Public Understanding of Science Blog

By Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves The so-called social winter season, which aligned with solar time (from October to April) rather than with the winter season, was a bustling period of cultural activities in the Netherlands during the first decades of the twentieth century. As the local newspaper Haarlem’s Dagblad reminded its readers at the start of the season of 1925/26:   "With the end of daylight saving time, it seems to us as if the door behind the summer is shut with a bang; suddenly, the long evenings begin, seemingly without twilight, and we think again of books and courses, meetings and lectures, concerts, and performances. There are plenty of options, but a choice must be made." Lantern lectures were among the activities organized by the many associations and societies established in Haarlem, an average-sized city situated less than 20 kilometers west of Amsterdam and home to about 75 000 people at this time. To put it in today’s terms, a public lantern lecture could be...

By Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves  Science performers played a significant role in science communication during the nineteenth century: they performed live for different audiences, in a variety of settings, often hauling science and technology experiments and demonstrations throughout the territory. Some scientific performers used the live event of the stage performance as a way to communicate their own investigative endeavors, to promote their published works, or to boost their scientific reputation. Other performers were interested in science and technology as fruitful material for their entertaining and instructive performances. The latter was the case for Levie Kinsbergen Maju (1823-1886), a Dutch performer with a background in stage magic who reinvented himself as a science popularizer in the 1860s. From the sensational ghost lecture of John Henry Pepper to Edison’s phonograph, and from illustrated astronomy lectures to the microscopic projection of the cholera bacillus, Maju delive...

As an historian interested in the public understanding of medicine and health in modern Italy, it was impossible for me to not write about food and its political, social and cultural importance. Italian food is famous all around the world. Almost everyone knows about pasta, pizza and the immense economic and cultural significance of Italian food. However, not many know that Italy’s distinct culinary tradition is a rather recent concept, formed only after the unification of the country (1861). The creation of an Italian diet was part of a political process aimed at improving the health of the new Italian population while also forging a sense of national identity. In this story about food and national identity there is one individual, Pellegrino Artusi (1820-1911), who contributed more than anyone else to make regional Italian recipes and the language of food known all across the peninsula. Artusi published in 1891 an extremely successful book about food, recipes and diet: La Scie...

Risk communication is today at the core of many studies in science communication, which increasingly needs to deal with the uncertainties related not only to natural disasters such as earthquakes or tsunamis but also to new technologies [1,2] . This literature reflects on how we communicate and how we should communicate risk, how people perceive it and what are the most effective practices to pursue. But what about the history of risk communication? When did it first arise, how and why? As many scholars have demonstrated, the 18th century is a turning point in the conceptualization of risk [3,4,5] , due both to a new understanding of natural catastrophes, strongly influenced by the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon [4]  and to the mathematization of chance, thanks to emerging theories of probability [6,7,] . But the communication of risk to non-experts during these decades remains a field wide open for exploration. The intent of this article is precisely to investigate such history, p...

UNESCO’s Division for Science & Its Popularisation propagated science popularisation as a foundation for modern democracies all around the world By Kristian H. Nielsen After Second World War, expectations for science and science popularisation were high. Scientists such as Julian Huxley and Joseph Needham propounded the view that science and international scientific collaboration would contribute to peace, development and understanding. Science, however, was not part of the original proposal for an educational and cultural organisation under the United Nations. Needham in particular campaigned for its inclusion and successfully so. At the conference for the establishment of such an organisation, British minister of education and president of the conference Ellen Wilkinson recommended to include science. She argued: ‘In times when we are all wondering, perhaps apprehensively, what scientists will do to us next, it is important that they should be linked closely with the ...

By Diana Garrisi Rarely discussed but very common, pressure injuries, also known as bedsores, affect millions of people around the world every year. The practice of wound care dates back to ancient times, when mud and clay were used to make plasters. Yet, the sheer number of people suffering from pressure injuries worldwide today shows that much more needs to be done to raise public awareness of wound management. November the 15th will see the celebration of World Wide Pressure Injury Prevention Day . Launched for the first time in 2013 by the American National Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel (NPUAP), this global annual event aims to publicly disseminate practical information about pressure injury formation and prevention. In the UK, the International Stop Pressure Ulcer Day is endorsed, as part of Stop the Pressure Campaign, by the National Health Service (NHS). Considered an important indicator of the quality of patient care, a pressure injury is a localized damage to the sk...

