ref blows the whistle?” one of them asked.

Officiating isn’t easy. I was an umpire for baseball games in which every full-count pitch was a borderline strike. It was up to me to decide whether the boy struck out or to send him to first base.

Still, in that moment, as the coach of those boys on the basketball court, I was frustrated. I did what I imagine chairmen do: I sent my assistant coach to ask the referees about the calls. It was cowardly, but I wanted to stay on the court and try to manage through this tense contest. I could be the good guy and he could be the one whining.

I told the boys to play hard, stay focused and stick together. An eight-point deficit, I insisted, was manageable, especially with an entire half left in the game.

But then something happened early in the second half. As the game got close, one of the boys from the other team got fouled on a 3-point shot. He stepped to the line in a quiet gym. Just as he was getting ready to shoot, one of the parents on my team barked at him, making him alter his shot and causing him to miss. The referee threw out the parent and the boy made the next two free throws.

While I didn’t agree with many of the foul calls, I understood the need to eject the parent.

With the game close the rest of the way, parents, coaches and players became increasingly animated, sharing the kinds of noises you’d hear at a Red Sox-Yankees game. What’s the right message to offer the kids at the end of a tense game?

I got my answer a few days later, when I interviewed Port Jefferson Station’s Annie O’Shea, who has had a breakout year in the World Cup in skeleton racing. Driven by teamwork and an ability to prevent any adversity from turning into negative internal dialogue, O’Shea found the kind of consistent success she’d always sought. She won gold and silver medals in races against the top international sliders and finished fourth for the entire season in the World Cup.

She said she stays focused on each turn, without worrying about the clock, what someone said or anything else that might slow her down. It all started with a positive attitude. That kind of attitude doesn’t come from barking or from screaming about calls from officials. It comes from working together and staying focused.

So, did we win? Does it matter?

Recent headlines, displayed prominently on news sites around the world, were alarming, such as: “150,000 Adélie penguins killed by iceberg.” The stories suggested our flightless black-and-white friends were cut off by a Rhode Island-sized iceberg from their food supply. It was too late to save the “Happy Feet” characters. But the reality was anything but black and white.

“These headlines, while eye-popping, are not necessarily true,” said Heather Lynch, an assistant professor in the Stony Brook University Department of Ecology and Evolution. The stories came from a recent study, published in Antarctic Science. Lynch did not participate in the study, but is involved in monitoring penguin populations from satellites. “This idea that [these] penguins have perished doesn’t reflect the biology in hand,” she said. It will take “many years” before scientists are able to sort out the effect of this iceberg on penguin survivorship.

That’s because penguins can take a year or two off from breeding during unfavorable environmental conditions, which means that penguins displaced from breeding by an iceberg aren’t likely dead.

The scientists in the original study were linking the change in the breeding penguin population at Cape Denison — the site of a research station for famous Australian geologist and explorer Douglas Mawson about a century earlier — with the number of nesting pairs recorded after the arrival of iceberg B09B in 2010.

“There was some concern that there were dead chicks or frozen eggs at the site,” Lynch said. “We need to be cautious about interpreting that as evidence of some kind of catastrophic mortality event. There’s extremely high chick mortality rate under normal circumstances. That is the cycle of life.”

Reports about penguins losing habitat, breeding grounds or access to food typically lead to the kind of questions that were central to the “Happy Feet” story: What role do humans have in the process and what action, if any, is necessary to save the birds?

Kerry-Jayne Wilson, the lead author on the study and the chairperson of the West Coast Penguin Trust in New Zealand, offered some perspective.

“We did not suggest adult penguins had died,” she said in response to an email request for comment. “Some media outlet started” this rumor.

She said she believes most of the missing penguins are probably “out at sea, having assessed conditions as unsuitable for breeding.”

The authors sent out a clarifying press release in response to the stories: “It is unlikely many, if any, adult penguins have died as a result of this stranding event. This iceberg stranding event only affects Adélie penguins in the Commonwealth Bay area; the millions of Adélie penguins breeding around the rest of Antarctica are not affected.”

So, where did the story go wrong? For starters, a press release announcing the study used the headline: “Giant iceberg decimates Adélie penguin colonies.” The statement suggests that breeding has declined in the area, without indicating that 150,000 of Mr. Popper’s pals perished.

I turned to a representative at SBU’s Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which teaches scientists to make their research accessible to the public, to see if there are any lessons from this communication misfire.

Elizabeth Bass, director emerita of the center, suggested scientists needed to know their audience when sharing their research. “Be crystal clear about your findings,” she advised. In all the courses the center teaches, the message is to stress characterizing the work in a way that’s “not going to be misunderstood.”

Lynch is concerned that these type of stories, taken out of context, make it more difficult to share well-grounded science from future studies with policymakers.

“At some point, people stop listening and that’s what concerns me,” she said. “Real science whispers, it doesn’t shout.”

About 61 years after he died, Albert Einstein is still right. The legendary theoretical physicist predicted a century ago that a space time continuum would contain gravitational waves.

This past September, a team of more than 1,000 scientists heard a sound from a billion light-years away that was generated by two black holes colliding. The scientists were working at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, known as LIGO. The announcement of the results, made on Feb. 11, was greeted with considerable excitement by physicists, mathematicians and scientists, with one of them saying that astronomers have long had eyes but this breakthrough gives them ears, too.

