Category: biology

  • Metaphorical genres in science communication: From gothic discovery to domestic intervention

    Metaphorical genres in science communication: From gothic discovery to domestic intervention

    I was idly scrolling Bluesky for some news that was not depressing when I chanced upon an article by Roger Highfield dealing with a recent advance in gene editing. It reminded me of two previous posts I had written, one back in 2016 on “Precision metaphors in a messy biological world” and another in which…

  • Making Science Public 2025: End-of-year round-up of blog posts

    Making Science Public 2025: End-of-year round-up of blog posts

    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…

  • Beauty and the snail

    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…