Making Science Public: A blog on science, language and culture
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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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Public engagement with AI: Some obstacles and paradoxes
I recently listened to a webinar by social scientists who had studied what AI researchers say about public reception of AI. The most important words I heard were ‘evidence’ (about public attitudes to and inclusion in AI) and ‘voices’ (of communities underrepresented in or negatively impacted by AI). The main argument was, I think, that…
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Geoengineering and metaphors, 2009 to 2025: Continuity and change
Since around 2006, I have been interested in speculations about geoengineering, that is, attempts to deal with climate change by directly intervening in the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, or land. Such interventions include pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or dampening solar radiation. In the UK there have been three inflection points in reflections about such…
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Wildfires in the UK: How do we talk about them?
On 1 May 2025, a member of the UK Meteorological Office noted on Bluesky that: “With the temperature at Kew Gardens reaching 28.0°C and still climbing, it is now officially the warmest start to May on record for the UK.” At the same time, the Metro newspaper reported that “UK records hottest start to May…
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Carbon bombs: On climate change and lexical change
Have you heard about car bombs? Surely, you have. Have you heard about ‘carbon bombs’. Probably not. I hadn’t, until my husband shoved The Guardian under my nose this morning and pointed to a headline saying: “UK banks put £75bn into firms building climate-wrecking ‘carbon bombs’, study finds”. He did that because he knew that…
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Space, hype and science communication
I recently wrote a post with Kate Roach about some hyped-up claims regarding de-extinct dire wolves. In the middle of writing about this, another claim came along, and, again, I thought “hmmm, is that really true or is it hype?”. This time it was not about de-extinct life but about extraterrestrial life. At the same…
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The (not) de-extinct dire wolf: Metaphors, myths and magic
This post is a collaboration between Brigitte Nerlich and Kate Roach, both retired social scientists with interests in science, culture and society. *** I (Brigitte) first heard about the dire wolf in a post by the science writer Carl Zimmer linking to an article he had written for the New York Times. I had never…
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Science, stories and the secrets of survival
I recently read a post on Bluesky by Adam Roberts, a British science fiction and fantasy novelist that said: “MODERN MAGIC MAKES MANIFEST MERLIN’S MEDIEVAL MYSTERIES”. I was instantly hooked and found out that this is a nicely alliterative rendition of the original title of a press release announcing that “Fragments of a rare Merlin…
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