A metaphor is a figure of speech where one thing is said to be another – as an implicit way of suggesting a comparison. (It is implicit, as the person hearing/reading the metaphor is expected to realise that the statement is not meant literally, but poetically.)
"We are dealing here with metaphors because the analogies are not made explicit and indeed the initial adoption of such usage may well have occurred without any conscious attempt at analogy"
Taber, 2013, p.1378 [Download this article.]
A metaphor is then different from a simile, as in a simile the comparison is made explicit (by saying one thing is 'like' / 'as' another). [See also the note at the foot of this page.]
Metaphors may be used as thinking and communication techniques. In teaching, comparisons such as metaphors may be used as one way to 'make the unfamiliar familiar'. Generally, in teaching, it would be better to use simile rather than metaphor to ensure that learners appreciate that a comparison (not an identity or equivalence) is being suggested. (Good advice to teachers might be that one cane never be too explicit about what you think you are communicating!)
Read more about 'Making the unfamiliar familiar'
Comparisons such as metaphors and similes can be found in teaching and textbooks, but also in learner's own thinking, in scientists' own work, and in popular accounts of science.
Antrhropomorphic metaphors
Teaching and science writing often includes statements about innanimate objects of non-human organisms phrased as though they are alive (they make decisions, have wants and needs, etc.) The trope is called anthropomorphism: imbuing non-human entities with human feelings and thoughts. Usually this is meant metaphorically, and such examples can be seen as a sub-class of mertaphors. Examples of anthropomorhpic references can be found here:
Read about anthropomorphism in public science discourse
Extended metaphor
Sometimes a meaphor is extended through a series of linked references. In the following example the idiom of getting stuck in a rut (when a wheel is caught in a channel, stopping a vehicle steeering in some other direction) is compared to suffering from mental illness: mental illness is like getting into a rut. Here this comparison is developed by referring to being on a specific track, and the depth of the ruts, which may have even been dug by the sufferer her/them/himself.
"In mental illness we often go down a track, you know, implicitly or unconsciously, deepen the rut in that track, we get stuck, and what psychedelics do is free up the system, and what the system is your mind, and so that stuckness and the depth of that stuckness can be sort of opened up, there can be a freeing action, but with that freedom comes a requirement to be supported when the mind opens up that way, because perhaps there's been defensive quality to digging those ruts as deep as they've been…"
Dr Robin Carhart-Harris (University of California)
Examples of science metaphors:
Black holes have to lose their 'hair'
Cells are cities buzzing with activity
Cells are fantastical living machines
Cells of the innate immune system are the first responder cells
Corners of our genome that are 'on steriods'
Dutch physicist H.A. Lorentz was Einstein's John the Baptist
Fossil turbulence and fossil galaxy groups
Lodestones (magnetic stones) feed on iron
Matter is fed into black holes
T cells are door to door wanderers that can detect even the whiff of an invader
The brain's ability to naturally produce dopamine gets fried
Was the stellar burp really a sneeze? Pulling back the veil on an astronomical metaphor
Some metaphors in scientists’/scholars’ writing about science
| Topic | Metaphor | author/source of metaphor |
| ad hoc hypotheses | "…according to psychoanalysis certain infantile experiences originate aggressiveness but, if the case is found of timorous behaviour when aggressive behaviour ought to occur, the finding is not counted as a counterexample: the ad hoc hypotheses is introduced that the subject has formed a reaction against his natural bent. In this way unfavourable evidences [sic] cannot occur and the innocent is persuaded by a gang of accomplices that are never caught because they supply each other with alibis." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| anatomy | "Take, for example, the structure of an eye, or of the skeleton of an animal,–what complexity and what artifice! In the one, a pellucid muscle; a lens formed with elliptical surfaces; a circular aperture capable of enlargement or contraction without loss of form. In the other, a framework of the most curious carpentry; in which occurs not a single straight line, nor any known geometrical curve, yet all evidently systematic, and constructed by rules which defy our research." | Sir John Frederick William Herschel, {1792 – 1871, polymath scientist} |
| atomic structure | "Our nuclear charge is located on the surface, since the number of protons and the number of neutrons in the nucleus are such that protons and neutrons should be in the outer layer of the nucleus, and only neutrons inside, that is, a shell forms on the surface of the nucleus. In addition, protons must be repelled, and also attracted by an electronic fur coat." | Henadzi Filipenka (Read 'Move over Mendeleev, here comes the new Mendel') |
| calculus | "…the geometry of [Isaac] Newton was like the bow of Ulysses, which none but its master could bend; and that, to render his methods available beyond the points to which he himself carried them, it was necessary to strip them of every vestige of that antique dress in which he had delighted to clothe them" | Sir John Frederick William Herschel, {1792 – 1871, polymath scientist} |
| chance | "The way to master chance is to face it and to discover its laws rather than to deny its objective existence. Chance is an evil ghost only if regarded as lawless chaos or as an ultimate, not further analysable, mode of being." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| chemical adsorption | "If only I had some liquid hydrogen…as charcoal cooled in it eats up almost every molecule of gas it can get at." | Henry G. J. Moseley {1887 – 1915, physicist} |
| chemical reaction | "What strikes me as objectionable in the postmodernist outlook, on the other hand, is its pervasive relativism, which attacks truth the way an acid eats up metal." | Wolfgang Smith {mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science} |
| cognition | "But may we not hope, that philosophy, if cultivated with care, and encouraged by the attention of the public, may carry its researches still farther, and discover, at least in some degree, the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations?" | David Hume |
| conduction in metals | "By repelling the clouds of electrons around the positive ions, the moving electron digs a hole for itself as it goes, easing its passage through the solid." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} ('The Nature of Solids') |
| data | "The raw datum may well contain any information, but the refined datum must convey only relevant and universally useful information; this is achieved both by pruning the raw datum …we are interested in systematising data with the aim of disclosing patterns in them, and this cannot be done unless the 'noise' is eliminated by the pruning process…" | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| data analysis | "Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; to the contrary, data should be cooked with care." | Geoffrey C. Bowker (Professor of Informatics) |
| digestion | "Pavlov…called the digestive system a 'chemical factory'." | Ivan Pavlov (quoted by Slava Gerovitch) |
| disease | animals inoculated with tuberculosis "gradually weaken, falling into the doldrums" | Jean-Antoine Villemin {1827 – 1892, physician and medical researcher} |
| ether model of electronagnetic fields | "The picture was, then, as follows: space is filled by the ether, in which the material corpuscles or atoms of ponderable matter swim around…" | Albert Einstein {1879 – 1955, theoretical physicist and peace campaigner} discussing a historical scientific model |
| energy-mass equivalence | "We might say that the principle of the conservation of energy, having previously swallowed up that of the conservation of heat, now proceeded to swallow that of the conservation of mass – and hold the field alone." | Albert Einstein {1879 – 1955, theoretical physicist and peace campaigner} |
| evolution | "Following the theory that mitochondrial DNA was passed down only from the mother (recently shown to be only approximately correct, as many such dogmas are) and that it mutated at a constant rate (recently shown to be probably incorrect; and certainly requiring ranking of different parts of the mitochondrion as better or worse timekeepers), one could argue for a 'mitochondrial Eve' for various species – producing a clock that throws key evolutionary events much further back in time than would be indicated by paleontological evidence in the form of fossil remains…" | Geoffrey C. Bowker (Professor of Informatics) |
| experiment | "…scientific experiment is a torch in the search for pattern." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| facts | "The expression [scientific fact], though common, should be avoided because facts are susceptible to scientific treatment but, by themselves, they are illiterate. Facts are neither scientific nor unscientific: they just are." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| fossils | "These wrecks of a former state of nature, thus wonderfully preserved (like ancient medals and inscriptions in the ruins of an empire), afford a sort of rude chronology, by whose aid the successive depositions of the strata in which they are found may be marked out in epochs more or less definitely terminated, and each characterized by some peculiarity which enables us to recognise the deposits of any period, in whatever part of the world they may be found." | Sir John Frederick William Herschel, {1792 – 1871, polymath scientist} |
| history of chemistry | "It may be divided, 1st, into the period of the alchemists, a lamentable epoch in the annals of intellectual wandering; 2dly, that of the phlogistic doctrines of Beccher and Stahl, in which, as if to prove the perversity of the human mind, of two possible roads the wrong was chosen; and a theory obtained universal credence on the strength of an induction, valid as such, but wrongly interpreted, which is negatived, in every instance, by an appeal to the balance." | Sir John Frederick William Herschel, {1792 – 1871, polymath scientist} |
| imagination in science | "…when the pioneer in science sends forth the groping feelers of his [or her] thoughts, he [or she] must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination." | Max Planck (Nobel prize winning physicst) |
| inferential power | "…it is the capacity formulae have of giving rise to further formulae – with the assistance of a logical or mathematical forceps." | Mario Bunge |
| information technology | "Information technology constitutes the twist in the Möbius strip that takes us from arguments internal to a field (how is the past conceptualized [sic] in the case of a historical science like geology) to its exterior (how is information about the past stored)." | Geoffrey C. Bowker (Professor of Informatics) |
| Isaac Newton | "Newton was not an actuary who could squeeze a functional relationship out of columns of data; he was an inspired detective who, from a set of apparently disconnected events (a bark, a footprint, a faux pas, a stain) concluded 'The gamekeeper did it'." | Norwood Russell Hanson |
