Fifty milliliters of water at 60 oC is added to 75 mL of water at 30 oC in a coffee cup calorimeter. The resulting mixture was observed to have a temperature of 40 oC. What is the calorimeter constant?

Catalyst has found usage in non-scientific terms as an almost metaphorical word for something provokes or speeds up action or change. The word's applicability to many topics made it easy for it to find its way out of the scientific lexicon and into other domains, in this case political. 

Its meaning is roughly the same, in that a catalyst in this context is something that facilitated or sped up the process of glasnost.

One distinct meaning that I notice is that "catalyst" in more casual or non-scientific speech is that it is often used as a creator of action all its own, an actor in itself, rather than a facilitating agent to a reaction, as its scientific definition states.