This year has been quite a year! First, I had to move the blog to a new independent home after the University of Nottingham shut down their blogging platform (I wrote two posts about this, one reflecting on the past and one on the future). Second, there was a lot to blog about, from wildfires in California in January to ‘enshittification’ in October, resulting in 43 posts. And third, my blogs have become somewhat more urgent in tone.
The themes I blogged about reflect the anxieties of our time: AI’s rapid advance and what it means for society, knowledge and meaning; climate breakdown and extreme weather and our dwindling ability to communicate about this; the transformation of science communication in a post-truth environment; and throughout it all, the power of metaphor to reveal and, in a way, diagnose how we are thinking about these challenges and the changes in science and politics.
AI, Large Language Models and metaphor
This has been my largest category by far, reflecting how AI has become impossible to ignore in 2025. The year began with me exploring how AI is metaphorically described as learning the language of proteins, cells, DNA, atoms – basically everything. Are these claims just hyperbole, or are we genuinely on the verge of AI speaking the language of life, the universe and everything? Philip Ball helpfully linked these questions to John Searle’s Chinese room argument, essentially saying ‘no’. (John Searle died at the end of this year, which was sad for me, as his work and that of his teacher J. L. Austin, started me thinking about language as action back in the 1980s)
On a visit to Cambridge, I had a rather surreal experience chatting with a cockroach (well, through AI) at Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology, which led me to reflect on AI as a museum curation tool. Then, in what became quite an extended meditation, I explored AI through the lens of food metaphors. AI ‘eats’ data, ‘drinks’ water, has an ‘insatiable appetite’, and risks ‘devouring’ us all, and we talk about ‘feeding the machine’. These culinary metaphors reveal our anxieties about AI’s voracious consumption of resources and knowledge.
Later in the year I wrote about ‘vibes’ and how this New Age concept has been colonised by algorithms. I explored the historical parallels between AI winters and AI bubbles, a topic still very much in the news. I also grappled with the serious challenge of public engagement with AI, realizing that AI researchers operate in a world of vector mathematics and high-dimensional spaces that is genuinely difficult for outsiders to understand.
While I was writing this end-of-year post an article popped up in my Bluesky timeline which looked interesting. The first line read “In sequence modeling, the parametric memory of atomic facts has been predominantly abstracted as a brute-force lookup of co-occurrences between entities.” This is probably fascinating stuff, but… how can we have meaningful conversations about AI alignment and other topics when the very language used in LLM construction is so alien to lay people? Even ‘vibe coding’ only means something to those who do it.
By the end of the year, I became fascinated by another trendy word, namely ‘enshittification‘, Cory Doctorow’s perfect word for our times, describing the gradual deterioration of online platforms and services. The word has achieved escape velocity, spreading from tech platforms to describe the degradation of everything from democracy to knowledge itself. I traced all lexical variations of the word. The one I most like is the adjective ‘enshittogenic’, as in ‘enshittogenic environment’.
Throughout these posts runs a concern about whether AI represents genuine understanding or merely sophisticated pattern-matching, and what it means for human knowledge and creativity when machines become intermediaries in our relationship with information.
At the very end of 2025 I wrote a trilogy of blog posts about metaphors for AI and academic studies analysing metaphors for AI, calling for an AI metaphor observatory where people would collect and dissect metaphors that people use to make sense of AI and to keep an eye on how AI systems affect the way we interact with them, how much we trust them, and also the different ways we regulate them.
Climate change and extreme weather communication
Climate change continued to make itself felt through devastating extreme weather events from the beginning of this year to its culmination in Hurricane Melissa which devasted parts of Jamaica, and I found myself writing extensively about wildfires – particularly the catastrophic Southern California fires in January 2025, but also the much smaller and quickly forgotten summer wildfires here in the UK. I discovered we’re living in what fire historian Stephen Pyne calls the ‘Pyrocene’ – an age defined by catastrophic fires.
But what really fascinated me were the metaphors emerging to explain these events. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist and exemplary communicator, introduced me to ‘hydroclimate whiplash’ – those dramatic swings between extreme wet and dry conditions. He explained it through the metaphor of an ‘expanding atmospheric sponge’ that both absorbs and releases water at unprecedented scales, growing by 7% with each degree of warming. There’s also atmospheric ‘thirstiness’, ‘blow-dryer winds’, and perhaps most evocatively, ‘a blizzard of a billion embers’ to describe how fires spread.
