Can metaphors hinder scientific progress?
February 24, 2023
This is a guest post by Jack Morgan Jones. He is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Manchester’s Philosophy Department with an interest in truth and practical rationality, as well as agency and constructivism. *** It’s readily acknowledged that metaphors can help an educated public better understand a scientist’s technical work. But questioning the …
Bird flu – then and now
February 17, 2023
Current news about a world-wide bird flu outbreak brought back memories of 2005, dubbed then “The year of bird flu”. In an article I co-authored that year with Christopher Halliday, we noted that “[l]ately, fear of disease has been fuelled yet again by the emergence of a new highly pathogenic virus strain of avian influenza …
Climate change and health: Early and late warnings
February 10, 2023
Last week I saw various tweets from the Wellcome Trust announcing a new funding scheme that will support research on the impacts of #ClimateChange on human health, centring on communities most at risk (an announcement that by the way, was illustrated with a tryptic of photos of lone individuals dealing with a flood, a fire …
Knitting with hyperlinks: A decade of blogging
February 3, 2023
Ten years ago, I was walking down the corridor in the School of Sociology and Social Policy building, when I bumped into Adrian Mateo, who was then Faculty marketing manager. I knew him from various engagement events related to projects I was involved in at the time. We chatted a bit and he suddenly asked …
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. …
Artificial intelligence, dark matter and common sense
January 13, 2023
In my last post I wrote about a new type of deep learning network, the chatbot ChatGPT, which has stirred up a lot of debate, including between me and my sister. We were skyping and I mentioned the blog post and she said: “Oh, I have just read something in the New York Times that …
Artificial Intelligence: Education and entertainment
January 6, 2023
I have heard about artificial intelligence or AI for decades, but I have never really played with it. I guess this is the same for many people. We might have AI all around us, but at the end of 2022 it became much more tangible – we had it at our fingertips. A company called …
Making Science Public 2022: End of year round-up of blog posts
December 9, 2022
This is now the 10th time that I have written an overview of the blog posts I have published over the preceding year. Phew! How time flies. Strangely, this year has been quite productive. I have posted more stuff about Covid, of course, but also about monkey pox, as well as about climate change, gene …
Immunity debt: Creating and contesting metaphors
December 2, 2022
This week I am writing a post about my probably last Covid metaphor: immunity debt. What do people mean by that, I wondered? While trying to find out, I became aware of how slippery a concept this is; so I apologise in advance for misunderstandings. In 2021 a French group of researchers published a paper …
![Hand-painted Kintsugi pottery bowl. Wikimedia Commons [Kintsugi, also known as kintsukuroi, is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum]](https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/files/2022/11/Hand_Pinted_Kintsugi_Pottery_Bowl-240x120.jpg)
Scientists do metaphor
November 18, 2022
I was idly browsing my Twitter timeline recently (probably for the last time), when my eyes fell on some tweets by Buzz Baum, a cell biologist, saying that he had spoken about metaphor on a BBC radio programme (oh, I thought!) which unfortunately had now been deleted from BBC Sounds (oh no, I thought). He …
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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