Brigitte Nerlich
View this author's profilePosts by Brigitte Nerlich
The language of life meets large language models
October 6, 2023
Between about 2014 and 2018 I was involved in the social and communications side of ‘synthetic biology’ as part of the Synthetic Biology Research Centre (SBRC) here at the University of Nottingham, which uses engineering biology approaches to understand and then modify industrially-relevant bacteria. I wrote my last blog post on synthetic biology in 2020. …
Evelyn Fox Keller (1936-2023)
September 25, 2023
On 22 September 2023 Evelyn Fox Keller sadly passed away at the age of 87. She had been a theoretical physicist, a mathematical biologist, a feminist philosopher, a historian of science, and an inspiration to many across these fields. She integrated insights from all these fields creatively and critically, and, most importantly, she added some …
From Omicron to Omega: What’s in a name?
September 22, 2023
The last few years have been years of planetary upheaval. We have all lived through a Covid-19 pandemic and are, in fact, still living with it, and we have all felt the effects of climate change. To deal with these planetary events, we had to invent and learn new concepts and new names. Quite recently, …
Orange is the new bleak*
September 1, 2023
I was recently reflecting on the way extreme weather events manifest themselves in different colours. Floods are brown and ugly; there is brown flood water and then there is brown mud everywhere (more on that here). Wildfires are orange and, in a sense, beautiful; there are orange sunsets and sunrises, but what’s left behind is …
Red and blue AI?
August 25, 2023
This is another post about artificial intelligence or AI, but it’s what one may call a bit ‘experimental’. I happened to think about an analogy and ran with it, but it might be a completely inappropriate one. Let me know! Red and green GM About twenty years ago, at the turn of the millennium, I …
Global boiling
August 4, 2023
On 27 July Secretary-General António Guterres gave a press conference at United Nations headquarters. He spoke about climate change against the backdrop of widespread floods, terrestrial and marine heatwaves and wildfires unfolding around the world and in the context of new data coming in from the World Meteorological Organization and the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate …
The climate speaks in words and pictures: Is anybody listening?
July 21, 2023
I can’t open twitter nowadays without being confronted by red-hot images of heatwaves, just like a few weeks ago it was all about wildfires, orange skies and smoke. The climate is speaking to us, indeed sending us smoke signals, from the air, the land and the water which are all alarmingly warm. This is not …
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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