Making Science Public: A blog on science, language and culture
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Science communication and ‘vulgarisation scientifique’: Do words matter?
A Spanish colleague and friend recently sent me a Portuguese caricature about ‘science communication’ with the following title: “Como a maioria do jornais divulga ciência” (How the majority of newspapers disseminate science). I’ll only translate the first two panels, as the third one is a bit coarse: Scientist: We have destroyed 10% of cancerous cells…
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Hottest year on record
Media reporting on climate change has heated up a little bit over the last ten days or so, after an announcement by NASA and NOAA which read like this: “NASA, NOAA Find 2014 Warmest Year in Modern Record”. This was taken up by the media and, between 15 January and 25 January 2015, the phrases…
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Nanoscience, images and technologies of visualisation: A space odyssey
This blog post is a story about an intellectual and collaborative adventure that should be all too familiar to academics. However, opportunities for such adventures may sadly be disappearing in an era of impact driven research. It is a story of how enthusiasm, curiosity, serendipity and collaboration can lead to unexpected and joyous outcomes. At…
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Citizen science
I recently wrote a post about ‘scientific citizenship’. Today I want to home in on a related concept: ‘citizen science’. First I’ll show you how the Oxford English Dictionary has defined the phrase; then I’ll examine how the concept was used in the news and who employed the concept first; and finally I’ll briefly reflect…
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Synthetic biology markets: Opportunities and obstacles
As some people know from my previous posts on synthetic biology, I am interested in tracing how synthetic biology is made public in the news media and whether or how it is becoming a matter of public debate. “Synthetic biology is an emerging area of research and is broadly described as the design and construction…
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Making science public: A compilation of blog posts – 2014
It is time again for my end of year blog of blog posts. Unbelievably, this is already the third time I am doing this. How time flies! Strange — so far we haven’t had a post about time! This is quite surprising, as otherwise we have had posts about more or less everything under the…
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Scientific citizenship
I recently read an excellent thesis on scientific citizenship by soon to be Dr Beverley Gibbs (whom you all know from her posts on this blog!). She uncovered various as yet under-explored aspects of scientific citizenship, focusing in particular on membership, rights & responsibilities and participation (and I hope she’ll write a blog post about…
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Making synthetic biology public: The case of XNAs and XNAzymes
On 1 December a group of scientists at the University of Cambridge led by Dr Philipp Holliger published an article in the journal Nature in which they presented new findings within the field of synthetic biology. Both the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Medical Research Council (MRC), who funded the research,…
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Will a spoonful of ‘awareness’ help the medicine go down?
Lord Robert Winston, well-known scientist and professor of fertility studies, would like the public to be made aware that experiments on animals are involved in the development of all medicines, vaccines, and drugs for human use. To this end, he introduced the Medicinal Labelling Bill in October 2013 which, if passed, would make it mandatory…
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RRI and impact: An ‘impossiblist’ agenda for research?
Richard Jones has written a long, profound and thought-provoking blog post on (ir)responsible innovation (stagnation). I read his post alongside a recent post on the social impact of research, its challenges and opportunities. This made me think that we are witnessing a confluence of agendas which are generally only looked at separately but that should…
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