| logic | "Since every formula has some logical form or other – and is on occasion nothing but a logical form – we must expect to find fibres of formal science [i.e., logic and mathematics] everywhere in the body of science, even if such fibres are not apparent." | Mario Bunge |
| logic | "For one thing logic and mathematics – the cement that binds scientific concepts – are symbolic." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| magnetism | "Sphere of Coition [also translated as Orbe of Coition], is all that space through which the smallest magnetic is moved by a magnet" | William Gilbert |
| magnetism | "To date we have declared the nature & powers of the loadstone, & also the properties & essence of iron; it now remains to show their mutual affinities, & kinship, so to speak, & how very closely conjoined these substances are. At the highest part of the terrestrial globe, or at its perishable surface & rind, as it were, these two bodies usually originate & are produced in one and the same matrix, as twins in one mine." | William Gilbert |
| mathematics in science | "Thus the partial differential equation entered theoretical physics as a handmaid, but has gradually become mistress." | Albert Einstein |
| meteors | "…analysis of the meteor that gave birth 25,000 years ago to Meteor Crater in Arizona showed that it did not contain uranium." [the source does not explain how the meteor {which was destroyed on impact 25 000 years ago} was analysed, or who carried out this task] | Hubert Krivine {physicist} |
| modern physics | "In a famous lecture before the Royal Society, [William Thomson/Lord Kelvin] warned of two 'dark clouds' threatening to darken the heavens of theoretical physics." [The 'clouds' were relativity and quantum theory.] | Reported in Schwenk, E. (1994). My name is Becquerel. |
| molecular structure | "In forming an organic compound, the carbon skeleton clothes itself by establishing covalent bonds to other atoms with its remaining unpaired electrons." | Alan Holden ('The Nature of Solids') |
| muscle activity | "…it is possible to group the isolated effect signs into units that, in the form of self-contained motor impulses or rhythmically arranged melodies of impulses, produce effects in the muscles subject to them." | Jakob von Uexküll {1864 – 1944, biologist} |
| natural products chemistry | "Indeed, in the great laboratories of nature it can hardly be doubted that almost every kind of chemical process is going forwards, by which compounds of every description are continually forming." | Sir John Frederick William Herschel, {1792 – 1871, polymath scientist} |
| Nature | "…the fecund womb of Nature" (Nature was commonly personified as a woman) | Athanasius Kircher (quoted by John Glassie) |
| nature of science | "…not all statements which lack a logical foundation are scientifically worthless, and that [such] short-sighted formalism stops up the very fountain at which a Galileo, a Kepler, a Newton, and many other great physicists have quenched their thirst for scientific knowledge and insight. | Max Planck (Nobel prize winning physicist) |
| nature of science | "The law of causality is neither true nor false. It is rather a heuristic principle, a signpost – and in my opinion, our most valuable signpost – to help us find our bearings in a bewildering maze of occurrences, and to show us the direction in which scientific research must advance in order to achieve fertile results." | Max Planck (Nobel prize winning physicist) |
| nature of science | "The more the edifice of science develops, and the more freely it rises into the air, the more it requires the examination and the continual renewal of its foundations." | Ernst Cassirer (philosopher) |
| nature of science | "The roots of exact science feed in the soil of human life." | Max Planck (Nobel prize winning physicst) |
| nature of science | "It is here that the investigation of the hidden powers of nature becomes a mine, every vein of which is pregnant with inexhaustible wealth, and whose ramifications appear to extend in all directions wherever human wants or curiosity may lead us to explore." | Sir John Frederick William Herschel, {1792 – 1871, polymath scientist} |
| novelty in science | "…several meanings and roles may consistently be assigned to the symbol '𝝍': it may at the same time belong to an abstract function space, it may represent the physical state of a system as a whole, the de Broglie wave associated with the latter, the amplitude of the probability of position, and so on. For the latter interpretation M. Born was awarded the Nobel prize – which is given to the fathers of remarkable ideas, not their baptisers unless the name happens to convey the meaning." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| observation | "…far from being accepted at their face value, observation reports are trimmed with theoretical shears." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| plant nutrition | "the multiplying tissue cells of the oak will have to organise themselves into organs – in roots, trunk, and leaf canopy, which captures the sunshine… At the same time, the canopy serves as an umbrella that carries the precious moisture from the sky to the fine roots under the earth." | Jakob von Uexküll |
| philosophical commitments informing science | "Scientific knowledge contains no philosophical assumptions. From this it is often concluded that scientific research has neither philosophical presuppositions nor a philosophical import, whence science and philosophy would be water-tight compartments. But this is a hurried conclusion. Philosophy may not be found in the finished scientific buildings…but it is part of the scaffolding employed in their construction." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| principle of lawfulness | "What ground is there to accept the principle of lawfulness: might it not be just the carrot that keeps science going? … the search for law – the marrow of scientific research…the principle of lawfulness, as usually understood, is far from being hollow and there is no advantage to emptying it…. And no science lover could sensibly reject this protective and programmatic hypothesis, because to kill the principle of lawfulness would be a worse crime than killing the golden egg hen: it is not just a piece of knowledge but a motor of knowledge." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| purpose of science | People are rational beings; and as such receive from science their proper food and nourishment ["Man is a reasonable being; and as such, receives from science his proper food and nourishment…"] | David Hume |
| relativity | "This non-rigid reference-body, which might appropriately be termed a 'reference-mollusc', is the main equivalent to a Gaussian four-dimensional co-ordinate system chosen arbitrarily. … The general principle of relativity requires that all these molluscs can be used as reference-bodies with equal right and equal success in the formulation of the general laws of nature; the laws themselves must be quite independent of the choice of mollusc." | Albert Einstein |
| Saturn's rings | [The rings become more difficult to see from Earth when they are not at an olbique angle] "Has Saturn, perhaps, devoured his own children?" | Galileo Galilei |
| science | "The totality of these connections [of the elementary concepts of everyday thinking with complexes of sense experiences] – none of which is expressible in conceptual terms – is the only thing which differentiates the great building which is science from a logical but empty scheme of concepts." | Albert Einstein {1879 – 1955, theoretical physicist and peace campaigner} |
| scientific enquiry | "…the great work of turning up [Nature's] hitherto unbroken soil, and exposing the treasures so long concealed." | Sir John Frederick William Herschel, {1792 – 1871, polymath scientist} |
| scientific enquiry | "the successful process of scientific enquiry demands continually the alternate use of both the inductive and deductive method. The path by which we rise to knowledge must be made smooth and beaten in its lower steps, and often ascended and descended, before we can scale our way to any eminence, much less climb to the summit. The achievement is too great for a single effort; stations must be established, and communications kept open with all below…" "In such cases the inductive and deductive methods of enquiry may be said to go hand in hand, the one verifying the conclusions deduced by the other; and the combination of experiment and theory, which may thus be brought to bear in such cases, forms an engine of discovery infinitely more powerful than either taken separately." | Sir John Frederick William Herschel, {1792 – 1871, polymath scientist} |
| scientific explanation | "Scientific explanation…is performed in the bosom of theories." "…every deduction is made in some context and that the peculiarity of scientific deduction is that it takes place in the bosom of scientific theories, whether adult or not. Ordinary explanation, by contrast, is made in the body of ordinary knowledge, which is a rather poor and incoherent mosaic." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| scientific explanation | "We might go as far as saying that explanation consummates the marriage of reason and experience, since it is a logical argument requiring empirical data and tested (or at least testable) generalisations". | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| scientific knowledge | "In "this opake of nature and of soul," the perverse activity of the alchemists from time to time struck out a doubtful spark; and our illustrious countryman, Roger Bacon, shone out at the obscurest moment, like an early star predicting dawn. It was not, however, till the sixteenth century that the light of nature began to break forth with a regular and progressive increase. | Sir John Frederick William Herschel, {1792 – 1871, polymath scientist} |
| scientific principles | "Principles constitute the fixed points of the compass that are required successful orientation in the world of phenomena." | Ernst Cassirer |
| senses | "…the task of the sensory organs…they serve as a sieve for the physiochemical effects of the outside world." | Jakob von Uexküll |
| symmetry in nature | "Flowers, nature's gentlest children, are also conspicuous for their colors [sic] and their cyclic symmetry." | Hermann Weyl (mathematician, physicist and philosopher) |
| syphilis | "…syphilis… which is the consequence of contagious and leprous affections of the genitals, is a daughter of leprosy and can in certain circumstances in turn become the mother of leprosy." | Friedrich Alexander Simon (1793- 1869, German physician) |
| the solar system | "The earth moreover is fertilised by the sun and conceives offspring every year." "Meanwhile the earth has intercourse with the sun, and is impregnated for its yearly parturition." [These are two alternative translations from the original Latin] | Nicolaus Copernicus (astronomer) |
| solids | "When a solid is made of a single kind of atom, the fact that it is solid shows that the atoms are all attracting one another. Then each may be expected to collect around it as many of its fellows as it can." | Alan Holden ('The Nature of Solids') |
| stars | "The time required for a star to consume its nuclear fuel is so long (many billions of years in most cases) that only a few stars die in our galaxy per century; and the evolution of a star from the end point of thermonuclear burning to its final dead state is so rapid that its death throes are observable for only a few years." | Professor Kip Thorne in a paper in Science [discussed here] |
