Brigitte Nerlich
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Mpox 2022: Lived experience, stigma and coping
February 28, 2025
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 …
Planes, ships and metaphors
February 21, 2025
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 …
When the world falls apart, enjoy a metaphor!
February 11, 2025
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, …
Making mineralogy public: George Sand and Jules Verne
January 31, 2025
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 …
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 …
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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