By Tim Boon At 21:25 on 11th December 1962 the BBC broadcast The Prizewinners , a television programme about that year’s Nobel laureates in medicine or physiology (Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for DNA) and chemistry (Max Perutz and John Kendrew for the elucidation of protein structures). The programme, broadcast the day after the ceremony, marked a key stage in the development of science television. Instead of the established expository forms in which science had been demonstrated in the studio or via outside broadcast from laboratories, this programme placed the emphasis on the personalities of the featured scientists. As Raymond Baxter, anchor man for the programme asserted, ‘this is to be a personal programme about these men. In a few moments, through television you will be able to meet them and judge for yourselves what manner of men they are’. Rather than having a reporter frame a discussion about scientific method or theory, this programme featured the ps...

By Bruno Pinto In May 2018, it will be celebrated the 20th anniversary of the inauguration of Expo 98, a world exhibition which took place in Lisbon (Portugal) entitled “Oceans, a heritage for the future”. The initial goal of this initiative was to mark the 500 years of the maritime trip of Vasco da Gama to India and other Portuguese Discoveries, but the theme of the oceans soon became the central focus of this exhibition. Lisbon Oceanarium  | Photo Credits  John Morris Expo´98 can be viewed as an example of a world exhibition aiming to balance environmental and scientific issues, in a quest for the sustainable use of the seas. In the context of this event, 1998 was classified as the “International Year of the Ocean” by the United Nations in order to promote a worldwide reflection about their conservation and use. The exhibition was seen by more than ten million people, with more than 900 national news media and journalists from 88 different countries assuring media ...

Around the 50th anniversary of the first human heart transplant, people are once again fascinated by this event and the extraordinary life of the heart transplant pioneer Chris Barnard. By Marina Joubert 3 December 1967 will forever be marked as the day when South African surgeon Chris Barnard astounded the world by becoming the first person to transplant a human heart. The historic surgery captured the world’s imagination and was hailed by 20th-century historians as on par with the moon-landing in 1969 in terms of its social and scientific significance. During my research into this defining moment in medical history, I was reminded of how different things were in my home country at that time. In 1967, South Africa was in the midst of its apartheid regime that lasted more than 40 years. The country’s policies of segregation along racial lines extended into its health system. There were separate hospital wards and services, including separate ambulances, for black and white pa...

By Cristiano Turbil Italy, since the unification, became a country where cultural and political differences somehow learnt to cohabit. This was achieved, among other initiatives, by popularising science and medicine in order to educate the general public about matters of national interest. This popularisation was carried out by the combined effort of scientists, politicians and editors, and in different ways, these actors equally contributed to explaining to the first generation of Italians the meaning of living in a united nation. One of the leading figures that contributed to this change in the public reception of science in Italy was the neurologist, anthropologist and politician Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910). Born in Monza, a town near Milan, in 1831, Mantegazza studied medicine and science at the university of Pavia and then in Pisa. After graduating, like many others of his generation, he undertook a long period of travelling around the world especially in Europe (German...

By Rupert Cole In the early seventies, long before talk of ‘public engagement’ and ‘public dialogue’ was in vogue, the BBC and the Royal Institution (RI) staged a television series, Controversy (1971-5), that gave audiences an opportunity to participate in debates with scientists on issues in ‘science and society’. Image credits: Financial Times A critical success at the time but now largely forgotten, Controversy was an experiment in science television. As a science programme, it was both novel in showing scientists disagreeing with each other face-to-face and in subjecting the scientists to audience scrutiny. Controversy ran for five series over 29 programmes (50-90 minutes in length), on debates ranging from racial differences in IQ testing to nuclear power. The name, format – a speaker presenting a controversial thesis before a panel of 4-6 opponents and audience in the RI’s theatre – and intention of the series reflected the cultural currents of the late 1960s ...

By Hsiang-Fu Huang Astronomers and historians often refer to the discovery of Neptune in 1846 as a triumph of Newtonian celestial mechanics. The irregularities of the orbit of Uranus led French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier   to correctly predict the location of a hitherto undiscovered planet. By discovering a planet at the tip of a pen, scientists showed feats of intelligence and caught the imagination of the public. Another absorbing but often underrated episode in nineteenth-century science was the search for the hypothetical planet ‘Vulcan’ (not to be confused with the fictional homeworld of Mr. Spock in Star Trek!). Like Uranus, the anomalous orbit of Mercury, which was inconsistent with theory, had long troubled astronomers. To solve the mystery, Le Verrier claimed that an undiscovered planet – or at least a mass of asteroids – stood between Mercury and the Sun. For a brief time, astronomers thought they had found this hypothetical planet and officially named it ‘...