By Stephen H. Jones Read enough science journalism and eventually you will become familiar with two tropes that seem to contradict one another. On the one hand, journalists will often write about ‘science’ as though it is an unquestioned authority, with the more opportunistic members of the profession using the term to try to convince us that expensive trainers are bad, Kylie Minogue’s legs are good, and that politicians are competent. The word ‘science’, as the sociologist Thomas F. Gieryn put it, ‘often stands metonymically for credibility, for legitimate knowledge, […] for a trustable reality’. On the other hand, people from that same professional sphere also write about science as something remote from a public that is uninterested and unfamiliar: the preserve of elite, untrusted experts. This is a familiar refrain among science communicators too, who frequently talk of science being ‘undervalued in our culture’. Can these two things be