Popular Science Talks

"popular" Science.

Reviews of popular science books.

Do you read popular neuroscience? Do you think Oliver Sacks is spot on and use his books to engage students or do you reckon his patient reports are more like novels or science fiction? Are you taken by Antonio Damasio’s powerful arguments or do you think he did not get his philosophy exactly right? Do you enjoy the writings of William Calvin, Susan Greenfield, Vilayanur Ramachandran or do you ...

Cognitive science in popular film: the Cognitive Science Movie Index.

HAL 9000. Morpheus. Skynet. These household names demonstrate the strong cultural impact of films depicting themes in cognitive science and the potential power of popular cinema for outreach and education. Considering their wide influence, there is value to aggregating these movies and reflecting on their renderings of our field. The Cognitive Science Movie Index (CSMI) serves these purposes, l...

Popular Images versus Self-Images of Science

Introduction The public image of almost anything is substantially a visual image. Public discourses are visually mediated, and for most people images sustain when words have long been forgotten. Visual images communicate more readily to the public than other media, and even the written or spoken word translate into visual images in the human imagination. Although it has become the subject of sc...

Frankenstein's footsteps: science, genetics and popular culture

Thanks to its widespread use in prenatal care, ultrasound is perhaps the most familiar of medicine's diagnostic imaging technologies. Foetal ultrasound scans have found their way into many a family photograph album. The technology has its origins in sonar and radar developed just before and during the Second World War. In the late 1940s and 1950s, various investigators, many inspired by wartime...