“A fountain of youth or a hopeful lie?” published

“So, meet Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD) – a molecule that promises a simple solution to the inevitable problem of ageing”. This tantalizing morsel comes from a draft article we workshopped recently, at a meeting where we contemplated the possible uses of irony and satire in writing about scientific topics—especially ones about which we might want…

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A long overdue evolutionary account of women

A New York Times bestselling book comes out of NeuWrite: Scientist and creative writer Cat Bohannon is a long-time member of the NeuWrite creative science-writing workshop group in New York City, where she completed her PhD at Columbia University on the evolution of narrative and cognition. In an inspiration to those of us workshopping our…

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Revealing problems in medical research in psychology

One of the most-read columns this month in the Finnish Medical Journal (Lääkärilehti) was authored by NeuWrite Nordic board member Jussi Valtonen, an award-winning novelist and a researcher in psychology at the University of Helsinki. You can read the column in Finnish here or in English machine translation here (PDF).

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“LGBTIQ+N” sci-fi short story published

Speculative fiction penned by scientists is rare, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. Recently we workshopped an unusual form of scientific commentary: a one-page sci-fi tale by microbiologist and NeuWrite Nordic advisory board member Howy Jacobs of Tampere University (pictured) that confronted the frightening ethical and political implications of human genetic engineering. This month, Jacobs’ story…

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“Humour Me Some Math!” published

At our February meeting we warmed up the dark Nordic winter with a workshop on ways to tap into humor to communicate about science. For good measure we made it as difficult as possible, by choosing what you might think would be one of the intuitively least-funny fields of endeavor: mathematics. Yet lo and behold, …

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Fighter moms support vital research into mitochondrial diseases

Describing science through simple stories and metaphors helped Brendan Battersby, a University of Helsinki research director in mitochondrial biology, connect with the parents of a child with Leigh Syndrome, which led to a new collaboration on research funding. The family felt that Brendan was the first medical expert who’d explained their child’s disease to them…

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