| the universe | "No stellar parallax is visible to the naked eye in Copernicus' geokinetic astronomy because the starry sphere is no longer adjacent to Saturn's, but it enormously remote. Gone forever was Ptolemy's cosmic jewel box, with its shining stars some 20,000 earth-radii away from us." | Edward Rosen (historian of science) |
| the universe | "As a Kuhnian paradigm, however, the notion of a clockwork universe is expendable; it is not an essential of science, but only a transitional aid." | Wolfgang Smith {mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science} |
| theory development | "…it is a rule of theory construction that as many simplifications as needed are to be made at the start, relaxing them gradually and only according as they are shown to constitute too brutal amputations." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| theory falsification | "As far as Earth's age is concerned, in fact, the discovery of radioactive heat is principally of historic interest: it was simply the first battering ram that ruined the mathematical construction that Kelvin had bitterly defended." | Hubert Krivine {physicist} |
| vacuously true conditionals | "the air of paradox should be thin in the sciences, where we never bother to state conditionals with antecedents known to be false…Take for instance 'Clairvoyants discover every secret': This statement is vacuously true* because…there are no clairvoyants. Yet we do not accept this truth because it is pointless, just as the zoologist has no use for the truth* 'Centaurs are wise'." [*i.e., there are no clairvoyants that do not discover every secret (because there are no genuine clairvoyants) just as there are no centaurs who are not wise (because there are no real centaurs).] | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| volcanoes | Volcanoes as "vent-holes, or breath-pipes of Nature" | Athanasius Kircher, quoted by John Glassie |
Science metaphors in broadcast media and science journalism:
| Topic | Metaphor | Source |
| bacteria | Thiomargarita magnifica is "this Godzilla of the microbial world" | BBC Science in Action website ('Monster microbe' episode) |
| bacteria | "…when you introduce phage to a lawn of bacteria…"[Example of a 'dead' metaphor] | Tom Ireland, science journalist, interviewed on BBC's Inside Science |
| Betelgeuse [red supergiant star] | "RP: …your latest paper, you describe this as Betelgeuse has been left ringing ["When applied to Betelgeuse, this suggests that over time, the post-outburst overtone ringing that we observe may fade, or switch back to the fundamental mode."] … "Basic physics says that when you have a star, of that mass, and that radius, it's going to go in and out and pulsate on [a frequency of] 400 days, but after the mass was ejected it starts ringing with a much shorter period…" | Dr Andrea Dupree, Associate Director Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian (interviewed by Roland Pease on BBC's 'Science in Action') |
| black holes | "'What makes the gamma-ray burst … is feeding a newly-formed black hole matter at an extremely high rate…The process that gives rise to the production of this neutron-rich material is actually outflows from the disc that's feeding the black hole." | Prof. Brian Metzger Department of Physics and Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University, reported in Chemistry World |
| black holes | "We are looking at it with X-ray telescopes and radio telescopes to see if maybe we can detect a little bit of emission from the black hole if it is eating the solar wind of its star, so a tiny bit of that gas is probably being captured by the black hole, and we will see if it is possible to detect any X-ray or radio emission from that." | Kareem El-Badry, astrophysicist at Harvard University / Caltech interviewed on BBC's Science in Action |
| black holes | "A black hole is a region of space where you have just crammed so much stuff into a such a small space, that gravity kind of goes into overdrive, it grabs onto everything, and it won't let go, and that includes light, so even if a light beam goes into a black hole it just kind of gets sucked in and stays there." [MC: "The ultimate waste disposal unit, stuff gets sucked in and can't escape."] | Prof. Andrew Pontzen Professor of Cosmology, UCL, talking to Marnie Chesterton on BBC Inside Science |
| bladder tumours | DT: "The Y-negative cells cause an immune evasive environment in the tumour, and that, if you will, paralyses, the T-cells, and exhausts them, makes them tired and ineffective, and this prevents the Y-negative tumour from being rejected, therefore allowing it to grow much better." NPH "Exhausted T cells have lost their ability to kill cancer cells, and have lots of proteins on their surface known as checkpoints , which put the brakes on immune responses. But this exhausting environment made by the tumours could also be their undoing" | Nick Petrić Howe talking to Prof. Dan Theodorescu, director of the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute, on the Nature Podcast. (Read more here.) |
| central nervous system | "the nervous system is a puppet-master, effectively it controls the circulation, it controls how blood flows in and out of a certain part of the body…" "And in some people the nervous system can be so sensitive that [surgery] would be enough to send the nervous system into a tail spin of over-protection and hypersensitivity." | Dr Deepak Ravindran, clinical lead for pain medicine at the Royal Berkshire Hospital (speaking on BBC Radio 4 'Room 5', Series 2, Episode 3: Poppy) |
| chemical reactions | "in the ortho lithiation of an S-trifluoromethyl sulfoximine-substituted benzene…the aggregates 'cannibalise' the base and stop it from reacting…A team…has now found various 'base-eating' aggregates." | Chemistry World article (Author: Katrina Krämer) |
| chemical reactions | "…click chemistry…and bioorthogonal chemistry which is a cousin of click chemistry…" | Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Professor of Chemistry at Stanford interviewed on BBC's Science in Action |
| colliding galaxies | "…we know that galaxies merge over their history, and we know that most galaxies harbour a very large black hole in their hearts, and when two galaxies merge, each of them carrying a black hole, the two black holes kind of sink slowly towards the centre of the newly formed larger galaxies…" | Dr Davide Castelvecchi, Senior Reporter, Physical Sciences, Nature talking on the Nature podcast |
| digestion | "When microbes break down food with their arsenal of chemicals and in turn produce other chemicals, it is known as fermentation." | Broadcast adaptation of Food for Life by Tim Spector, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King's College London |
| epigenetics | "There are two waves of genome-wide epigenetic erasure and reconstruction, that happen during the life-time of an individual. The first one happens during the development of the eggs and sperms when the epigenetic slate that is established in the cells that are going to give rise to eggs and sperm, is wiped clean, and basically your D.N.A. is epigenetically naked. And then it starts to build new epigenetic modifications that are specific to an egg or are specific top sperm. And then the second wave of epigenetic erasure and reconstruction happens immediately upon fertilisation. So that egg is fertilised by a sperm, and then immediately the epigenetic slate is wiped clean again." | Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, interviewed on 'The Life Scientific' |
| forces | "At the core of nuclear physics lies a tug of war between two of the four fundamental forces: on one side, the strong nuclear force acts to hold the nucleus together by binding the protons to the neutrons; on the other, electromagnetism acts to blow it apart by repelling the positively charged protons… As nuclei get larger, therefore, the battle between the two gets more even, and eventually electromagnetism begins to win." | Chemistry World article (Author:Tim Wogan) |
| fossil animals from about 462 million years ago discovered in Wales | "This is at a time in the middle of the Ordovician when life was diversifying spectacularly, but we only really know that from the shelly fossils. So, it is a completely new window in terms of telling us how life went from these very simple Cambrian communities, to things that are much more like the ones we have in the modern day." | Dr Joe Botting, Amgueddfa Cymru (Museum Wales) taking on BBC 'Science in Action' |
| fulgurites | "Dubbed 'fossilized lightning', fulgurites are tubes of fused material created when a large electrical current travels through sand." | Physics World article (Author: Sam Jarman) |
| gene regulation | MZ-G "So we take human embryonic stem cells, in which we induce expression of specific genes, to initiate programme of development that will [re?]create these two extra embryonic structures that we would like to put together with human embryonic stem cells." RP: "So you give them a kind of genetic kick?" MZ-G: "Yeah, we give them a kick to develop into the right orientation…" | Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz (University of Cambridge, and California Institute of Technology) interviewed by Roland Pease for an episode of BBC's Science in Action |
| gravitational waves | "…because you have billions of galaxies, many, many of them have pairs of supermassive black holes in them, some of those must be emitting a lot of gravitational waves, and the combined hum from all these pairs of supermassive gravitational black holes in the entire observable universe, together, gives the signal…" | Dr Davide Castelvecchi, Senior Reporter, Physical Sciences, Nature talking on the Nature podcast |
| infection | "Fine particles of pollution can ferry influenza deep into the lungs, according to new research" | Noah Baker, speaking on the Nature Podcast |
| invasive alien species | "The water hyacinths in Lake Victoria are literally [sic] choking that lake…" | Gaia Vince presenting an episode of BBC Inside Science |
| invasive alien species | "some these invasive alien species are incredible hitchhikers, and they will hop onto the kayak, and this is both the little tiny invertebrates like little shrimps, but also plants as well…" | Professor Helen Roy, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, interviewed by Gaia Vince during an episode of BBC Inside Science |
| Joint European Torus (JET) nuclear fusion facility | "The flywheels store up energy from the electricity grid, so that the country's lights don't dim, as JET's powerful electromagnets suck up huge currents." | Roland Pease speaking on an episode of BBC's Science in Action |
| metabolism | "The primary regulator of fat cell formation (adipogenesis) is considered to be peroxisome proliferator activated receptor gamma (PPAR-)….This receptor has a large promiscuous pocket that is vulnerable to hacking by multiple obesogenic ligands." | Chemistry World article (Author: Anthony King) |
| microbes | "Microbes, like us, need a good night's sleep. And if you give them that time to sleep, then they have a cleaning team that comes out at night, they have a shift change, so scavengers come tidying up your gut lining and make your gut this perfectly-oiled machine that our ancestors had but we've lost." | Tim Spector Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King's College London speaking on BBC's Just One Thing – with Michael Mosley |
| microbiome | "And it is increasingly thought that the microbiome is a key component, a key part of the engine that explains why we are seeing this collective change in chronic disease risk… the largest microbiome is within the gut, and it is of such significant importance, not just because it's the largest, it's because that's where the majority of our immune engine lives and exists… And what you see is that the microbiome is a very important part of the engine room that explains why a high fibre diet has so many important health properties…" | Dr James Kinross, Senior Lecturer in Colorectal Surgery and a Consultant Surgeon at Imperial College London, speaking on 'Start the Week' |
