Science, stories and the secrets of survival
April 11, 2025
I recently read a post on Bluesky by Adam Roberts, a British science fiction and fantasy novelist that said: “MODERN MAGIC MAKES MANIFEST MERLIN’S MEDIEVAL MYSTERIES”. I was instantly hooked and found out that this is a nicely alliterative rendition of the original title of a press release announcing that “Fragments of a rare Merlin …
Contesting Earth’s History
April 3, 2025
This is a GUEST POST by Richard Fallon, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Natural History Museum, London. Richard has studied interactions and overlaps between literature and science, focusing on the long nineteenth century and paying particular attention to the literary popularisation of dinosaurs. His current work examines transatlantic geoscience between the 1860s and the 1920s characterised by …
Fin-de-Siècle Youth Magazines and their Construction of Gendered Responses to Sickness
March 14, 2025
This is a post by SUSAN SUDBURY. Susan is a fifth-year honours student completing a Bachelor of Advanced Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia, where she is studying an extended major in English Literature. I am here reposting with permission a blog post that she wrote as part of the Media and Epidemics project. …
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 …
John Herschel: A snapshot of his adventures in photography
February 16, 2024
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 …
Making science public 2023: End-of-year round up of blog posts
December 15, 2023
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 …
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 …
The Gmelin family: From chemistry to phlogiston and permafrost
May 12, 2023
I had Covid. I was lying in bed. I saw a tweet by Mark Carnal saying: “Historians of Biology. How on earth is Gmelin pronounced? I’ve not had to say it out loud before.” I am not a historian of biology but, as a German speaker, I was intrigued. So, I looked up the name …
Gene editing, gene shears and other titbits from the history of genetic engineering
April 7, 2023
I was wondering what to write about. In past blogs, I have done quite a bit of ‘conceptual history’ about metaphors or phrases like ‘imaginaries’, ‘tipping points’, ‘deficit model’, ‘trickle down economics’ and even ‘gene surgery‘ and ‘gene drive’. I have also written a few posts about gene editing or genome editing. But, come to …
Gene drive communication: On bombs and bullets
January 20, 2023
In a recent article for Scientific American, the zoologist and author of a recent book on the history of genetic engineering, Matthew Cobb, lays out the pros and cons of ‘gene drive’. Gene drive is a new genetic technology that could be used to wipe out whole species of insects that transmit, for example, malaria. …
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