Tag: Science Communication
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Fire, wind, and lies: How we talk about wildfire shapes how we respond
Rusi Jaspal and I recently published an article on the metaphorical framing of the January 2025 Southern California wildfires. Here is a short blog post about it to whet your appetite for the real thing which appeared online first in Metaphor and the Social World under the title “Fire, wind and lies: Mapping the metaphorical…
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Sandboxes and moats: Wrestling with AI metaphors
After this morning’s (17 April 2026) news reports, most of you will know about the furore surrounding the non-release of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI model and its implications for cybersecurity (listen to this podcast to get some understanding). Cybersecurity will, however, not be the focus of this post; it will, of course, be metaphors. The…
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Vibe-coding spaghetti: Unpacking an AI metaphor for biology
I recently saw a post on Bluesky just saying “Coconuts”. Intriguing! Underneath was a screenshot of a tweet which was even more intriguing. The tweet said: “A techbro told me that biology is easy because DNA is just code, right? I told him that DNA is 4 billion year old, completely undocumented, vibe-coded spaghetti, built…
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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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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…
Making Science Public 