| microbiome | " The microbiome has so many different molecular languages that it speaks…" | Dr James Kinross, Senior Lecturer in Colorectal Surgery and a Consultant Surgeon at Imperial College London, speaking on 'Start the Week' |
| neurotransmitters | "…anti-depressants – as far as we know, these drugs work by effecting neurotransmitters which carry messages within the brain" [I consider this must be metaphorical, as otherwise it commits a category error – nothing is transferred to, and then from, the neurotransmitter] | Horatio Clare presenting BBC's 'Is Psychiatry working?' |
| neutron stars | "An unusual pulsating radio signal emerging from a 'stellar graveyard' could be evidence for a new class of neutron star…'What is surprising about this discovery is that it resides in the neutron star graveyard'…" | Dr Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydeney, reported in Physics World |
| placenta | "So the placenta has a series of systems which means it acts like a gatekeeper to prevent the mother's hormones going over to the baby." | Rebecca Reynolds – Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, speaking on an edition of BBC's In Our Time |
| plankton | Carol: "But, then, when the phytoplankton die, and when the zoo plankton defecate and produce faecal pellets, these particles rain down through the ocean, so we call it marine snow because you can imagine it drifting slowly down through the depths to 4000 metres." | Prof Carol Robinson Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of East Anglia, talking on an episode of BBC In Our Time |
| pulsars | "…some of these Stars, they also also spew out radio waves…" | Dr Davide Castelvecchi, Senior Reporter, Physical Sciences, Nature talking on the Nature podcast |
| reaction mechanism | "the … CF3 molecule, causing it to spit out a fluorine atom…" | Article in Chemistry World [discussed here] |
| red giants | "a stellar burp…a star going through a bit of a burp…the star Eta Carinae which went through a stellar burp, just like Betelgeuse did" | Article in Chemistry World [discussed here] |
| red giants | "So bloated is this ageing star…" | Article on the newsite 'Gizmodo' [discussed here] |
| red giants | Betelgeuse underwent "a sneeze" | Article in the New York Times [discussed here] |
| red giants | Betelgeuse has an "injury" and was "recovering after blowing its top" | NASA website [discussed here] |
| spinal cord injury | RP: "…before the rehabilitation, all these damaged nerves are sort of screaming to try and get the message through to the legs, but it is not working. But, the, some of the nerves learn that they can actually do this, and the other ones become less loud. In other words you are sort of retraining those nerves almost." JB: "Exactly, so if you look at this nerve, it is probably not dominant when you have this lesion and all the others are speaking very loud and they cannot really make a proper signal, and then, with the rehab, this nerve is taking the lead, and is shutting down the others. So that is why probably there is less activity, the others stop talking and this is the one that is now talking the loudest and that is helping for the movement." | Roland Pease interviewing Jocelyne Bloch, Associate Professor at the Université de Lausanne, on BBC's Science in ActionProfessor |
| stars | "Across the universe, stars have been dying for millions of years…" | Lord Melvyn Bragg talking on BBC radio show 'In Our Time' [discussed here] |
| stars | "…when it runs out of its fuel at the core, that's when you reach the end of its lifetime and we start going through the death processes" | Prof. Carolin Crawford (University of Cambridge) talking on BBC radio show 'In Our Time' [discussed here] |
| stars | "massive stars … have to chomp through their fuel supply so furiously that they exhaust it more rapidly" | Prof. Carolin Crawford (University of Cambridge) talking on BBC radio show 'In Our Time' [discussed here] |
| stars | "In astronomy, we are dealing with fossils as well, when we look out into the universe, the light has take a long time to reach us, even though light travels very fast, the further out you look, the longer the it's taken to get to you…" | Prof. Andrew Pontzen Professor of Cosmology, UCL, talking on BBC Inside Science |
| star systems | "Regardless of what these planets are like, their existence in resonant orbits alone is notable. Theory suggests that the planets formed in these resonances. Ordinarily these resonances are then destroyed by gravitational perturbations from passing stars or marauding giant planets, but around HD 110067 this doesn't seem to have happened." | Keith Cooper writing in Physics World |
| supernovae | "part of the supernova explosion we have been talking about, and it carves out a bubble within the interstellar medium" | Prof. Carolin Crawford (University of Cambridge) talking on BBC radio show 'In Our Time' [discussed here] |
| T cells | "The Y-negative cells cause an immune evasive environment in the tumour, and that, if you will, paralyses, the T cells, and exhausts them, makes them tired and ineffective, and this prevents the Y-negative tumour from being rejected, therefore allowing it to grow much better." | Prof. Dan Theodorescu speaking on the Nature Podcast (read about this) |
| T cells | "Exhausted T cells have lost their ability to kill cancer cells, and have lots of proteins on their surface known as checkpoints, which put the brakes on immune responses."" | Nick Petrić Howe speaking on the Nature Podcast (read about this) |
| water voles | GV: "What sort of part of the jigsaw puzzle does it complete to bring this species back in particular?" AL: "They are a missing part of the food chain. So, through their burrows they will dig up through the soil, they will bring soil nutrients to the surface, which helps with vegetation. They themselves are consumers of vegetation, so they'll nibble bits of plants, leaving room for other plants to come through so changing the plant composition of the banks. And Then, of course, they are a food source for predators, so foxes, herons, otters, hopefully not mink, we hope that we've not got mink here anymore, but also birds of prey so you know, really vital part of, the missing Mars bar, essentially, of the food chain." | Dr Ashley Lyons, Conservation Scientist, RSPB, interviewed by Gaia Vince on BBC Inside Science |
Science metaphors in popular science books:
| Topic | Metaphor | Source |
| Alzheimer's disease | "Slicing into her brain, Alzheimer found odd tangles of protein fibres and a sticky plaque called amyloid, so much that the organ was basically stuffed with a deadly jam that had been muffling her memories." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| amphidops | "All of these species have a remarkable ability to move about by using a diverse array of swimming, digging, and hopping behaviours. They accomplish this with a virtual Swiss army knife of legs: some are large, others small, some face forward, still others face backward." | Neil Shubin Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| anthrax | "Central to its success is a potent three-part toxin made up of protective antigen [PA], lethal factor [LF] and oedema factor EF [oedema factor]. … PA is the muscled henchman of the group that attaches to the surface of our macrophages and gathers EF and LF to its side." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| anthrax | "…anthrax, which lurks in the alveoli awaiting its cellular carriage: our macrophages" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antibodies | "…[a new baby] will have to build up her own portfolio of protective antibodies…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antibodies | "The classic example of haute couture immunotherapy is the monoclonal antibody' | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antibodies | "…the IgA effectively blocks and disables the invaders' docking stations…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antibodies | "some mAbs [monoclonal antibodies] are essentially naked, and work by painting a bullseye on the surface of cells they attach to, labelling them for destruction by white blood cells…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antibiotic resistance | "For instance, they [bacteria] can change their surface so the antibiotic can no longer get inside the bacterium, or develop antibiotic bilge pumps that prevent the drug from building up. Alternatively they may create new metabolic pathways that mean they can bypass the antibiotic's roadblock." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antibiotic resistance | "The problem is we are setting up easy antibiotic assault courses all over the place by not finishing a course of antibiotics, or taking them unnecessarily providing a perfect training ground for bacteria to become resistant by exposing them to antibiotics again and again until some of them adapt instead of dying." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antibiotic resistance | "Thankfully the bacteria in question were found to be susceptible to other antibiotics, a fact that prevented them from being the microbial horsemen of the apocalypse." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antigens | "Three of the HLA [human leukocyte antigens] molecules… take peptides …from within the cell, and display them on the cell's surface … this biological barcode lets the T cell know that it's looking at a self-cell that should be defended, not attacked." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| astronomy | "Astronomy is thus a four-legged animal standing on sound and false ideas at the front and sound and false observations at the rear. Amazingly, the beast can limp forward, sometimes even gallop, from one discovery to the next. And lurching on its way to valuable information about the nature and history of the universe it has in passing exposed the character of those ephemera, the tails of comets." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| antiquity of species | "If, as Pauling and Zuckerkandl speculated, proteins evolved at a constant rate, you could use differences in the sequence of proteins to calculate the time that these species shared [a] common ancestor….Proteins in the bodies of different species could serve as a kind of clock for understanding evolution: no rocks or fossils would be needed to tell the time in the history of life. This idea, so utterly outrageous when it was first proposed, is now known as the 'molecular clock' and is used in many instances to calculate the antiquity of diverse species." | Neil Shubin Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| bacteria | "[Francisco] Mojica made a bold and untested hypothesis – that this planidrome-space system is a bacterial weapon against viruses." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| bacteria | "…this system evolved in an arms race with viruses. Viruses attack bacteria as well as humans, We fend most of them off with our immune system. This bacterial mechanisms …uses a molecular guide and scalpel: the palindromes help form the guides that bring a molecular scalpel to cut the viral DNA to render it harmless." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| bacteria | "…the dark-arts of pus-producing bacteria…" | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| bones | "…bones aren't static structures, they're living leviathans constantly being broken down and rebuilt by the bony equivalent of yin and yang: osteoclasts and osteoblasts." