I’m running Schol Bio tuts again this year, & I like to start each session off with a question on some aspect of biology, just to start everyone thinking in that space. In the last session I presented two images (see below) and asked the students: what are possible genetic explanations for what you’re seeing […]
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You get rubbish. Tonight TV1 & Stuff both shared an “article” (which also featured in the Daily Mail) about what working from home will do to us in the future, including a 3D render of “Anna”, with clawed hands, hunched back, sunken eyes, & other horrors. It’s the result of a research study, they said. […]
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Image from Pixabay, via photosforclass.com A couple of days ago TVNZ rather credulously carried a story under the headline that “garlic can help” cure flu or covid-19, seemingly based on this article in the Financial Review. Presumably with the added benefit of keeping vampires away. However… from the Financial Review piece That is, the TVNZ headline […]
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I’m really enjoying running on-line tuts with Schol Bio students, because the questions & discussions are so interesting. (So, hopefully the students enjoy them too!) Last week we got onto talking about the enzyme lactase and the fact that in some populations many individuals continue to produce it into adulthood (thus making them lactose-tolerant, & […]
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With the discovery last week of 2 cases of measles in Auckland, I thought I’d pull together a few of the posts that I wrote during our last outbreak (in 2019) but which are still very relevant. Measles isn’t a benign disease, and unfortunately vaccination coverage for it has declined over the last few years, […]
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Featured image from https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/animals-and-plants/native-animals/native-animal-facts/brush-tailed-possum Recently I shared this Spinoff article about extinction on Twitter, & tagged the Science Learning Hub as the NZ focus makes the article a good fit with their mahi supporting student learning. But I was somewhat surprised to have someone else pop up saying that they wouldn’t read it because, […]
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This gorgeous little insect is a female Australian bag moth (Cebysa leucotelus) – in this image she’s sitting on the netting we’re using to keep the late-season cabbage butterflies off our brassicas, but I suspect that normally she’d have been a little harder to spot. After all, from the tips of her antennae to the […]
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I suspect many of those reading (like many of my friends) will have watched the series The Last of Us. (I haven’t, because I’m fairly sure I’d be spending a fair bit of time with my eyes shut!¹) What you might not realise is that the fungal “protagonist” (for want of a better word) is actually […]
Continue readingPermafrost is “any ground that remains completely frozen – 0°C or colder – for at least two years straight”, and as you’d expect is found at high altitudes or in polar regions. It acts like a deep-freezer – scientists have found mammoths buried in permafrost that were so well preserved that at least one field […]
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What is a mastodon, anyway? Like mammoths (on the left in the image above), mastodons were common during the last ice age, but the two elephant-like creatures are fairly distant relatives. The more-familiar mammoths were close cousins of modern elephants (a fact that is of interest to those considering doing a Jurassic Park on mammoths – […]
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