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 …
‘It’s not a retoot is it?’ Moving between platforms and languages
November 11, 2022
The question in the title was asked by Aris Katzourakis on Mastodon, the now well-known decentralized social network built on open web standards by a non-profit. In this little post I’ll tell the story of how I came to explore a new social world, including a new language. *** I joined Twitter about a decade …
Invasion as a metaphor
November 4, 2022
On 31 of October Suella Braverman, Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, said, according to Hansard, the official report of all Parliamentary debates: “The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast, and which party is not.” ‘Invasion’ is generally defined as the “action of invading …
What’s in a name? On embryology, developmental biology and discipline naming
October 24, 2022
Last week Philip Ball asked an interesting question on Twitter which provoked a lot of responses and comments: “when did ‘embryology’ start to become ‘developmental biology’? I bet Philip will post an excellent answer to that question soon. I am not Philip and I am not a historian of biology; I am just a magpie. …
Asteroids: Angst, amazement and avarice
October 14, 2022
On planet earth it is extremely difficult to change people’s, especially politicians’, behaviour to avert, say, climate catastrophe. Not so in space. Here humans boldly achieve the unthinkable, namely changing the motion of something that’s going in a dangerous direction. What I am talking about is, of course, NASA’s “first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and …
Resisting metaphors: The case of trickle-down economics
October 3, 2022
I have recently been corresponding with Ahmed Abdel-Raheem, a metaphor researcher who is developing a theory of metaphor resistance. Ahmed is looking at how producers of metaphors deal with metaphor failure in various ways (denying it was a metaphor, reinterpreting it etc.) and how metaphor audiences or viewers can resist metaphors, be they verbal or …
Andrea Wulf’s ‘Magnificent Rebels’ (2022)
September 23, 2022
The situation in this country and around the world is quite depressing and I wondered what could cheer me up. Then I started to read Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self and that did the trick (I had previously read her biography of Alexander von Humboldt and enjoyed that too). …
Tipping point
September 16, 2022
Over the past 15 years or so, the use of the term ‘tipping point’ has exploded in the scientific literature. My current interest was sparked by a new paper on tipping points published in Science. The lead author is David Armstrong McKay, a University of Exeter Earth systems scientist, and the paper is an update …
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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