… and the air will go up to the right side of your brain & improve your creativity. NOT!!! I thought I’d seen a fair bit of nonsense but this one was new to me. It’s one of several pseudoscientific claims that are due for a right royal debunking next month. Unfortunately this is in […]
Continue readingMonth: November 2008
shades of jurassic park
A couple of nights ago I caught the end of a TV ‘news’ item about mammoths. Molecular biologists have managed to sequence the mammoth genome – the next thing, said the reporter breathlessly, will be bringing mammoths back to life…
Continue readingit’s different at uni – part 2 (& a guest post!)
This is a little different: a guest blog by a friend of mine. Grant works as an independent scientist through his one-man consultancy, BioinfoTools, which mainly develops software for analysis of genetic and molecular biology data, and offers data analysis,contract research and science writing. He has his own research interests currently with a central theme […]
Continue readingadventures of a curious character
I’m still going on The eye: a natural history, but right now I’m going to talk about Richard Feynman’s autobiography, Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman! (I must confess that I’m one of those people who keeps several books on the go at once – The eye is on the bedside table, but Feynman’s book is what I read […]
Continue readingit’s different at uni
I know that if you’ve finished, or have almost finished, your NCEA exams, probably the last thing you are thinking about is university study! More likely, a relaxing break is foremost in your mind 🙂 (Mine too, actually…) But I was talking this morning with colleagues about how different university is from school for many […]
Continue readingtwo-headed kitties & embryonic development
A few posts back Heraclides referred to a kitten born with two heads – you may well have seen it on TV news the other night. (If you google ‘two-headed kitten’ you’ll find this wasn’t a unique birth. I remember we had a two-headed calf in the zoology museum at Massey, when I was a […]
Continue readingwhy don’t big dogs live so long?
Yesterday, for the first time in more than 14 years, I went for a long walk by the river without my dog Bella. These days she’s still keen to go for a walk – but it’s more like an amble. A v-e-r-y s-l-o-w amble. And after 2-3 km that’s it for the day. Her age […]
Continue readinglazy sunday
I feel lazy today. I could review a paper for you… Or – I could share something completely off-topic!
Continue readinganimal communication
I was sorting some papers today & came across some notes I wrote for a lecture about animal communication. And I thought they’d make a good subject for a blog.
Continue readingthe natural history of the eye
Well, here I am back in the office again. The conference was great – but it was on assessment in the tertiary education system: not something you want to hear about here 🙂 But during a break in the proceedings I slipped out & investigated the Lambton Quay bookshops… (Dangerous things, bookshops; I could easily […]
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