// Latest Posts

Certainty

There has recently been some discussion in climate change circles about climate sensitivity and predictions of warming trends about which I will not talk, as I have no expertise in those fields. However, as I am nevertheless trying to keep up-to-date, I recently read a reblogged blog post about just such issues on And then …

Food sovereignty in the UK

Food security has become the dominant framing of agri-food policy and research in the UK. However, it is not the only framing. In this post we take a look at one of the alternatives, food sovereignty. We look for food sovereignty in policy, in research, and in the media. We also explore the emerging food …

Jules Verne: Making science visual

On Christmas Eve I had a chance encounter on twitter and the result is this blog post, or rather: essay. Richard Ashcroft had retweeted a tweet about a book by Adam Roberts. The tweet by Adam Roberts said: “Finished copies came by this morning’s post. Very lovely piece of book making!” The book retells Jules …

Making science public: The science and silence conundrum

The issue of science and advocacy is a complex topic and has led to heated discussions amongst scientists, science communicators and commentators of different persuasions, especially this year it seems. There was first a flurry of debate provoked, in July this year, by an article written by Tamsin Edwards who argued that climate scientists should …

Tools for thinking about an increasingly complex world

A few weeks ago I had to write a seminar talk about epigenetics in the media. In the course of investigating the historical background to that emerging discipline, I looked at Conrad Hal Waddington’s work on embryology and development and his creation of the metaphor ‘epigenetic landscape’. But this is not what this blog post …

Maybe, Minister: Can politics and science ever speak the same language?

This blog post by Professor Philip Moriarty (member of the MakingSciPub network of Honorary Associates) was first published in PhysicsFocus on 5 December, 2013. Phil and Dr Clare Burrage from Physics and Astronomy have been spending the week at Westminster. This is Phil’s story: Along with 35 other scientists (including my colleague Clare Burrage here …