Join the Policy Institute at King’s College London and HEPI on Tuesday 15 September, from 6.30pm to 7.45pm, at Bush House, London, for a free event exploring the future of higher education in England....

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is clearly proving very hard to control. Much of the difficulty must be put down to the armed conflicts on the ground, which complicate th

A new campaign group wants to offer couples the same rights whether or not they've tied the knot

In the early 2000s, during the dramatic but now almost forgotten outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle, I wrote about war metaphors and the issue of projecting control over an ‘out of …

On 1 August 2026 Yonatan Chemla and Christopher A. Voigt published a report in Trends in Biotechnology, entitled “Responsible biotechnology: An analysis of the Asilomar 2025 entreaties”. This caugh…

On 1 August 2026 Yonatan Chemla and Christopher A. Voigt published a report in Trends in Biotechnology, entitled “Responsible biotechnology: An analysis of the Asilomar 2025 entreaties”. This caugh…

I have written about AI slop and AI fakes as part of my work here on the ‘metaphor observatory’ in the era of generative AI. So, when I saw posts on Bluesky about ‘watermarks’, I pricked up my ears…

For those attending this year’s party conferences, join HEPI for our 2026 Party Conference fringe events, at the Labour Party Conference on Monday 28 September in Liverpool and the Conservative Party ...

On 4 August a wildfire started near where my sister lives in New Mexico. This was not unprecedented. Indeed I have written here on the blog about fires there in 2011 and in 2022. What was unprecede…

Higher education figures call on Labour to reverse tax on fees and warn institutions at risk of ‘going under’

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“Once again the season of the anti-sociologists is upon us…[a]curious admixture of illogic and sentiment…makes up the creed and canons of anti-sociology.” Those words come from Robert K Merto

In the early 2000s, during the dramatic but now almost forgotten outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle, I wrote about war metaphors and the issue of projecting control over an ‘out of …

In the early 2000s, during the dramatic but now almost forgotten outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle, I wrote about war metaphors and the issue of projecting control over an ‘out of …

A new RCT of air filtration devices gets heads spinning...again

I have been interested in climate change and climate change communication for a long time, most recently as part of a Leverhulme Trust funded ‘Making Science Public’ programme of research (2012-201…

A clunky booking website and my failure to check dates before pressing ‘buy’ meant that I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on its opening night here in Nottingham. I have since had a lot of

The blog posts assembled here were inspired by working on two projects. Between 2014 and 2016 I was part of a Synthetic Biology Research Centre project funded by the BBSRC focusing on bringing resp…

With the roll-out of Making Tax Digital going ahead, HMRC must provide an in-house, government-developed, fully-functional software that allows easy and confident compliance with MTD. Self-employed pe...

The Vikings are big draw for tourists and museums struggle to balance the real history.

Study finds those who speak two languages have brains that appear around six years younger than those who speak one

I was adding some final flourishes on the topic of ‘iatrocracy’ to my forthcoming book with Natewindé Sawadogo – Sickness and Social Order: Professions, States and Markets since you ask – wh

I have written a lot about the metaphors we use to talk about generative AI, but for some reason, one obvious and deep-rooted metaphor has flown under my radar: ‘copilot’ or ‘co-p…

The University of Aberdeen says it accepts there were "missteps" in its process in 2023.

Covid’s cultural effect is difficult to overcome, but we can at least resist the trend of infinite accommodation, say Mario Senovilla and Elena Liquete

Hiring of college grads is down across the board. But certain majors are able to access opportunities in a wider array of industries, new LinkedIn data shows.