Making Science Public: A blog on science, language and culture
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Cars and cancer: Metaphorical musings on the occasion of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Metaphors are weird. They are crucial for the expansion of human knowledge. However, they don’t really impart knowledge. They only tell a story. And that story can only be understood by people who already have some knowledge. When I say ‘life is a journey’, I expect people to understand that metaphor, as people generally know…
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How has Science Communication Research Developed? Results from a Citation Analysis
This is a guest post by Mike S. Schäfer (University of Zürich) & Adrian Rauchfleisch (National Taiwan University). The article summarised in this post first appeared in the Journal of Science Communication. This post contributes to the ‘science communication‘ strand of this blog. It can be read together with an older (2012) post which reports on how Rick Borchelt…
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Anticipating public reactions to emerging sciences and technologies: Nano, synbio and AI
In around 2003 I woke up to nanotechnology because I was watching my son play a computer game that involved ‘nano-armour’. That pricked my curiosity. Later I came across a quote from Howard Lovy, then editor of Small Times: “Nanotechnology, independent of its development as a science, is spreading as a cultural idea and icon.…
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Epigenetics: Grappling with definitions
Definitions of epigenetics are notoriously slippery. This does not seem to hamper basic research. But it might hamper public understanding. The words ‘epigenetics’ and ‘epigenetic’ have undergone quite substantial changes in meaning over time, leading up to a meaning which is now popular but open to misinterpretation. This history and increasing confusion has been charted,…
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Phage and fiction
We have known about bacteriophages for over a century. I myself became vaguely aware of them around 2004 when I started to be interested in bacteria and antimicrobial resistance and later on when my mother had Clostridium difficile, a health-care associated infection related to antibiotic use. However, I never actually looked more closely at phages until Carmen…
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Groundhog day in the hothouse
On 6 August Will Steffen and others published a paper entitled “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene”. The paper explores “the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a…
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Genome editing in the news: Trying to keep up
Gene/genome editing has been much in the news recently and it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay on top of new developments. The last two weeks alone have seen major announcements, which I shall briefly list in this blog post. This leads me to a question that has been troubling me: How does one do…
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Science and trust: Some reflections on the launch of the International Science Council
The Ecologist published an article on 19th July about the launch of a new International Science Council, ISC, entitled “Paris launches the International Science Council with aims to rebuild trust in science”. ISC is a merger of the “International Social Science Council (ISSC), formed in 1952 to promote the social sciences, including the economic and…
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Cells and coincidences: Some holiday musings
We are on holiday and I was reading the delightful book by Tim Birkhead, The Wonderful Mr Willughby: The first True Ornithologist. I had bought it because Francis Willughby had connections to Wollaton Hall, a Hall I see almost everyday when I walk to work at the University of Nottingham, where Willughby’s papers are kept.…
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Are we all alarmists now?
Over the years I have written many posts about extreme weather events on the one hand and quite a few on so-called alarmism on the other. This was in the context of working on issues related to climate change communication. Some years ago, when writing an article on communicating climate change, I included a sentence…
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