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 …
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 …
The (not) de-extinct dire wolf: Metaphors, myths and magic
April 18, 2025
This post is a collaboration between Brigitte Nerlich and Kate Roach, both retired social scientists with interests in science, culture and society. *** I (Brigitte) first heard about the dire wolf in a post by the science writer Carl Zimmer linking to an article he had written for the New York Times. I had never …
Compound weather: Some linguistic musings
March 21, 2025
You might have heard of a ‘compound fracture’ or of ‘compound interest’ or even, if you are a linguist, of a ‘compound noun’ (nouns consisting of more than one noun). But have you come across ‘compound weather’? I recently came across this expression when looking at some extreme weather disasters which were compounded by compound …
Steel porcupine: A metal metaphor for our times
March 7, 2025
When Covid spread I started to collect metaphors. Now the world has suddenly changed again. Metaphors of fighting a virus are replaced by talk about fighting literal wars. But metaphors are never far away. European leaders gathered in London on 2 March 2025 to talk about the Ukraine-Russia-US situation and make plans for a just …
Planes, ships and metaphors
February 21, 2025
We all know that meaning in language only happens in context. Words don’t mean in isolation; they acquire meaning in context. Metaphors even more so. The word ‘pig’ means different things in a farmyard, during a policy encounter or when a mother visits a teenager’s room. Mostly, meanings emerge in context because a speaker has …
Floods and fires: Reciprocal metaphorical mappings in crisis response
February 14, 2025
Psychologists, sociologists, linguists and many others have studied how people respond to extreme weather events, such as floods or wildfires. Some linguists have been interested in particular in analysing the use and impact of metaphors. When we studied the 2021 German floods, Rusi Jaspal and I found that floods were either metaphorically framed as human, …
Food for thought: AI and culinary metaphors
January 3, 2025
Just before Christmas 2024 I read an article in Nature about AI running out of data. It said that “The Internet is a vast ocean of human knowledge, but it isn’t infinite. And artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have nearly sucked it dry.” Then, on Christmas Eve Aparna Nair said on Bluesky: “I know academics who …
Learning the language of life, the universe and everything – LLMs go metaphorical
December 9, 2024
More than two years after the advent of ChatGPT, we all know a little bit about LLMs or ‘large language models’ (although we, that is ordinary people, don’t really know what that means, especially ‘model’). So, just to recap, and using a definition provided by Claude (as the phrase is not yet in the Oxford …
Gunfight at the O.K Corral; or how bacteria interact in popular science writing
November 1, 2024
For many years, I have been fascinated by war metaphors that people use to talk about bacteria, especially in the context of antimicrobial resistance, the microbiome and microbiology itself. I am not the only one, of course. There is a thriving literature on war metaphors relating to bacteria that started to expand after Joshua Lederberg …
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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