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| Bose-Einstein condensates | "Normally the [Bose-Einstein] condensate would be totally opaque, but the first laser creates a sort of ladder through the condensate that the second light beam can claw its way along – at vastly reduced speeds." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| cancer | "The immune system not only sculpts the face of cancer cells…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| cell death | "Every cell has many caspases within it, all of which are kept well under control in an inactive state. However once the first few are activated they play an epic game of tag, recruiting more and more capsases, amplifying each other's actions and driving the cell ever faster towards death." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| cell death | "…the caspases take an active part in dismantling the cell. They rip apart its internal scaffolding, shred the proteins in the nucleus and put a 'cease and desist' on the cell's DNA repair mechanisms. Death is rapid: within hours of the self-destruct command the cell has set its affairs in order, reduced in size and dismembered itself into small packets that can be devoured by macrophages." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| cell signalling | "Some signals are proactive, for example when cells periscope from their surface a receptor called ULBP (UL16-binding protein). Any NK cell that finds itself shaking hands with a ULBP receptor knows it has found a stressed-out cell. The same is true if the NK cell extends its receptors to the cell only to find it omits parts of the secret-handshake expected from a normal cell." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| chemical reactions | "The superheavy scientists [sic*] had worked out how to perform chemistry on their fleeting children…" [* i.e., scientists working on superheavy elements, not obese scientists] | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| chemical signalling | "The witch's brew of communicative chemicals in our bodies…" | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| comets | "Soothsayers and fiction-writers have a case: one day the earth will collide with a bright comet or its dark corpse and the result will be world-wide mayhem." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| comets | "Comets…obtrude because they jaywalk across the paths of planets." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| comets | "If the 'new' comets seem to be coming from starting points half a light-year out, that is where they have been in residence since the birth of the Solar System. Such is the leading idea about the origin of comets, that is to say the theory not disfavoured in Cometsville. All the other other categories of comets are, in this scheme, pilgrims from the coolest provinces of the Solar System who lost their return tickets and are trapped in shorter orbits around the Sun, waiting either to perish in the heat or to be evicted into interstellar space and exiled from the Sun for ever. But the theory requires the existence of a large population of unseen comets to sustain the pilgrimage, and thus it endorses the opinion of Johann Kepler that 'there are as many comets in the sky as fishes in the sea'. The devotion of comets to the gravitational faith that unites the Solar System appears in this: their first journeys from the outer darkness to the altar of the Sun take a very long time indeed, for the sake of a fleeting visit. When the priests of this faith, the celestial mechanicians on the Earth, interrogate 'new' comets now arriving in the Space Age they admit to travelling for several million years." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| comets | "After the virgin comet Kohouteck was scrutinised by radio and visible, ultraviolet and infrared light, one could sum up the detectable constituents of comets in general in one word: noisome." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| comets | "But the dust disperses continually and is subject to the same kind of gravitational football from the planets as comets are. In time, the waifs become impossible to identify with their parent comets, and they can encounter the Earth singly at any time." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| comets | "The more times a comet visits the region close to the Sun, the less it will retain its original, and ancient, Solar System secrets, as they are moulted and left floating around in space." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| comet sampling | "It was soon seen that the dust had produced distinctive carrot-shaped burrows into the aerogel collector that were a few millimetres in length, making some of them easy to spot in the laboratory. On closer inspection, however, there was a slight problem. As the particles had burrowed their way into the aerogel it was found that they'd tended to break apart. Little bits and pieces of the dust ended up being deposited all along the inside surface of the burrows. Often at the very end, having excavated its way right into the aerogel, would be a tough piece of rock that became known as the 'terminal particle'." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| comet sampling | "The intake pipes for COSAC (Cometary Sampling and Composition) are located on the base of the Philae lander, and those for Ptolemy are located on the top. … COSAC is most likely to have ingested some of the volatiles in the ice-poor dust kicked up during the brief initial touchdown, whereas Ptolemy breathed in the cometary gases higher above the surface…" | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| comets and meteors | "Comets are sometimes confused with their impetuous kin, the meteors and meteorites that dash into the Earth's upper air from outer space [sic] and either burn up as 'shooting stars' or reach the ground as incandescent lumps of iron, stone and tar." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| complement system | "Genetic studies have also demonstrated the importance of another complement skill: sprinkling C3b on the surface of bacteria makes them much more appetising to microbe-munching cells like macrophages and neutrophils. People with genetic mutations that reduce complement's ability to fulfil this seasoning role suffer from repeated pus-heavy infections in childhood." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects [Read about this book] |
| crators | "The pockmarked surface of the Moon provides evidence to suggest that a range of objects impacted the early Earth-Moon system, and the other rocky planets, plenty of times in the past, allowing ample opportunity for water to have been parachuted in from space." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| CRISPR-Cas [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats] | "With this technique, scientists can target regions of the genome with two kinds of tools: a molecular scalpel to cut DNA and a guide to bring the scalpel to the right place." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| cytokines | "…some diseases can cause this system to go into overdrive, serving the body with with an overwhelming cytokine spamming." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you. [Read about this book] |
| D.N.A. | "New experiments reveal a multibillion-year history filled with cooperation, repurposing, competition, theft, and war. And that is just what happens inside DNA itself." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| D.N.A. | "Hill, Lettice, and the team started trudging through the entire genome until they saw the signal [of DNA inserted into a mouse]. The snippet inserted was almost a million bases away from the Sonic hedgehog gene. That's an enormous amount of genetic real estate between the site of the mutation and the site of the Sonic gene." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| elementary particles | "By the 1950s, elementary (or seemingly elementary) particles were proliferating, and new 'quantum numbers' were invented to describe them: charge, spin, parity (related to mirror image symmetry), isospin, strangeness, charm (the last a humorous characteristic bestowed on some particles that live a charmed life, meaning that they lasted much longer than expected before decaying into other particles)." | Lindley, David – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| elements | "Unlike other drugs, lithium is older than we are, born in the big blast that gave our universe its considerable kick start." | Lauren Slater The Drugs that Changed our Minds. The history of psychiatry in ten treatments. |
| embryonic development | "…apoptosis sculpts and moulds the growing embryo, carving out a mouse or a kitten or a fish, from a tiny ball of cells." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| entropy | "Planck…objected to Boltzmann that if his interpretation of entropy was correct, then the existence of the universe as we know it – in a state very far from equilibrium, with stars churning out energy into empty space, and some of its being greedily taken up on the surfaces of planets to fuel life -seemed very unlikely indeed." | David Lindley – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| equation | "Dirac's electron equation was a strange beast, using novelties of mathematics previously unseen in physics to do its job." | David Lindley – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| ethics | "…medical ethics is a subject that often seems drier than the dusty remains of Tutankhamun." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| evolution | "The virus was hacked, neutered, and domesticated for a new function in brains." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| evolution | "…multicellular bodies are a confederation of parts that arose at different times, sometimes in different places. These parts, some in conflict, some cooperating, all changing over time fuel the fire of evolution." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| evolution | "Traits can appear in one species only to be borrowed, stolen, and modified for new uses by another. Hosts can inherit a ready-made invention rather than having to build it themselves." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| evolution | "Ever twisting, turning, and at war with itself and external invaders, DNA provides the fuel for evolution's changes. | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| evolution | With cells and genetic material of different species merging and genes continually duplicating and repurposing, life's history flows more like a braided and meandering river than a straight channel. | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| gene regulation | "For a gene to become active, a molecular game of Twister needs to happen." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| gene regulation | "Recall that there are molecular switches across the genome that, under the right circumstances, turn genes on and off. Most of these switches lie right next to the genes they activate. Since progesterone is the trigger for the formation of decidual stromal cells, then we could reasonably assume that the switches would be responsive to it. The genetic switches would be tethered to a sequence that recognized [sic] progesterone. When progesterone was present, the switch, the switch would activate and the gene would make protein." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| gene regulation | "…each genetic switch had the telltale signature of a jumping gene" | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| genetics | "The patterns of gene activity were pointing to a kind of biological cut-and-paste: a genetic process used to form the main body axis was redeployed to make other bodily structures." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| genome | "The genome is the stuff of B movies, like a graveyard filled with ghosts. Bits and pieces of ancient viral fragments lie everywhere-by some estimates, 8 percent of our genome is composed of dead viruses, more that a hundred thousand of them at last count. Some of these fossil viruses have kept a function, to make proteins useful in pregnancy, memory, and countless other activities discovered in the past five years. Others sit like corpses where they attached to the genome only to be extinguished and decay." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| genome | Ten percent of our genome is made up of ancient viruses, and at least another 60 percent consists of repeated elements made by jumping genes gone wild." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| immune system | "…the incredible arsenal that lives within us…" "…the creepy critters that like to call us home … our immune system tries to show them the door." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| immune system | "Thus all my innate defences would essentially hold the fort, and in many instances this first line would be enough to wipe out the invader before the adaptive system gets a chance to craft bespoke weaponry." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| immune system | "Despite their diminutive size, the immune system is eminently capable of spotting these tiny sneaks [e.g., E. coli], since inside each of us is a surveillance network that would make the NSA green with envy." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| immune system | "While the lung escorts invaders out in an orderly fashion, the gut takes a more medieval approach to border control: acid." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| immunotherapy | "Alas, haute couture immunotherapy, like its clothing counterpart, does not come cheap." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| infection | "The classical pathway is tripped when C1 [complement protein 1] is activated by coming into contact with bacteria or by the smoke signals of infection, such as DNA escaping from dying cells." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| infection | "…to minimise the movement of air in the room to reduce the risk of microbes parachuting from the air to land on [a vulnerable person]" | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| infectious disease | "A sudden outbreak of disease – West Nile virus say, or cholera or salmonella – appears to us like a breach in a force field, an aberration that we expect some authority will address and stamp out before it comes close to threatening our families." | Thomas Goetz. (2013). The Remedy. Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the quest to cure tuberculosis. |
| interleukins | [IL-1 alpha and beta are] "pro-inflammatory little fire-starters that travel in the blood to the base of the brain where they reset our internal thermostat, causing the body to reach a feverish temperature." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you. [Read about this book] |
| intersetellar dust | "The dust in the ISM [interstellar medium] doesn't look exactly like dust on earth; it is composed of very small particles made of carbon, ice and silicates (compounds containing silicon and oxygen which constitute the largest group of rock-forming minerals). These gas and dust ingredients are literally the seeds of new worlds." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| jet engines | "…as the gas rushes out of the rocket exhaust it propels the rocket itself in the opposite direction – and this will continue as long as the gas keeps rushing out, and obviously there is no need to 'push against' a surrounding atmosphere, which is why our probes can function excellently when beyond the top of the Earth's blanket of air." | Patrick Moore. The Great Astronomical Revolution. |
| Kupffer cells | "Once caught, the red blood cell is consumed whole by the Klupffer cell, which sets about dismantling the haemoglobin inside its tasty morsel." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| lanthanides | "Instead, it [element 93] behaved like a group called the rare earth metals or lanthanides – a line of elements beginning at lanthanum that all acted similarly to each other. These elements were so odd they had been considered apart from the rest of the periodic table, isolated on a naughty step just below the main chart" | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| LASERs | "The laser is a child of mixed parentage." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| leukaemia | "The drug, TGN1412, was supposed to jump-start the immune system of leukaemia patients whose disease has decimated a type of white blood cells called T cells." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you. [Read about this book] |
| life | "In a feat of stunning self-regulating choreography, billions of atoms, molecules and ions become a part of the frantic dance we call life." | Andrew Scott, Vital Principles. The molecular mechanisms of life |
| life on earth | "Once life emerged, the entire planet was a microbial zoo for billions of years." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| light | "A photon begins its life, travels – potentially for billions of years – and then is destroyed. Each end of its existence, birth and death, involves an interaction with matter. It's the electrical charge of the electron that creates the photon in the first place, kicking off the elegant dance between electrical and magnetic components that Maxwell first described. And it's another electron's electrical field that wipes it out at the end. Q.E.D. [Quantum Electrodynamics] completes the life cycle of light…it's thanks to a charged particle like an electron that a photon of light begins or ends its life." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| light | "The intention is to pull photons into spinning vortices in a Bose-Einstein condensate, hoping that the light will be dragged into the churning matter like a car sucked into a tornado. If these frigid whirlpools can be spun fast enough, they will become microscopic optical black holes, clawing in light and never letting go until the vortex loses its momentum." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| light | "…Hau's first experiments used one laser to form a sort of ladder through the otherwise opaque Bose-Einstein condensate that allowed a second ladder to claw its way through. But if that first laser, called the coupling laser, is gradually decreased in power, the team found the second beam was swallowed up in the material." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| lipids | lipids "have split personalities" | Andrew Scott, Vital Principles. The molecular mechanisms of life |
| lobotomy | "Moniz, who would win a Nobel prize for his invention of lobotomy, went through the halls of Lisbon's insane asylums looking for patients suitable for the frontal-lobe surgery, which Moniz's surgical colleagues performed, first via ether [sic] injections, with the alcohol essentially burning away the brain, and later with a leucotome, a device shaped like an ice pick, with a retractible wire to whisk out grey matter." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds |
| lymphatic system | "The traditional burglar alarm of the body, the lymphatic system…This superhighway for white blood cells involves an elaborate network of vessels, nodes and organs, which circulate a clear liquid called lymph…" | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| macrophages | "Macrophages then arrive to mop up the bodies of the dead and dying cells…These bruise-painting macrophages arrive in the tissue thanks to the same siren call of inflammation and infection that beckoned the neutrophils." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| mass spectometers | "Ptolemy is a 5kg (11lb), shoe-box sized, miniature version of a mass spectrometer housed in a laboratory at The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. The full-size, Earth-based instrument is easily the size of a car garage. Like its larger Earth-based brother, Ptolemy was designed to measure the so-called light elements, such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, but on the surface of a comet rather than in a perfectly climate-controlled laboratory." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| medical diagnoses | "…'diagnostic drift'… refers to a particular diagnosis coming untethered from its initial conceptual moorings, so that a category of illness once tightly tied to very specific behaviours is suddenly relevant to everyone and his aunt, with the result that the disorder in questions …becomes so watered down, so deeply diluted, that it almost ceases to have any medical meaning at all." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds |
| memory drugs | "…memories having clearly been wiped out by ZIP [zeta inhibitory peptide], like some sort of cleanser for the brain. … ZIP completely nuked the memory, and did so selectively." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Mind |
| memory formation | "…cells were speaking to one another in the act of making memories, reaching out to one another across gaps between neurons to form the bridges that allow memory to exist, with one association cemented to another…" | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. The history of psychiatry in ten treatments |
| meteorites | "After all, meteorites are the offspring of asteroids and comets, and they have journeyed from being objects in space to landing on Earth." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| microbiome | "The role of diet in shaping the microbiome starts early, with breast milk triggering the first seismic shift in the composition of our gut bacteria." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects [Read about this book] |
| microbiome | "By providing an all-you-can-eat oligosaccharide buffet for B. infantis [Bifidobacterium infantis], the breast milk encourages the bacteria to proliferate rapidly and spread like a benign blanket across the surface of the gut, leaving little room for other [,] potentially harmfu [,] bacteria to grow. " | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects [Read about this book] |
| microbiome | "It seems that the bacteria release chemicals that help shore up the intestinal defences by reinforcing the tight junctions which link the gut cells together. By aiding in the repair and maintenance of these linking points in our gut's security fence, our little caretakers help to protect the integrity of the gut as a physical barrier." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects [Read about this book] |
