… sea biscuits, that is – what we call sand dollars. PZ has just posted a video clip of the early development of sand dollars, & it’s absolutely gorgeous. It starts, as he says, with a bit of echinoderm porn – I never knew that sand dollar sperm looks like that whipped ‘cream’ stuff that […]
Continue readingMonth: November 2008
human-chimp similarities – evolution? or design?
(Another link-&-comment today – I’m at a conference & a bit short of time for longer posts.) The Sensuous Curmudgeon offers a dry commentary on a web-post by the Discovery Institute oops Institute for Creation Research (thanks to the Curmudgeon). The DI post is itself a commentary on a recent research paper looking at the […]
Continue readingdo you go ‘wow!’ at big numbers?
Quite probably – even though it’s quite hard to envisage what a really really big number means. But people can also be swayed by big numbers when they shouldn’t be. Ben Goldacre gives an example in his latest post. A media story about a particular statin (a drug used to lower the levels of ‘bad’ […]
Continue readinga vaccine for AIDS?
I’m supposed to be finishing writing a paper for a conference right now, so I was casting around for something short & sweet to write. Fortunately for me, ERV has just written an interesting post examining claims about a possible new treatment for AIDS. It involves souping up the patient’s killer T cells (part of the […]
Continue readingwhy play?
And the answer isn’t necessarily, ‘for fun’ 🙂
Continue readinganother example of critical thinking…
… this time about climate change. It’s on the blog Hot Topic, where the author has written a rather sceptical review of an item in the Dominion-Post newspaper. The newspaper story included the statement that greenhouse gases don’t cause global warming – rather surprising, given that in the absence of some level of greenhouse gases the […]
Continue readingdiscovering biology in a digital world
I’ve just found another neat blog: Discovering biology in a digital world. It was recommended on The Panda’s Thumb, & it’s written by Sandra Porter, a molecular biologist & science educator. There’s a whole range of stuff here, but the bit that first caught my eye was a post on the RNA world that many […]
Continue readingunforseen consequences of megafaunal removal
It can be hard to predict the outcomes of human interference in an ecosystem, even when it’s done with the best of intentions. This paper looks at the unforseen consequences of removing large herbivorous mammals from part of an African savannah, & demonstrates just how complex ecosystem interactions can be.
Continue readingsomething fishy here…
It seems that fish oil is back in the news. This morning’s Herald carried an item about a school that’s trialling the use of omega-3 fish oils in enhancing student performance. They obviously haven’t heard of the Durham ‘trials’ in the UK…
Continue readinggoing to the movies
We’ve just been to see the BBC movie Earth – the reviews we’d seen recommended it & the images (on view on the wall-to-wall TVs in the electronics shop) were stunning. What did we think?
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