Public Understanding of Science Blog

By Brian Park. Image source: Cosmacon. In recent years, bakuchiol has gained widespread attention as a “natural alternative” to retinol , appearing in everything from dermatologist recommendations to viral social media posts. Marketed as gentler yet equally effective, bakuchiol has quickly entered public discourse as a scientifically backed skincare solution. However, its rise highlights an important question central to the public understanding of science: how do people interpret, trust, and act on scientific claims about emerging ingredients? The Appeal of “Natural” Science Public interest in bakuchiol is not driven by chemistry alone. Instead, it reflects a broader cultural preference for products labeled as “natural.” Scientific evidence does suggest that bakuchiol can influence pathways associated with skin aging, including collagen production and oxidative stress. Yet, in public-facing narratives, these mechanisms are often simplified into marketing phrases such as “plant-based re...

By Rishabh Kachroo. Inaugurating the forty-fifth session of the Indian Science Conference, Madras, 6 January 1958. Source: The Nehru Archive. The Curious Afterlife of Scientific Temper “Scientific temper” has never been just another term for the Indian republic. Enshrined in the Indian constitution through the 42nd amendment in 1976 and popularised before that in India by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as an intellectual orientation and a civic ethos, scientific temper was imagined as a moral infrastructure for democratic life and a hopeful bulwark against dogma, obscurantism, and the inertia of inherited inequalities.  Today, however, it rarely evokes the ethical urgency that it once carried. It merely lingers as a vaguely pedagogical trope, invoked occasionally in textbooks and science day speeches.  Before we go any further and discuss why science temper’s decline matters, it would help to have a working definition of the term. In the Indian context, scientific temper is...

By Lena Zils. Image credit: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images. A pandemic. A public trying to make sense of it all. In moments of uncertainty, science moves to the centre of public life, and so does the question of how much people trust it. A new longitudinal study from Switzerland asks: what actually moves public attitudes toward science, and does a pandemic change the answer? Most research on public attitudes toward science captures a single moment, a snapshot. But attitudes don't work like snapshots. They shift, accumulate, and respond to the world around them. That's why we followed the same individuals across three waves of the Science Barometer Switzerland between 2016 and 2022, tracking how their views on science evolved through calmer times and through the upheaval of COVID-19. The findings are nuanced, occasionally surprising, and carry real implications for anyone trying to communicate science to the public. The Pandemic Changed the Rules During the pre-pandemic period...

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 ...