| modifying light speed | "For the moment, such experiments remain solely in the domain of the laboratory. The effect is to tweak at time's skirts without doing anything to upset the fundamental workings of the Universe." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| Moon | "The vastness of space means that we've had to be clever about the space destinations we've visited, initially choosing those nearest to us. Humans themselves have literally [sic] only touched the surface of Earth's fellow space citizen, the Moon." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| near Earth objects | "There are various other, apparently gentle and slow, techniques that could act to nudge an object out of our way: these include, but are not limited to, foil wrapping or spray-painting, ion-beam shepherding, deploying a swarm of reflective mirror bees or laser ablation." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| nerves | "In 1886, in the process of researching a cure for malaria, against which the dye [methylene blue] did prove to be effective, German scientists and eventual Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich discovered that this strange and potent blue liquid would selectively stain the nerve cells of the frogs he dissected, and thus seemed to have an affinity for nerves, the motorways and byways of everything we feel and are." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. The history of psychiatry in ten treatments |
| neural connectivity | "So it could be that the way antidepressants make up feel better is by helping the brain grow a richer, thicker forest of connections, which enable us to think faster and with more acuity. This line of reasoning stands in absolute contrast to what Whitaker and Glenmullen have found in their analysis of many outcome studies which all seem to show antidepressants burning the brain" | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| neutron | "The neutron was literally [sic] a makeweight to allow nuclei to have more mass than their electric charge would seem to indicate." | Lindley, David – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| neutrinos | "…neutrinos…are ghostly particles with very little mass…" | Jeremy Bernstein. Oppenheimer. Portrait of an enigma |
| neutrophils | "…this cell can capture bubonic plague in a web of its own DNA, spew out enzymes to digest anthrax and die in a kamikaze blaze of microbe-massacring glory. …The neutrophil is a key soldier in an eternal war between our bodies and the legions of bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites that surround us." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you |
| neutrophils | "…the neutrophil. It defines cool. It's the James dean of the immune system; it lives fast, dies young and looks good in sunglasses." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| neutrophils | "Initially it was seen as a simple soldier with a basic skills set of 'see bacteria, eat bacteria' but your understanding of the role of the neutrophil has evolved over time. Now we know it is a crafty assassin with a murderous array of killing techniques. | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| neutrophils | "…they observed the post-NET neutrophils crawling through the infected tissue rapidly…" | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| neutrophils | "So it's possible the neutrophils of the young and the healthy in 1918 were too vigorous, and that their friendly fire contributed to the death of the victim." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| NK cells | "Ever neat assassins, NK cells…" | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| nuclear fission | "Because of the odd, nonspherical shapes involved, the critical masses had eventually to be determined experimentally. This was done by adding prices to the assembly until it finally went critical – something that the physicist Richard Feynman called 'tickling the dragon's tail." | Jeremy Bernstein. Oppenheimer. Portrait of an enigma |
| nuclear fission | "Creating an element was walking a tightrope: you needed energy to push past the Coulomb barrier in the first place, but if you used too much energy the nucleus would literally shake itself apart." [I am not considering this an analogy as I cannot see how the energy maps onto tightrope walking.] | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| nuclear weapons | "It is the reaction momentum from the stream of ablated material that implodes the secondary bomb. The implosion causes the cylindrical rod of plutonium – the 'spark plug' – to go critical." | Jeremy Bernstein. Oppenheimer. Portrait of an enigma |
| optical computing | "By weaving a basket of light inside a computer, the space taken up by the electronics can be significantly reduced." | Brian Clegg – Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| organ donation | "Organs from prisoners come with a higher risk of blood-borne viruses like hepatitis C and HIV. Which is why some people willing to buy an organ with questionable provenance decide to request a free-range one." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you. [Read about this book] |
| organisms | "Bodies and cells rely on highly controlled behaviors of their constituent parts. But beneath that order lies cacophony." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| osteoblasts | "…the builders in this relationship." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| osteoclasts | "…the bone-inhabiting giant-cell called the osteoclast, whose role is the constant gardener of our bones…the bony equivalent of yin and yang: osteoclasts and osteoblasts." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| pancreas | "The pancreas is a floppy, feather-shaped organ that nestles behind your stomach and acts as the commander-in-chief when its comes to controlling blood sugar levels." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| panspermia | "The divorce between bodily disease and comets seemed final and absolute – until Hoyle and Wickramasinghe offered to set medicine back a few centuries by remarrying them." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| panspermia | "They [Hoyle and Wickramasinghe] would have us believe that a billion comets out beyond Neptune contain viruses capable of invading humans and commandeering their cells to reproduce the cometary genes and clothe them in neat protein jackets, as worn this season in the Ooo Cloud." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| parasites | "Dracunculus medinensis is one of the turduckens of the parasite word – it's a parasite inside a water flea inside a person." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| particle accelerators | "Inside, the Rad Lab was a chaotic mess, full of cages of mice for biomedical experiments, blackboards chalked with equations and giant magnets for the 'proton merry-go-round' that was the Berkeley particle accelerator." | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| particle accelerators | "The Berkeley accelerator was loaded with bismuth foil (lead's neighbour on the periodic table – bismuth only has one stable isotope, so it's easier to separate), which was soon pelted with carbon and neon ions. The beams chipped off protons and neutrons, leaving scattered fragments of gold dust. Seaborg had become the modern King Midas." | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| phylogeny | "The ancestor of all vertebrates came about by stopping sea squirt development early, freezing the traits of the larval stage, and letting the creature grow to adulthood with them." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| placenta | "it coordinates a cacophony of immunological chatter…" | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| polarisation of light | "Certain crystals would select out light that was polarised in a certain direction. This was because the electrical part of the light wave fights against the electrical components of the atoms in the material." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| pregnancy | "…a complex collaboration between the placenta (which is made of baby's cells) and the maternal immune system…a majestic dance of immune cells and messengers, carefully choreographed to ensure mum and baby live and grow in (relative) harmony together." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| protein isolation | "The process begins with chemically macerating the issue – in this case, brains – into fluids, then treating them successively to isolate the desired protein form all the others present. The protein soup is run through a series of tubes with each pulling out different contaminants. In one of the final steps the fluid is run through a glass column packed with a special gel. The gel removes the final contaminants and other proteins, and the fluid that makes it through contains only the purified protein." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| proton pumps | "They take potassium ions out of the stomach juice and drop them off inside the parietal cell. In a neat little dance of exchange they also pick up hydrogen ions from inside the parietal cell and release them into the maelstrom of the stomach." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| Prozac | "In the US mass-marketing campaign that accompanied fluoxetine's eventual release, Lilly touted the supposed specificity of its drug, likening it to a magic bullet, or a Scud missile that lands with programmed precision on millimetres of neural tissue." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| psychiatric medicines | "Lithium, therefore, was the first 'magic bullet', a site-specific drug, or at least a symptom-specific drug… unlike the 'dirty' drugs that had preceded [the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors]. Lithium, it could be argued was psychiatry's first clean drug, modifying a discrete set of symptoms without spread or stain." "The antidepressants that preceded fluoxetine came to be considered 'dirty drugs' because they worked on multiple neurotransmitter systems at once and therefore caused a host of unpleasant somatic side effects." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| psychiatric medicines | "…because tricyclics work only on depressed subjects and relieve only depression, they may be a superior torchlight into the mechanisms of pathological despair." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| red blood cells | "The Kupffer cells hang around like spiders on the walls of the blood vessels waiting to catch any red blood cells which have passed their best before date (typically 120 days). | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| respiratory system | "…your airways are exceedingly well booby-trapped passages lined with goblet cells, which secrete a fine later of mucus to trap dirt and bacteria." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| Rorschach [ink-blots] test | "The test in America was a lightning rod from the start." | Damion Searls, The Inkblots. Hermann Rorschach, his iconic test & the power of seeing |
| science | "The ideas of early scientists often seem crass because science is a garden where theories grow in a bed of facts, and errors are eventually weeded out; we have acres of facts that were quite uncultivated three hundred years ago, and, as a result, any third class graduate of the twentieth century knows far more about the workings of nature that, say, Isaac Newton did." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| scientific instruments | "By looking into the far distance, telescopes act as time machines that peer back towards the origins of time. Their place in the scientific armoury remains as important now as it was in the 1600s." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| S.E.T.I. | "The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Soviet Academy of Sciences run projects in support of [the idea of "alien folk…conversing with one another by radio and looking out for primitive newcomers like ourselves"], and spacecraft now leaving the Solar System now carry messages in bottles." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| sex addiction | "These ['sex addicts'] are largely married men who nevertheless seek out prostitutes and pornography, not once a day, not twice a day, but twenty or thirty times in a twenty-four-hour period, men haunted and ravaged by their own internal fires, men eaten alive by uncontrollable desire, men whose brains are likely damp with dopamine coursing down dendrites and being sucked up by axons in a never-ending obsessive circuit." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. The history of psychiatry in ten treatments. |