I also explored how floods and fires function as reciprocal metaphors in crisis response, examined ‘heat domes’, ‘carbon bombs’, and ‘compound weather’, and wrote about geoengineering metaphors and how they’ve evolved from 2009 to 2025. One troubling post examined how wildfires have become entangled with ‘wild liars’ – the explosion of misinformation and conspiracy theories that now accompany every disaster, making it harder to respond effectively.
In one post I explored a whole cluster of metaphors through time (between 2009 and 2025) in the context of geoengineering, a technological ‘solution’ to climate change that poses more problems than it ‘solves’, but that boasts a host of eye-catching metaphors, framing the planet as a machine that can be mended, a body that can be protected, or a patient that can be healed.
Running through all these posts is a dual concern: the physical disintegration of stable climate patterns and the discursive disintegration of our ability to talk sensibly about it. As I wrote in one post, we’re experiencing a dual disintegration of climate change and climate discourse.
Pandemics, disease and health communication
At the start of 2025, someone tapped me on the shoulder in the Lidl queue and asked: “Do you think there will be another pandemic?” They meant bird flu in humans. That surreal conversation prompted me to reflect on how we’ve lived through or on the verge of ‘another pandemic‘ for most of our lives – from HIV/AIDS through SARS, swine flu, Ebola, Zika, Covid-19, Mpox, and now the spectre of H5N1 jumping from birds to cows to humans.
What struck me most was how collective memory seems to be one of collective forgetting. Despite living through so many pandemics, we remain unprepared, we don’t learn lessons’: and learning itself is increasingly seen as somehow ‘woke’. I looked at how newspapers have used the phrase “another pandemic” over time and found interesting patterns of remembering and forgetting.
I also revisited Covid metaphors five years on, reflecting on an event at UCL with Jonathan Van Tam about communicating in crisis. War metaphors dominated early pandemic discourse, but I argued then (and still believe) that alternative metaphors – especially ecological ones emphasizing empathy, interdependence, and care – might have served us better. This matters now more than ever as we face potential new pandemics alongside political and scientific crises.
A post about Mpox explored lived experience, stigma and coping, while a historical piece examined how fin de siècle youth magazines constructed gendered responses to illness – showing how disease communication has always been shaped by cultural assumptions.
Synthetic biology and biotechnology
Only a few posts fell into this category this year. Christian Gude’s guest post on synthetic biology in the era of AI deserves special mention. He argued that the synthetic biology industry’s crisis of trust stems from embracing reductive metaphors – especially “DNA is the programming language of life, and we’ve cracked the code.” This metaphor, sold to Silicon Valley tech bros, ignored the staggering complexity of biological systems and led to spectacular failures like Ginkgo and Zymergen.
Christian advocated for ‘biophilia’ – love of the living and complex – over mechanistic domination, arguing that AI should be seen as an artisan’s tool rather than a replacement for human intuition about biological systems.
My post on synthesising genomes explored how future promises are articulated through past metaphors, while the piece on ‘the dark genome’ told a Gothic tale with a surprisingly happy ending – how what was once dismissed as ‘junk DNA’ turns out to be far more interesting than we thought.
Metaphor, culture and politics
This theme captures posts where metaphor does political work in times of crisis. The ‘steel porcupine’ metaphor emerged during discussions of European defence, while ‘planes, ships and metaphors’ examined how we use vehicles to think about political direction and crisis navigation. This illustrated a point I made more explicitly in my post on ‘situational metaphors, satire and sense-making’ – how metaphors arise spontaneously in specific situations to help people make sense of chaotic events.
As a little counterpoint in this world of destructive metaphors, my post ‘when the world falls apart: enjoy a metaphor‘ looked at how metaphor provides comfort and comprehension when things seem to be disintegrating.
My piece on ‘science and politics: some whimsical thoughts’, inspired by reading a Dorothy L. Sayer’s novel on the one hand, and waiting for news about Elon Musk’s Royal Society Fellowship on the other, was somewhat lighter in tone but touched on serious questions about how science, truth and politics intersect, and how we talk about that intersection. At the time of writing Musk is still a fellow of the Royal Society, despite the fact that his actions contravene the society’s norms and Code of Conduct.
These posts remind us that metaphor is not just decorative language – it is a tool for navigating political reality, making sense of crises, and sometimes very useful for satirising absurdity when direct criticism fails.
