Search for "science communication"
The Carbon Neutral Lab: Science, culture, values
November 11, 2016
This week we held our yearly Synthetic Biology Research Centre (SBRC) Strategic Advisory Board Meeting. The meeting took place in the Carbon Neutral Laboratory which houses the Centre for Sustainable Chemistry. This building has become quite famous because it burned down last year, was rebuilt and opened this year. I should say from the outset …
Crowdfunding Science
October 14, 2016
This is guest post by Mike S. Schäfer, Professor of Science Communication at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research (IPMZ) and Director of the Center for Higher Education and Science Studies at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. Heather Richards was short of $3000, and she could still not realize her research project. The …
The Institute for Science and Society: Past, present, future
October 2, 2016
Many of you will have seen a new video of the brilliant work done at the Faculty of Social Sciences here at the University of Nottingham since about 1948. I was looking at this during my last days as Director of the Making Science Public programme and also through the eyes of a co-founder of …
Camille Flammarion: Making science popular
July 22, 2016
Life on this planet is currently crazy, chaotic and confusing. In this context, I was thinking – wouldn’t it be nice to be able to poke one’s head out of the earthly firmament and look at the heavens beyond. This thought popped into my head because I had once seen an image depicting something like …
Assembling a synthetic human genome: Science and the politics of openness
May 18, 2016
There has recently been some commotion in the field of synthetic biology about a meeting held at Harvard on 10 May 2016 at which scientists discussed the creation of a synthetic human genome. The meeting was a closed, invitation-only meeting. In a field of science that takes pride in its openness and transparency, this created …
Climate, science and politics: The certainty and consensus confusion
April 24, 2016
In this, my probably final, blog post on climate change, I’ll return to a topic that has troubled me for many years, namely religious rhetoric used in debates about climate change science and climate change politics. The terrain between climate change science and climate change politics has become a bit of a swamp and the …
Science, politics and magic
April 10, 2016
A couple of years ago, prompted by an article by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, I wrote a blog post about ‘responsible innovation’ as a buzzword. About a year ago, I tried to understand the appeal of another buzzword, namely ‘co-production’. Yesterday, I cleared out some files and happened to come across some thirty-year-old notes on the magical …
Reviewing the evidence on transparency in science: a response to Lewandowsky & Bishop.
March 30, 2016
Co-authors: Warren Pearce, Sarah Hartley & Brigitte Nerlich. In January, Nature published a Comment piece by Lewandowsky and Bishop entitled “Don’t let transparency damage science“. The authors argued that some of the “measures that can improve science — shared data, post-publication peer review and public engagement on social media — can be turned against scientists”. …
Improving climate change communications: moving beyond scientific certainty
June 8, 2015
This is a co-authored post with Gregory Hollin. It is based upon our new paper in Nature Climate Change, which is the first piece of original research from science and technology studies (STS) published in the journal. In the last 25 years scientists have become increasingly certain that humans are responsible for changes to the …