| sine waves | "Every scientist knows what a sine wave looks like, that graceful, endless up and down. It is intuitive becase it is so familiar, it is a known quantity, a valued friend…. …If you were in a line of work where Bessel functions cropped up regularly, they would become your friends, as familiar to you as sine waves. | Lindley, David – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| Solar System | "After the planets were essentially complete the work of purifying the Solar System took hundred of millions of years." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| Solar System | "After all, these celestial bodies [planets, comets and asteroids] are simply made of rock, ice and gases; they contain virtually the same mix of elements and rock minerals we find here on Earth, having been born from the same cloud of dust and gas in interstellar space." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| Solar System | "The size of the Solar System, and the problems in visiting its farthest corners, mean that scientists are still drawing a detailed picture of what the real estate surrounding our average star contains, and trying to understand how it formed." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| Solar System | "Once scientists worked out that the Solar System experienced a major phase of carnage after the planets had formed , they needed to find a way to account for this violent time." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| Solar System | "Despite this seemingly huge distance, it isn't actually very far in the great cosmic billiard table of the inner Solar System so…" | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| Solar System | "In the book of our Solar System, we're barely halfway through, and humans have made but a fleeting appearance on just a few of its pages." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| space exploration | "Rosetta entered deep-space hibernation from June 2011 to January 2014, just keeping enough systems running to stop it from completely freezing to death. The next big hurdle for Rosetta was reactivation from hibernation – for it to be awoken from its deep-space slumber – something that couldn't be guaranteed. Luckily, Rosetta's internal alarm clock, which had been ticking since launch all those years earlier, went off at 10 a.m. GMT on 20 January 2014. This triggered a complex series of events to being the spacecraft out of hibernation, which it managed successfully, waking from its coma without the loss of any system. This was lucky because the Rosetta teams had no way to ruffle the spacecraft's covers from Earth. With the alarm clock having gone off, Rosetta activated its core systems such as heaters and avionics, to slowly bring the whole of the spacecraft back to life." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| space exploration | The little lander could be forever sat on the side of the comet, wedged in a little shadowy crack, but it was to remain in deep-space slumber. However, the orbiter was still alive and tracking [comet] 67P/C-G through space." "As we know, the Rosetta spacecraft had to enter hibernation for many months to save power on its ay to catching comet 67P/C-G. The communication-delay time during this mission was up to 30 minutes each way, depending on the distance from Earth, which was fine in the circumstances because the Rosetta teams didn't need to communicate with their sleeping beauty at this stage." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| stars | "Cold fusion was so antithetical to established science that accepting it as true would have meant that astrophysicists could no longer believe in their understanding of the birth, life, and death of stars." | David Lindley – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| stimulated emission of radiation | "Generated in a sealed container, those photons could themselves stimulate further photons, a pyramid selling approach to producing light." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| subatomic particles | "New subatomic particles arrived on the scene, singly at first but later in battalions. These newcomers had both experimental and theoretical origins, In 1930, the same year that Dirac predicted the antielectron, Wolfgang Pauli came up with another prediction, but for empirical reasons. In radioactive beta decays, the particles that leaving the scene of the crime have less total energy than the particles that went in, and Pauli suggested that the missing energy was carried away by neutral and elusive particles that was also produced in the decay." | Lindley, David – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| 'superheavy' elements | "The superheavy elements – the final 15, element 104 and beyond – have only ever existed in quantities so small they can't be seen by the human eye and can last for less than a second. … They are chemistry's unicorns." "You can't hold a superheavy element in your hand. Chances are, as you read this, many of these elements do not exist anywhere in the universe. They are chemical unicorns. But they are unicorns we know exist." [Seemingly they exist in a sense that does not require them to exist anywhere in the universe] | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| supernovae | "For a short time the output of energy is staggering, but when the outburst is spent all that is left is a patch of expanding gas together with a very small, super-dense 'stellar wreck' made up of particles called neutrons. In fact, a supernova represents the death-agony of a very massive star." | Patrick Moore. The Great Astronomical Revolution. |
| T cells | "Normally T cells need two separate on-switches to be flicked at the same time to activate their invader-destroying skills." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you. [Read about this book] |
| T cells and B cells | "…our adaptive assassins, our T and B cells" | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| Toxoplasma gondii | "By using this mouse-shaped Trojan horse the parasite gets itself delivered directly into the cat's gut…" | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| tears | "Yet the tears we shed aren't just cathartic, they're also a form of chemical warfare." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| tears | "…tear lipocalin, whose neat structure includes a pocket for binding a multitude of molecules. This clever pocket allows tear lipocalin to bind the bacterial siderophores…neutralising the bacterium's ability to steal iron from us…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| transplantation | "David's transplant was doomed to fail. Katherine's bone marrow was a Trojan horse, harbouring a hidden danger: the Epstein-Barr virus…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| viruses | "…viruses are the squatters of pathogen society. Unlike bacteria, which tend to carry their own internal baggage for all their disease-making needs, viruses pack light." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| viruses | "…modifying human cells to act like virus-mules to ferry the virus through the blood to the tumour…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| viruses | "…while many drugs are one-attack-method-wonders, the [oncolytic] viruses have a Swiss army knife selection of killer techniques at their disposal." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| viruses | "…a humongous virus…This titan among viruses would come to be known as the Ebola virus." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| viruses | "…one of the ways that Ebola disrupts the immune system is by blocking an emergency fast lane in cells that would usually allow them to respond to viral infections rapidly." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
Metaphors employing scientific concepts
| Topic/theme | Use of metaphor | borrowing from | Source |
| definitions | "The mathematicians proudly claimed that striving for unambiguous definitions was one of the 'specific traits of the mathematical style of thinking', and they insisted that a mathematician in linguistics 'plays the role of a litmus test: if a definition satisfied the mathematician, then if must satisfy everyone'." | chemistry | Slava Gerovitch {historian of science & technology) |
| linguistics | "We do well to be skeptical [sic, sceptical] of a grammarian's systemization [sic, systemisation] when it is full of ENANTIOMORPHISM, the pairing with every category of an opposite which is merely the lack of it." | chemical structure | Benjamin Lee Whorf {linguist and chemical engineer} |
| names | "Names may begin by suggesting ideas and may not be neutral. But if they are just names they end by being purely conventional tags or identification marks – sometimes very inadequate ones as in the cases of 'real number', 'imaginary number' and 'irrational number', fossils of a mistaken philosophy of mathematics." | palaeontology | Mario Bunge |
| nuclear power (attitudes to) | "Climate change had been there all along: skies had been warming, glaciers melting and seas slowly rising for decades. Until the 1980s, few humans had regarded the beast as a serious threat. No longer. But the only force that was truly able to combat it – according to the movie – was largely regarded as a pariah, beset by a cultural hysteresis that associated it with bombs and meltdowns." | physics (hysteresis) | Robert P Crease, (philosopher) writing in Physics World |
| imaginary numbers | "Leibniz himself often betrayed an agnosticism about imaginary numbers that was generally alien to him and contrary to the spirit of his philosophy; for he once designated them as an extraordinary hybrid, 'an amphibian between being and nonbeing'." | biological classification (an amphibian spends part of its life on land, part in water) | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz {German polymath} , quoted by Ernst Cassirer |
| Rorschach [ink-blots] test | Test described as "a fluoroscope into the psyche" | X-ray imaging technology | Samuel Beck, research psychologist (reported in Damion Searls, The Inkblots. Hermann Rorschach, his iconic test & the power of seeing) |
From this website:
In the kind of research known as case study, we examine cases that may be considered to (metaphorically) be organisms in the way the case is entangled within a context.
Note on analogies, similes and metaphors.
In practice the precise demarcations between similes, metaphors (and anthropomorphisms) and analogies may not be absolutely clear. I have tried to follow the rule that if a comparison is set out to make a structural mapping clear (even if this is not spelt out as a mapping: e.g., an atom with its electrons is like a sun with its planets) this counts as an analogy. Where I do not think a comparison is an analogy, but the comparison is made explicit ("…as if…", "…like…": e.g., the atom, like a tiny solar system) I consider this a simile. When the audience is left to spot a comparison (rather than a literal identity) is being made (e.g., the oxygen atom, this tiny solar system) I class this a metaphor.
Anthropomorphism may be seen as a particular kind of metaphor where a metaphorical feature implies a non-human entity has human attributes (e.g., meteors can be impetuous).
I reserve the right to reassign some of these comparisons in due course!
