Public Understanding of Science Blog

By Yibeltal Temeche. The fossilised remains of Lucy. Courtesy of  Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University. The discovery and the public response In 1974, a remarkable discovery in Ethiopia changed how we understand human origins. A 3.2-million-year-old fossil skeleton—popularly known as “Lucy”—was unearthed in Hadar. Scientifically, Lucy belongs to the species Australopithecus afarensis, an extinct early hominin that lived millions of years before modern humans. Her discovery provided some of the earliest clear evidence of upright walking, a defining trait in human evolution. However, in the decades since her discovery, a fascinating divergence has emerged: while the scientific community classifies Lucy as an extinct early hominin, the Ethiopian public narrative has embraced her as a national matriarch—the "first human" and the "mother of humanity". The gap between science and public perception From a scientific perspective, Lucy was not a human in the ...

By Hannah Little. We interviewed science communicators, asking whether they use storytelling strategies that are known to cause humans to pay attention to some stories more than others, and why they might avoid using certain strategies. Science communicators expressed concerns about using communication tactics that might contradict the objectives of science communication, threaten the integrity of science and risk the welfare of audiences. Humans have used stories to understand the world around us for millennia, from folktales to news stories, and from movies to the gossip we collect in the local pub. Science communicators have long been trying to capitalise on this most human instinct to pass on the information we hear in the form of stories. For science communication, stories enable us to foreground relevance, emotion and engagement, which can be used to persuade audiences or make information stick with people. Not all stories are created equal; some are more memorable than others. O...

By Rose Sebastian. The first state-run science museum to come up in independent India was the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum, Kolkata (1959). It was followed by the establishment of the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum, Bangalore (1962) and a flurry of other science museums in various cities.  All these institutions, which were initially under the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), were later brought under the purview of the National Council of Science Museums (NCSM) in 1978 to standardize and coordinate their content and outreach programmes.  The unique exigencies of nation-building in postcolonial India shaped the form and function of these institutions, to achieve economic and social progress through techno-scientific modernity, and establish India as a significant presence in the postwar global politics. Yet another aim was to make science accessible and understandable to the common man, rather than confined to distant laborat...

By Elena Maria Rita Rizzi. The contribution examines the overlooked project for a museum of the history of medicine at the University of Padua proposed by doctor and professor Arturo Castiglioni in the interwar period.  Although Castiglioni’s plan was only partially realized, it sheds light on a key moment in the dissemination of Italian medicine via the musealization of its material legacies at the University of Padua and, more broadly, in Italy.  While reflecting broader trends in the musealization of medicine that emerged between the nineteenth and twentieth century in Europe, Castiglioni’s project highlights the central role played by the history of medicine in shaping the public narrative of the Venetian atheneum and city in the interwar years.  Embedded, in the late 1930s, in a far-ranging program of patrimonialization of the main university building, Castiglioni’s project also attests to the propagandistic uses of the material culture of medicine, and more broadly...