Category: science communication
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Metaphors in AI and genomics: Going beyond blueprints and parrots
I have been writing about metaphors in genetics and genomics since 2003 and about metaphors in AI/GenAI/LLMs since 2023. Recently, I started to wonder whether there are any similarities and differences in the nature and use of metaphors between the two fields and whether this has any possible impact on science communication. As usual, I…
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Peptides, wellness and woo: A linguistic analysis
My recent blog posts have mainly dealt with topics focusing on AI and metaphors; but for a while now I wanted to get back to writing something about biology, a field which has fascinated me for a long time. Then I saw an article in The Guardian on an injectable ‘peptide craze’ sweeping the US,…
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Moltbook: Snapshots of a metaphorical firework
(Now also available as podcast!!) In late January 2026, a social network appeared where only AIs could post and within days, the internet had responded with an explosion of parodies, panic, and metaphors that revealed as much about us as about the bots. In this post I have taken a few snapshots of this mimetic…
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Metaphors for AI: Networks, holes and loops
I have been observing metaphors for generative AI for some time. This does not mean that I understand what’s going on in AI, but they provide me with an illusion of knowledge. They throw a net or mesh of metaphors over the topic that provides something of an epistemological safety net. But sometimes that net…
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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…
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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…
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From symbolist poets to science communication: Exploring an invisible thread in my academic life
Years and years ago, I had an Academia profile in which I mentioned that when I began studying French literature in the mid-1970s I fell in love with Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I no longer have access to Academia, but somebody must have seen that sentence and recently sent me an email asking how I got…
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‘Science in Action’ is ending. Here is why that matters
The year is coming to an end and with it a radio programme that was a staple of science communication around the world: the BBC World Service’s ‘Science in Action’. This is rather symbolic, as science itself is going out of action in some parts of the world, especially the United States where science funding…
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The dark genome: A gothic tale with a happy ending
On 29 September Roger Highfield published an article for the Francis Crick Institute entitled “A message from the dark genome: The genetic ghosts that haunt and help us” (based on a chat with George Kassiotis and Samra Turajlic). This set my metaphor-whiskers twitching, as the article overflows with metaphors circling around the central one of…
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Metaphor, alchemy and lessons from the 17th century
Philip Ball has just published a magnificent book on the history of alchemy: Alchemy: An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments, and the Birth of Modern Science. This made me think about metaphor, of course, given how central metaphorical language was to alchemical practice. In a sense, metaphor is alchemy, metaphorically speaking, as it transmutes two…
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