Public Understanding of Science Blog

By Tenzin Tamang. AI sees climate change as "hotter" than experts do. Our research explores this overestimation bias in LLMs. Ever asked an AI chatbot about climate change? Many of us turn to these powerful tools for quick information, but our new research reveals a surprising quirk: AI models tend to "see hotter", frequently overestimating the impacts of climate change compared to the consensus of expert scientists. This tendency to exaggerate gets even stronger when we ask the AI to respond as if it were a climate scientist. What we did We took statements about climate change impacts directly from the highly respected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2023 Synthesis Report. For each statement, the IPCC provides a specific confidence level (e.g., low, medium, or high). We then presented these same scenarios to popular GPT-family models and asked them to rate their confidence in two conditions: (1) directly, and (2) acting as a climate scientist. Wha...

 By Robin Bayes.  Photo Credit:  John Englart On July 4, 2025, American climate policy was upended as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) rolled back or canceled many clean energy tax incentives in the United States. Supporters touted this move while opponents lambasted it, each side claiming the moral high ground. While Republican House Budget Committee members argued that the OBBBA stops climate activism as a weapon to harm working families , the Committee’s Democratic caucus argued that it betrays the middle class by killing clean energy jobs and investments. When political messaging uses this kind of harm-based moral rhetoric to escalate the climate policy debate, there may be lasting consequences. Moralizing science and technology is associated with divisive characteristics In a recent short article published in Public Understanding of Science , I examine how moralization affects the way everyday people approach policy debates about science and technology....

 By Alexandre Morin-Chassé. Photo Credit: Unsplash On July 22, 2011, just before carrying out terrorist attacks that claimed 77 lives in Norway, Anders Breivik released a 1,500-page manifesto. In this document, he detailed his preparations for the attacks and shared his views on various political and social issues.  Among his extensive arguments, Breivik criticized "cultural Marxists" for ignoring scientific evidence suggesting that genetics plays a major role in human abilities and behavior. He advocated for genetic screening and birth control to prevent the extinction of the Nordic race and to increase its average IQ.  Breivik is not the only extreme-right terrorist to espouse such views; manifestos from the shooters involved in the 2019 Christchurch and 2022 Buffalo attacks also included essentialist claims about genetics and their social implications. Albeit a notable viewpoint among lone actor terrorists on the extreme right, little is known about the extent t...

By Declan Fahy. Michel Claessens,  former head of communication for the ITER project. What happens when an organisation’s science communication becomes replaced by politically-motivated public deception?   Michel Claessens was in such a situation as part of his work as head of communication between April 2011 and March 2015 for the ITER project, a massive energy project located in the south of France. At the facility, some 33 nations are collaborating to build a nuclear fusion device. It is one of the world’s largest scientific projects, but one, Claessens argues, that has a definite political dimension, including its promotion of nuclear power. Claessens, who was also a former head of communication in the Directorate-General Research and Innovation of the European Commission, details in the May 2025 issue of Public Understanding of Science his concerns over hype, research integrity and the merging of science communication and marketing in publicly funded big science pr...

 By Massimiano Bucchi. Photo Credit: Flickr A spacious meeting room in a prestigious university.  Vice-Chancellor - Good afternoon everybody and thanks for being here. I am the Vice-Chancellor for Public Engagement. We are here today to discuss how to improve our university public communication and public engagement strategy. Let me briefly introduce the participants: Professor Orange, Department of Physics; Professor Green, Department of Environmental Sciences; Professor Mustard, Department of Computer Science; Professor Turquoise, Department of Political Science; Professor Brown, Department of Statistics; Professor Blue, Department of Philosophy. And of course, Mrs. Black, who heads our communication office.  Mrs. Black - Thank you, Vice-Chancellor. I have asked also Mr. Mellow Yellow to be here with us today. Mr Mellow Yellow is a highly successful influencer and renowned specialist of social media and he is going to help us with his advice. He is a great expert...

 By Yuqi Zhu and Jianxun Chu. Image generated by DALL·E and author Have you ever found yourself saying (or at least trying to say) “thank you” to AI assistants, like ChatGPT? If so, have you ever been shocked and wondered why you feel the urge to do so for something that, technically speaking, is lifeless ? After all, there’s no essential difference between AI and other tools in life, like a car, a laptop, or a vacuum cleaner. Yet, that urge just came out of nowhere after receiving a genius answer from AI that fixed the bugs bothering you, or after hearing genuine words from AI when you needed someone to talk to. Is it a common thing, or just a weird act, and does it reflect something deeper? Based on our study recently published on Public Understanding of Science , you’re definitely not alone. Screenshot from Her (2013): a conversation between Theodore (protagonist) and Samantha (AI assistant) A public debate on gratitude toward AI Early in the rise of generative AI, ...