Science communication and public engagement
Perhaps the most sobering post in this category was ‘From dissemination to firefighting: the new reality of science communication?‘ I observed three snapshots: normal science communication happening on the ground in Germany; an academic paper that seemed stuck in 1990s debates about ‘public understanding’ vs ‘public engagement’; and US government reports riddled with misinformation about vaccines and climate science.
This led me to ask: is science communication shifting from dissemination and engagement to scrutiny and firefighting, or to put it more bluntly, debunking bullshit? When official government sources spread misinformation, science communicators must spend their time debunking rather than explaining. This represents a fundamental transformation in what science communication means and does.
In another post I explored space hype and the ethics of science communication. I also returned to the issue of communicating AI and issues around ethics/ELSI and propose that participation and community engagement with AI should include both creators and users of AI and must find a way of bridging a linguistic gap that looms large but seems to be invisible to many advocating responsible AI and AI engagement.
At the end of 2025 the BBC axed the radio programme ‘Science in Action’ and I wrote a post showing how shortsighted that was and what impact that would have on science communication and public understanding of science.
Metaphor, metonymy and methods
These posts delved into the theoretical underpinnings of metaphor as a scholarly tool. My piece on ‘metaphor, alchemy and lessons from the 17th century’ explored historical parallels in how we think about transformation and change in science, from chemistry to genomics.
One post also dealt with metaphor’s sister or cousin or… anyway: metonymy. I tell three stories all related to a train journey to Oxford: about coffee as metonymy; life with my husband and son as metonymy; and the White House as the vanishing of a metonymy. Along the way readers also learn a bit about metonymy.
Another highlight was undoubtedly my husband David’s reminiscence about meeting Erving Goffman in a taxi in Paris in 1979. Goffman, one of sociology’s giants, used metaphor as his primary tool of analysis – the stage metaphor, the dramaturgical approach. David’s story captured Goffman’s wit, his naturalistic approach (comparing microsociology to naturalists sketching plants), and his refusal to engage in “inter-galactic paradigm-mongering.”
I also explored ‘understanding computational hermeneutics‘ – how we make meaning between past and present through computational methods. This new method, inspired by a very old one, raised questions about how AI might change our relationship with historical interpretation.
History of science and science in culture
These posts took me into more historical and cultural territory. The George Sand and Jules Verne post explored how mineralogy became public in 19th-century literature – a reminder that science popularisation has deep roots. Some of them were also explored in a guest post by Richard Fallon announcing his new book that brings literary studies and history of science into conversation to help understand how the boundaries of legitimate science were navigated in a period of upheavals in geology, palaeontology, and palaeoanthropology (1860-1935).
‘The not-de-extinct dire wolf’ examined the myths and magic surrounding this iconic creature used as a publicity stunt in a new de-extinction proposal, while ‘beauty and the snail‘ was a more contemplative piece about aesthetics and nature.
‘Let there be light’ explored the cultural and scientific meanings of illumination, starting with a visit to Derby and seeing Joseph Wright’s famous picture of the orrery and taking that as a starting point to republish an old essay on Jules Verne’s illustration and the metaphor of light.
Prompted by a post by Matthew Cobb regarding his biography on Francis Crick, I penned a post in which I told the story of how Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia was “the most important book” young Francis ever read. It led me to reflect on my father’s post-war collection of Lux Lesebogen, my husband’s childhood encounter with ‘Understanding Science’, and my own engagement with the French popular science Magasin Pittoresque. Looking back on these engines of wonder and curiosity, I wondered what happens to curiosity and wonder in an age of instant information, misinformation and banned books?
In a rather quirky post on a ‘Merlin Manuscript Mystery’, I made the point that the meaning of life and our very survival depend on art and science all the way down. If we cut funding to one or the other or both, our life expectancy will go down and we will lose sight of the meaning of life.
Reflections on my academic life
In my last post of the year I tried to pull out and examine an invisible tread that runs through my rather chaotic academic life from symbolist poets to science communication, a thread spun by chance encounters and serendipity.
We are living in what one might call interesting times – and mostly not in a good way. But that makes the work of thinking carefully about how we talk about science, technology, and society more important than ever. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again in 2026!
Acknowledgement: I had some initial help from Claude 3.5 Sonnet in organising the themes and drafting initial category summaries.
Image: Photo taken from top of bus in Nottingham through a rain-spattered window looking out on street lights, car lights and Xmas lights – giving the impression of a painting by Van Gogh
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