Scientific Knowledge

Review by Peter Broks This is a wonderful book, both in the sense of being a pleasure to read and being full of wonders. Its overall aim is to examine the myths about science and its practitioners that have been deeply embedded in western culture over the past seven centuries. It does so by “tracing the representation of the scientists as a character in Western literature and film from the

By Kirils Makarovs & Peter Achterberg Bringing lay agency into decision-making and demonopolizing scientific expertise seems to have become an urgent matter for Europeans. In this article, we focus on the question in which countries and among whom, such democratization of science is found. If new terms such as ‘post-fact’, ‘post-truth’, ‘alternative facts’, ‘anti-science’, and ‘fake science

We found four groups regarding people’s attitudes towards science in Switzerland. The groups also substantially differ in their media use. By Tobias Füchslin As in many other countries, science enjoys a large amount of interest and public acceptance in Switzerland. While interesting, such overall findings for a population of more than eight million citizens are hardly useful for any science

By Emily Dawson A fundamental problem lies at the heart of science communication. For a project that claims to have roots in participatory democracy surprisingly little attention has been paid to issues of power and structural inequality. This omission is particularly awful given we have long known that those science communication activities high profile enough to count audiences, visitors or

By JoAnn M. Valenti, Ph.D. One hundred and ten feature-length films from 29 countries selected from 13,468 submissions were showcased late in January’s snow covered Park City, Utah mountains for the annual Sundance Film Festival. The international festival also includes documentaries, shorts, work in a new Indie Episodic category, panels, music and New Frontier’s ever-growing array of AI and

By Andrea Rubin A bread roll, lettuce, sliced tomatoes and 150 grams of a juicy burger. The atmosphere on the 5th August 2013, with food critics and chefs gathered in west London, is very different from the relaxed, cheerful mood of a barbecue with friends. Josh Schonwald, an American journalist, and Hanni Rützler, an Austrian researcher, are about to taste the first burger from bovine stem

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