Synthetic biology in the era of AI: From dominating nature to collaborating with it
January 17, 2025
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 …
Wildfires and wild liars
January 13, 2025
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 …
Another pandemic?
January 10, 2025
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 …
Food for thought: AI and culinary metaphors
January 3, 2025
Just before Christmas 2024 I read an article in Nature about AI running out of data. It said that “The Internet is a vast ocean of human knowledge, but it isn’t infinite. And artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have nearly sucked it dry.” Then, on Christmas Eve Aparna Nair said on Bluesky: “I know academics who …
Chatting with a cockroach – a bonus post
December 13, 2024
Last week I posted my overview of the blog posts I have written over the year, and I thought that I was done with blogging for the rest of the year. Little did I know. Given that we now hear about AI speaking or learning the language of atoms, I had to do a quick …
Learning the language of life, the universe and everything – LLMs go metaphorical
December 9, 2024
More than two years after the advent of ChatGPT, we all know a little bit about LLMs or ‘large language models’ (although we, that is ordinary people, don’t really know what that means, especially ‘model’). So, just to recap, and using a definition provided by Claude (as the phrase is not yet in the Oxford …
Making Science Public 2024: End of year round-up of blog posts
December 6, 2024
It’s that time of year again when I write my round-up of all the blog posts that I have written over the year. There were more posts than I expected. I have tried to group them into topics, some of which you might be interested in, others not. This year, I mostly explored the ever-expanding …
Plausible climate futures – a book review
November 22, 2024
I was recently watching the images of the devastating floods in the Valencia region of Spain. This brought back memories of the 2021 German floods and all the mud and debris they left behind. I also read an article by the world expert in extreme weather attribution, Friederike Otto who argued that, despite so many …
Chatting with chatbots about the climate crisis
November 15, 2024
Last week, I had another adventure in AI land. This started by accident, as so many adventures do. It all came about because I read about an interesting symposium organised in Amsterdam by Anaïs Augé’s and Gudrun Reijnierse on “Public responses to the language of science communication: Uptake, acceptance, resistance”. As part of this symposium, …
Gunfight at the O.K Corral; or how bacteria interact in popular science writing
November 1, 2024
For many years, I have been fascinated by war metaphors that people use to talk about bacteria, especially in the context of antimicrobial resistance, the microbiome and microbiology itself. I am not the only one, of course. There is a thriving literature on war metaphors relating to bacteria that started to expand after Joshua Lederberg …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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