Bioracism reborn?
Many science bloggers and writers put their thoughts into the form of essays that discuss a new book, or several new books where the writer sees a theme. We studied…
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The intersection of science and literature
We had a special treat at our dinner salon and workshop meeting this month: Iida Turpeinen, one of Finland’s leading thinkers and practitioners in the transdisciplinary space between science and…
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The bioethics of the brain-machine interface
Direct electrical/digital interfaces between human brains and machines are advancing rapidly while AI is suddenly infiltrating the process of human thinking at mass scale. Where are we headed? At our…
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What are zoos? Do we live in one?
Does visiting a zoo ever give you a strange feeling-not just about our relationship with nature, but maybe even about your own life? What kind of science and ideas lie…
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Rethinking the secret life of plants
With the long-awaited greenery of the Nordic summer finally upon us, it was the perfect time to consider the secret life of plants. They’re not what we think they are:…
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Fact vs. fantasy—science writing meets science fiction
For communicating factual science, we’ve talked about using techniques from fiction. And we’ve workshopped fiction that’s intended to communicate about factual science. But is there a difference, actually, between writing…
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Sex, fads, and math
Scientists might use a term like “computed statistics of social synchrony” to refer to what normal people might call sex, fads, and math. Our two texts this month brought us…
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Would you want to live longer and get younger?
We had a fun challenge this month from Hanna Västinsalo, our celebrity filmmaker, who leverages her PhD in genetics to entertain audiences with unexpected science stories with a human perspective.…
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Using ourselves as characters to guide audiences into science
Lecturing at an audience and just “explaining the science” isn’t always the most effective way to communicate. An alternative approach that’s often recommended is using a personal story to connect…
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What explains public distrust of science?
A concern frequently voiced by participants in our workshops is the decline of public trust in science. The need to rebuild trust, and strengthen public awareness of the scientific process,…
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Going deep—getting the writer and reader immersed
What happens when, as we research and write, we take a really deep dive-especially into subject matter that might be outside our expertise, or into a complicated real-world situation, or…
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On using metaphors and irony—carefully
The metaphor of modern medicine as a tower anchored a draft piece of fiction that we workshopped this month. In the story another tower appeared through the mist, too: alternative…
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Reaching resistant readers
How do you get your message to the audience that needs to hear it-especially if they are likely to resist? For that matter, as writers, how do we learn enough…
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The entanglement of subject and object
Sir Isaac Newton thought light consisted of particles, until Thomas Young’s famous “double-slit experiment”, believed to have been performed in 1801, suggested that light actually took the form of waves.…
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The shocking truth about scientific utopias
Scientists hate science. Or so it seemed when we read the judges’ comments and the winning stories in the EU-LIFE/Nature essay competition, which had been intended to encourage scientists to…
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Stories that teach
How to get readers interested in the nuances of complex debates over climate policy? Yawn. Unless, maybe, you start your story like this: A typhoon has hit Manila during a…
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Writing for kids makes us better science writers for adults
One of the senior scientists in our workshop group recently found himself in the impromptu situation of sitting down for a video interview about his complex research on mitochondrial diseases-but…
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Medically and genetically engineered dystopias
Science fiction is an especially creative kind of science writing, one that can show us the present in imaginative and emotionally charged ways while also anticipating possible futures. Amidst hopeful…
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Should scientists express opinions? If so, how?
Among the top 100 most-influential scientists on Twitter-according to an early and somewhat controversial survey by Science way back in 2014-was Trish Greenhalgh (pictured). Today Greenhalgh is at Oxford, where…
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