 By Justin C. Cheung and Shirley S. Ho. Image source: ChatGPT Artificial intelligence (AI) is very popular nowadays, from ChatGPT, Apple Intelligence, to digital twin systems, and even autonomous drones. In academia, another term is gaining considerable traction: Explainable AI (XAI) .  XAI is a concept that refers to how well the algorithmic decisions (or behaviors), and the underlying algorithmic model can be understood by lay end-users. It helps people comprehend how AI behaves, which as research has shown, can greatly improve trust and thereby behavioral acceptance. In risk-laden AI applications such as autonomous passenger drones, XAI is all the more important because it has great potential to mitigate unwarranted concerns. At the core of our study , we examined the effects of perceived explainability in autonomous drone algorithms on trust factors. We delineated trust in three dimensions, namely performance (how well the AI operates), purpose (how well the AI’s obj...

 By Rod Abhari and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát.  Whether science is seen as “self-correcting” or “broken” depends in part on how the public understands retractions. Scientific retractions are increasingly used to correct the scientific record. Last year, over 10,000 academic articles were retracted, marking an all-time high. But while scientists may see retractions as an assurance of scientific integrity when a scientific topic has been the subject of political controversy, the public may see them as evidence of incompetence or even corruption.  Our recent article , available online in Public Understanding of Science, examined social media posts of the most discussed retracted COVID-19 articles in order to better understand the relationship between scientific retractions and the politicization of science.  When Retractions Failed In May 2020, The Lancet published a study concluding that hydroxychloroquine—a drug promoted by then-President Donald Trump—was ineffective a...

By Joop de Boer and Harry Aiking.  Photo credit: Unsplash  “Viruses have been produced in government laboratories to control our freedom”.  Conspiratorial anti-science beliefs such as the previous statement mix two related categories of unwarranted beliefs and attitudes: That of conspiratorial ideas and that of anti-science attitudes. The very existence and diffusion of such beliefs highlights an opposition between “the common people” versus “the social elite,” including academics, scholars, and experts, but this opposition shows itself in a variety of ways.  The beliefs combine a mistreatment of the people with an image of science that seriously contradicts the cultural values of intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and commitments to the welfare of others. In European countries, the importance of these values is associated with national wealth and women’s political representation. Hence, characteristics of both individuals and countries are important to clarify t...

By Alice Fleerackers and Chelsea Ratcliff. Photo credit: cclogg   New study finds that over 50% of readers misunderstand the term “preprint” when they see it mentioned in a news story. A news story describing a novel blood test for Alzheimer diagnosis. An analysis of how Donald Trump is redefining the word felon . A deep dive into a promising new approach to building AI models. These three seemingly different news stories have one thing in common. They report findings from preprints —research articles that are publicly available but haven’t yet been peer reviewed or published by a journal. If you’ve never heard of preprints before, you’re not alone. Our new study suggests that more than half of readers are confused when they see the word preprint mentioned in a news story. For most people in our study, this held true even when they read a news story that included an explanation of the term. In fact, we found that over three-quarters of people who were shown an explanation...

 By Dr Emma Kaylee Graves-Sandriman. Photo credit: TheDigitalArtist Despite their dystopic narratives, science fiction references have been used in UK news about XR to present the technologies positively. Many science fiction narratives present cautionary tales of technology, particularly when it comes to extended reality (XR; including virtual, augmented and mixed reality). My recent research examined the use of fiction references in UK news about XR. As summarised here, I found that journalists typically use fiction references to present XR positively, despite the dystopic narratives found in fiction. Fiction references in UK news In UK news, fiction references are used to support readers’ understanding of XR products through the use of metaphors, comparisons and imagery. For example, a headline about virtual reality in the Sun began with “ Enter the Matrix ” and the MailOnline described a virtual reality “ Star Trek-like headset ”. Another used imagery of Tom Cruise in Min...

 By Sevtap Savas, PhD., Kayla Crichton, Janine Taylor-Cutting, and Jason Wiseman. Podcasting can be a valuable public communication tool to connect new dots, hear new perspectives, and disseminate useful knowledge on cancer. Newfoundland, Canada | Photo credit:  Sevtap Savas Podcasting can be a valuable tool for generating public knowledge and sharing content with the wider community.  In this blog post, we discuss our experience with podcasting as a public engagement tool. First, let’s introduce our partnership! Public Interest Group on Cancer Research is a group of three scientists and 10 community members located in Newfoundland and Labrador, a Canadian province with one the highest cancer incidence and mortality rates in Canada .  One of our projects in 2023-2024 was about creating digital stories and knowledge on cancer, including sharing lived experiences, providing information on cancer care and support programs, and advocacy. A part of this project was dedi...