I asked Marilena LoVerde and Patrick Meade, Stony Brook University assistant professors at the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, for their take on the big announcement.

DD: How does the significance of any potential finding of gravitational waves compare to that for the Higgs boson particle? Some people have suggested that it’s on the scale, if not larger, than the Higgs boson particle.

PM: I would certainly say it’s a very big discovery. However, unlike the Higgs, gravitational waves were on a much stronger footing that they should exist. The Higgs told us something new about how the universe worked, and it didn’t have to be true — there were many other options. However, gravitational waves are exciting because it’s a validation of the theory we already use, general relativity, and it may provide a new way to search for physics we haven’t discovered yet.

ML: This is absolutely on the scale of the Higgs boson. Similar to the Higgs boson, gravitational waves were predicted and expected to exist — and in fact indirectly measured through the spin down of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar — but the direct detection of gravitational waves is an absolute triumph of experimental physics and opens an exciting new era of gravitational wave astronomy.

DD: What has the email traffic about this announcement been during the last week? Have you received emails from scientists, colleagues, collaborators and friends who all want to know what this would mean and what you make of it?

ML: Rumors have been going around for months, but the frequency of people emailing/discussing such rumors and adding pieces of evidence suggesting they were true, and the details of the rumors have all increased significantly in the past few weeks.

PM: Since this isn’t directly my field I wasn’t as involved as with some other rumors, but rumors through Twitter, blogs and conversations with colleagues at other places who heard things were all happening over about the last month.

DD: Is there a chance that whatever was detected was an artifact?

ML: The signal looks very compelling. Of course I haven’t had much time to study the details of the statistical methods used to extract the signal and I’m looking forward to doing that.

PM: I’d say it’s extremely unlikely to be an artifact or statistical anomaly, because the same signal was seen in two separate detectors — one in Washington [state] and one in Louisiana.

DD: Will the existence and detection of gravitational waves open up the sky to enable us to “see” much more than we can now in terms of matter and the universe? Will they help us see and understand dark matter and dark energy?

PM: Gravitational waves definitely open up a whole new way to see the universe. However they won’t directly give us any information on dark matter or dark energy in the foreseeable future. To make gravitational waves that are observable with our technology you need very violent gravitational events, like these two black holes merging that LIGO saw. However, by developing new detectors with better sensitivity we may be able to look back and see other violent events in the history of the universe.

Clinton, Bush, “Star Wars,” McDonald’s, Target. It sounds like the setup for a joke, except that the joke seems to be on us.

Somehow, a nation that prides itself on rugged individualism has wound up with a case of “the more of the same, please.” It’s like we’ve all been chewing the same gum for a long time. As soon as we’re not sure what to do with it in our mouths, we pop in another piece, which tastes OK for a while but then runs out of flavor.

Hey, look, I get it. The unfamiliar could be worse and confusing. We have, politically and culturally, become a country that is comfortable with the devils we know.

Drive through almost any town on the East Coast and you might feel as if you are taking a short trip, over and over, through a movie set with the same props, signs and stores on every corner. What happened to mom and pop stores? Is there such a thing as local flavor anymore? Do we even want to try local flavor, lest we don’t like it or, worse, our digestion doesn’t appreciate an unfamiliar combination of foods? We are a society of specific tastes, avoiding gluten, peanuts, dairy, animal protein and a host of others.

What that’s created is a collection of picky eaters and picky consumers who want things their way from specific restaurants and stores. That has become a recipe for the same stores to open in towns throughout the country.

We have become a society in which franchises reduce the amount of thinking we have to do, trimming the highs and lows of unique experiences.

We don’t have to think about any of our consumer choices, because we can go to the same stores with the same layout everywhere. In fact, many of these stores have saved money on staff, allowing us to self-checkout, so we don’t even have to converse with people about their lives and towns anymore. We can continue to interact with our friends and family on the phone, removing ourselves from our current setting. When we’re done shopping, we don’t have to worry about the type of hotel we sleep in at night because we can stay in the same place everywhere. “Yes, as my profile demonstrates, I like room 518.”

Here we are, 24 years after Bill Clinton took office and Hillary is hoping to move back into the White House as Clinton II. Of course, she’s not Bill and she has her own ideas for the country. But it feels as if we’ve been here before, as if we are in another “Star Wars” between the Clintons and the vast right-wing conspiracy she decried all those years ago.

Speaking of “Star Wars,” it’s a relief that the current film isn’t as bad as the forgettable three prequels. And yet the plot devices and decisions seem to have come from the recycling bin, albeit with a humble woman from a desert planet who has developed the ability to use the force.

Maybe we’ve had enough of the same. Maybe the country has decided to take Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump more seriously because we don’t want to be on automatic pilot anymore. Then again, Sanders sounds like the George Steinbrenner character from “Seinfeld” and Trump sounds like, well, himself from TV.

Where will we be a year from now? Well, we will probably have another “Star Wars” film; we will have a new president, or maybe a different iteration of something familiar; and we will be somewhere in America, surrounded by familiar stores and choices.

Then again, maybe, just maybe, we will make our own decisions and find our own way, without big box retailers and familiar characters and story lines passing in a blur past the windows of our minds.