Alternative facts: The good, the bad and the ugly
January 24, 2017
On 22 January “Senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press … and spoke to host Chuck Todd about a briefing the new press secretary, Sean Spicer, had held earlier in the weekend. Spicer claimed Donald Trump’s inauguration had attracted record numbers of spectators. Conway denied the statements were lies, instead …
Ernst Haeckel, Christmas Cards, and Fake News
December 24, 2016
This is a brief post inspired by a tweet which led me down a rabbit-hole…. I was looking idly through my tweets this morning when my eye landed on one by Mo Costandi saying “Before his ‘Artforms in Nature’ (http://bit.ly/1GIlTwE), Ernst Haeckel designed greeting cards”. This led me to a flickr page where John Holbo …
Nano does Nottingham Does Comics
December 15, 2016
This is a guest post by Phil Moriarty. It continues the story of the graphic novel being created as part of a project trying to achieve 3D printing with atoms, which I have started to document here and here. *** Yesterday evening I spent a fun few hours at the Nottingham Writers’ Studio with my colleagues …
Making Science Public: Opening Up Closed Spaces
October 6, 2016
This article summarising the Making Science Public End of Award Conference (22 June) first appeared in EASST Review: Volume 35(3) September 2016, and is re-posted here with permission of the EASST Review editor. ••• What does it mean to make science more public, open or accountable? How is ‘the public’ imagined and constituted? How does …
Zika, poems and people
September 18, 2016
Friday morning (16 September) two things happened. I was preparing for a meeting with colleagues (Sarah Hartley and Barbara Ribeiro) to discuss findings from a project examining Brazilian media coverage of the Zika virus epidemic.* At the same time I got an email asking me to contribute something to a volume on the 2009 swine …
That was the week that was
June 25, 2016
This week was one of the strangest weeks of my life. In the middle of the week I had two days of real enjoyment. On Tuesday, 21 June, current and former members of our Institute for Science and Society came together at an event organised for me by Sujatha Raman and entitled ‘Adventures in Science, …
Science and politics in an uncertain world
June 19, 2016
Our end of award conference is taking place on Wednesday 22 June and I know that I should be writing something cheerful and upbeat about our programme, what we have done and are still doing. However, the conference is happening at a difficult time, and somehow I have lost my blogging enthusiasm. The conference is …
Making Science Public: End of award conference, 22 June 2016
May 3, 2016
We are celebrating the (upcoming) end of the Leverhulme Trust Research programme: Making Science Public with a one day conference and we would be delighted if you could attend. The conference will take place at the University of Nottingham, University Park Campus, Highfield House, on 22 June. The programme (see below) includes four panel discussions showcasing …
El Niño – the Christ Child
December 22, 2015
I had an odd exchange of photos with my sister in America this week. I sent her daffodils from Nottingham; she sent me arctic conditions from New Mexico. Both photos can be linked to ‘El Niño’, I believe, a weather phenomenon “named after the birth of Christ because it traditionally occurs in Latin America around …