Year: 2017
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The language and politics of hope
Yesterday, feeling rather under the weather, I whiled away my time as a sniffling wreck by sitting on twitter and watching the world tweet by. I also diverted myself by watching the James Comey testimony in the US. Then I watched the exit polls for the General Election in the UK. Then I fell asleep and woke up to…
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Juno, Jupiter and the art of citizen science
With political and moral life here on earth being in utter turmoil, images of/from Jupiter beamed down to our little planet by the Juno space probe have recently kept me sane (as far as that’s possible). They brought with them glimpses of beauty and moments of wistfulness. A year or so ago, I wrote a blog post…
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SBRC symposium: Synbio, metaphors and responsibility
On Monday this week (22 May, 2017) our Synthetic Biology Research Centre symposium on metaphors, synthetic biology and responsibility took place at the East Midlands Conference Centre at the University of Nottingham. The weather was marvellous and showed off University Park in all is spring glory. We started with a pre-conference dinner which, in a way,…
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Science, art and pints
For the first time in my life I participated in ‘Pint of Science’ this year. This festival of science engagement takes place on three days in May in pubs all around the globe, including 26 cities in the UK, such as Nottingham. Over a drink, scientists present and discuss their latest research and findings and…
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Making microbes public: A workshop report
This is a post by Carmen McLeod who participated in a workshop held at the University of Oxford on 3/4 May 2017 entitled Making Microbes Public. She wrote the original post for the blog of the Interdisciplinary Microbiome Project and it has been reposted here with permission. Carmen is a social anthropologist currently based in the Nottingham…
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The microbiome goes viral
In this post, I want to return to a topic that started to fascinate me in 2007, namely the microbiome. In 2009 I published an article (with Iina Hellsten) about the metaphors used to make the microbiome public, but then didn’t do any further research on the topic, apart from writing a blog post stimulated by Jon…
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Our microbiome: Separating hype from health
This is a blog post by Nicholas Staropoli, originally posted at the Epigenetics Literacy Project on April 18, 2017. It’s reposted here with permission. The post deals with the issue of hype, which we have discussed a lot on this blog; in this post the focus is on the microbiome. *** The details of science — how to…
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Cassini: Space probes, history and women
I have just read a lovely article by Rebekah Higgitt on the various Cassinis that worked in France as astronomers. One of them was Giovanni Domenico (or Jean Dominique) Cassini (8 June 1625 – 14 September 1712), the first director of the observatory founded by Louis XIV, and discoverer, amongst other things, of four satellites of the planet…
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Public trust in science: Myths and realities
The March for Science has come and gone. There was no fuss; but there was wit and fun; and solidarity and conviviality. The march did what it set out to do: it got people talking about science and politics. During the march, some tweets jumped out at me. They focused on the thorny issue of…
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Biosocial: A brief conceptual history
I have recently come across the word ‘biosocial’ in various social science debates about epigenetics and other advances in the life- and bio-sciences. A chapter in a book on ‘social epigenetics’ (and the ‘biosocial’) says for example: “Epigenetics has considerable potential to transform social science by embedding mutually regulative reciprocal connections between biological and social…
Making Science Public 