The less civil the accompanying comments, the more risk readers attributed to the research, a finding that has implications for thepublicunderstandingofscience.
He has written several popular science books, including The Selfish Gene and holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for thePublicUnderstandingofScience at Oxford.
Mark Brandon, a polar oceanographer at the Open University who specialises in publicunderstandingofscience, compiled his own account of recent communication on the Arctic.