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Brigitte Nerlich

Brigitte Nerlich

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Posts by Brigitte Nerlich

Making epigenetics familiar: The visual construction of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in the news

Some time ago I wrote a blog post with Aleksandra Stelmach and Alan Miguel Valdez  about visuals used to make epigenetics public through the popular lens of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. I then promised some image analysis. Here is a summary of what we found (I thank ChatGPT for helping me summarise our findings. If you want references, …

John Herschel: A snapshot of his adventures in photography

Sitting at home on a miserable day last week, I was reading a tweet, then a blog post by Stephen Case who wrote a book with my sort of title: Making Stars Physical: The Astronomy of Sir John Herschel. That post cheered me up, as I learned something new. I went to the kitchen to …

Responsible AI to the max: Meet Goody-2

This is not a real blog post. I just needed to mark the advent of a thought-provoking and funny, yes funny, AI, namely Goody-2 (and my brain always adds ‘shoes’….). Finding Goody-2 A couple of days ago, I saw this tweet by Melanie Mitchell, a complexity scientist and expert on AI, which made me curious. …

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Truth, post-truth, and post-fake

I was sitting at my desk trying to think about something I could blog about. For some reason the word ‘truth’ popped into my head. After that I engaged in a bit of ‘reading the tea leaves’. That is, I messed about on the news database Nexis, rummaged in the Oxford English Dictionary and looked …

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Humanising artificial intelligence and dehumanising actual intelligence

Millions of people will now have interacted with a new form of accessible artificial intelligence, in the form of ChatGPT, DALL-E or Midjourney. Many will have had (at first) quite strange feelings of empathy with the bot, saying please and thank you and trying not to overburden it. We might also admire its apparent humility …

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Sickle cell disease and identity

In my background post, I tried to provide some information about what sickle cell disease is, how it has so far been treated and what a new therapy using gene editing might involve. When such as treatment possibility was announced as approved by health agencies in the UK and the US, newspapers took (some) notice, …

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Sickle cell disease and gene editing

Before the end of 2023, I had rarely heard of sickle cell disease (or anaemia). I knew it existed, but that was all. Then, around November and December, it was suddenly in the media spotlight, because UK and US health authorities approved a new therapy and because the new therapy used the still new and …

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Climate change, metaphors and me

We were sitting round the kitchen table chatting after Christmas, reminiscing about last Christmas. I nostalgically said that last year such conversations had sparked my interest in AI in the form of ChatGPT and given me ideas for blogging. I wondered what I should blog about now. We all agreed that there was always climate …

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Making science public 2023: End-of-year round up of blog posts

The year 2023 began with a bang. Suddenly there was a new form of ‘artificial intelligence’, and by ‘new’ I mean a form of AI that even I could use and vaguely understand. There was, it seems, some monstrous machine (called LLM) gobbling up everything we have ever produced in science, literature and art and …

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The human side of AI: Delivery robots in Milton Keynes

This post has been written in collaboration with Alan Miguel Valdez, Lecturer in Technology and Innovation Management, The Open University, Milton Keynes *** At the beginning of November 2023, an international AI Safety Summit took place at Bletchley Park, the iconic location of World War II code breaking feats. What has perhaps not been stressed …

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