Many year 13 Biology students will spend some time during the school year on a plant or animal study. Often the organisms you’ll study will be something like slaters, or duckweed, because they are easy to keep & study in the classroom. But that’s not always the case, & today I thought I’d write about one […]
Continue readingMonth: December 2008
do insects see the world as we do?
Insects and humans (& in fact all other animals with eyes) use the same visual pigment – rhodopsin. But in other ways, insect & mammal eyes are fundamentally different. The insect eye is a compound eye that comprises many individual units, while ours is a camera-type eye. And these structural differences have a considerable impact […]
Continue readingthose nasty toxins…
Thankfully, the antivaccination lobby is (so far!) relatively small & quiet in New Zealand. It’s another story in the US, where various celebrities lend their names to the anti- voices. A couple of days ago Orac posted another in his series on what’s wrong with the US anti-vax groupings, & I thought I’d talk about some of the […]
Continue readingevolution in action
When I did a plasma donation the other day, the blood-bank people put a note on my file so that the plasma would be fractionated & treated as necessary to prevent any recipients from getting malaria. (Not that I"ve got malaria!) This was because I’d just got back from Vanuatu, and malaria is relatively common […]
Continue readingmerry christmas
Happy Holidays, have a great New Year – – & may your days be filled with interesting things 🙂
Continue readingtalking about science
Why is it important for people (scientists, journalists, science communicators, every woman & her dog) to talk about science? Does it really matter if NZ primary school students think science isn’t fun, if secondary students seem to be showing less interest in the sciences, or if fewer & fewer students major in physics at university? As […]
Continue readingthe consequences of vision
You learn something new every day. One of the big talking points in palaeontology is the ‘Cambrian explosion’ – the seemingly rapid appearance (over ‘just’ a few million years!) of complex animal life, which occurred around 490-540 million years ago. Discussion ranges over the causes of this diversification and whether the apparent ‘explosion’ really happened […]
Continue readingif it sounds too good to be true…
… it probably is. The latest example of this comes from a newspaper story, wherein a visiting professor (I can’t remember what he was a professor of) was expounding on what the world would be like in 2070. Among other predictions, he felt we’d have dishwashers that cleaned the dishes without detergent, water – or energy. […]
Continue readinghard to explain? more creationist straw men
It seems the silly season is beginning early – I’m expecting a rash of ‘letters to the editor’ as the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth gets closer (what are you doing for Darwin Day?), but this seems a little premature. The writer begins: We’ve weathered a fair few scientific broadcasts lately authenticating Charles Darwin’s findings. Effectively they […]
Continue readingan early dromaeosaur
I’ve always been interested in dinosaurs, & I loved Jurassic Park. Especially the raptors – they reminded me of birds in many ways. Which makes sense, of course, given that the majority consensus is that birds evolved from maniraptor dinosaurs 🙂 Anyway, all this means that dino headlines are always going to make me look twice. As I […]
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