Making Science Public: A blog on science, language and culture
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Science and politics: Some whimsical thoughts
On Monday morning I had a lot of time. I was in hospital getting an infusion of Vedolizumab. With observation etc. that takes about three hours. I scrolled on my phone and read some posts on Bluesky, while, at the same time, reading an old novel on my Kindle – a Lord Peter Wimsey novel.…
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Mpox 2022: Lived experience, stigma and coping
Mpox is a disease that is caused by infection with a virus called MPXV. There are two major genetic groups (clades) of MPXV, clade I (formerly known as Central African or Congo basin clade) and clade II (formerly known as West African clade). In the last few years, two outbreaks made the news, one in 2022, caused by…
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Planes, ships and metaphors
We all know that meaning in language only happens in context. Words don’t mean in isolation; they acquire meaning in context. Metaphors even more so. The word ‘pig’ means different things in a farmyard, during a policy encounter or when a mother visits a teenager’s room. Mostly, meanings emerge in context because a speaker has…
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Floods and fires: Reciprocal metaphorical mappings in crisis response
Psychologists, sociologists, linguists and many others have studied how people respond to extreme weather events, such as floods or wildfires. Some linguists have been interested in particular in analysing the use and impact of metaphors. When we studied the 2021 German floods, Rusi Jaspal and I found that floods were either metaphorically framed as human,…
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When the world falls apart, enjoy a metaphor!
I have been writing blog posts since 2012. They dealt mainly with topics relating to climate change, the biosciences, infectious diseases, and more recently AI. Occasionally, I branched out into space or into the 19th century. That happened at times when the tectonic plates of politics shifted, such as after Brexit, the first Trump government,…
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Making mineralogy public: George Sand and Jules Verne
On 14 January, Richard Fallon, an expert on 19th/20th-century literature and science, posted on Bluesky: “More people ought to read George Sand’s 1864 romance Laura, Voyage dans le cristal: a delirious, phantasmagoric, mineralogical story that includes a trip to a prehistoric lost world at the North Pole”. I had read some stories by George Sand…
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Whiplash, sponges and blizzards of embers: Exploring wildfire metaphors
Some years ago I wrote a blog post about climate change and language change, in which I talked about new weather words, such as weather bomb, atmospheric river, rain bomb, polar vortex, heat dome, Spanish plume, mega heat wave, mega drought and mega fire. Now, during the California wildfires of 2025, I have noticed a…
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Synthetic biology in the era of AI: From dominating nature to collaborating with it
Today’s post is a guest post by Christian Gude. He has a PhD in synthetic biology from the University of Nottingham (where we met when I was still doing synbio and RRI at the SBRC) and is now working at Phenotypeca Ltd as IP Analyst in a multidisciplinary role between science and intellectual property. In…
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Wildfires and wild liars
I have written about wildfires and bushfires and climate change since 2012, here, here, here, here and here, for example. I should have written about the Paradise Fire or the Maui Fire, but I didn’t. And now we have the awful Southern California urban wildfires. What can one say? Fortunately, people more knowledgeable than I…
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Another pandemic?
At the beginning of the new year, I was standing in the queue at Lidl when an acquaintance tapped me on the shoulder and asked: “Do you think there will be another pandemic?” “Hmmm, I said, what sort?” “Bird flu but in humans…”. That was on the day that the first death from bird flu…
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