Year: 2025
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Beauty and the snail
Since around 2016, the year I retired, I have followed the blossoming career of another University of Nottingham academic, Angus Davison, a professor of evolutionary genetics and expert on snails and a science communicator. He became famous in 2016 when he began to write and broadcast about ‘Jeremy the lonely lefty snail’, a snail with…
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Can Better Words Lead to Better Climate Action?
This is a cross-posting of the beginning of an article by Becca Warner for ATMOS magazine (thanks for the permission!). As this article contains some extracts from her interview with me, I thought it might make a good addition to the Making Science Public blog. To read Becca Warner’s article, please use this link! Article…
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Vibes: From new age to new algorithms
The other day I was talking with a friend and moaning about writer’s block. My friend said: “You are into words and metaphors and stuff. What’s one small language puzzle that’s been nagging at you lately?” I blurted out: ‘vibes’. My friend replied: “Write about that then”. Lots of people have written about that word…
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The Making Science Public blog: An introduction
I have now said farewell several times to my old university blogging platform, but I haven’t really started building up a new readership here. Newbies to the blog might wonder what the old Making Science Public blog was all about; what topics it covered before venturing to press the subscribe button….. As a gentle introduction…
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Making Science Public in a chaotic world
As you know, I am now gradually moving from my old ‘Making Science Public’ blog home at the University of Nottingham to my new personal blog home here. This wasn’t easy and lots of people supported me directly or indirectly in this move (by listening to my whining). You know who you are, and I…
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Hello World!
Hello, welcome to my new Making Science Public Blog. I started blogging on the old Making Science Public blog maintained by the University of Nottingham in 2012. We have transferred all the hundreds of posts that I and colleagues have written since then to this new WordPress blog, as the University will close down its…
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Heat dome: Atmosphere, architecture and agency
The phrase ‘heat dome’ has been around since the 1960s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But only recently has it gained currency as one of the many new (extreme) weather words signalling climate change. I first came across it in 2020 when I read reports on a horrible heat wave in India. At that…
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Unmuting the message
A few weeks ago Shanshan Zhang, Senior Scientific Editor at One Earth, Cell Press, asked me to write something about climate change communication, a topic I have been grappling with for a long time. At first I hesitated, but she really encouraged me and I am glad I wrote something. My little piece became part…
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Synthesising genomes: Future promises, past metaphors
Yesterday morning I was packing for a holiday and briefly listened to the Today programme on Radio 4, just at the time that Pallab Ghosh was talking about a new initiative funded by the Wellcome Trust, namely a new Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project. I didn’t really have time to listen or read about it…
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‘The most important book I ever read’: Francis Crick and children’s encyclopaedias
Matthew Cobb has written a biography of Francis Crick (1916-2004), one of molecular biology’s foremost scholars. It will come out in November. While writing the book, he posted, as he does with every book he writes, little snippets of information on Bluesky along the way – letters, photos, passages of notes he couldn’t quite decipher,…
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