Eyes seem to be flavour of the month at the moment 🙂 PZ has just put up a fascinating post – about using MRI technology to see the images forming in the visual cortex of volunteers as they look at pictures of letters of the alphabet. Truly. But he points out that it’s not like Big […]
Continue readingYear: 2008
how to s*x a moa
Time for look at another paper. This one’s on something I think I referred to earlier – the use of ancient DNA to determine the sex of New Zealand’s giant, flightless – & alas! extinct – moa.
Continue readingwhy rumours can last for ages
A headline in SciTechDaily caught my eye: If I’m not gullible and you’re not gullible, how come some improbable stories take a long time to die? This reminded me of a comment by Ben Goldacre, along the lines that people aren’t as good at assessing their own abilities (whether related to driving a car or passing […]
Continue readingevolution of the eye
I’ve written before about the evolution of the eye (here & here for example. Now there’s a whole issue of the most excellent science education journal Evolution: education & outreach devoted to this very topic – & it’s free on-line right here! So if you’re interested in following up on some of the latest work on this […]
Continue readinga biologist on holiday
Well, it wasn’t all lying around by the infinity pool while we were away in Vanuatu – although I must say, doing that was very pleasant… (& contrary to appearances, we had very little rain.) But one of the attractions of going somewhere different is that there is so much new stuff to see and do. […]
Continue readingmore on copy-number variations in chimps & humans
A little while ago now I wrote about the creationist take on a recent paper looking at chimp/human genetics – more specifically, copy-number variations in particular gene sequences. I intended to read the original paper & blog about it, because the Sensuous Curmudgeon made it sound so interesting. So you may imagine that I was just […]
Continue readingoutrunning age
This post’s based on another news item to do with postponing ageing (it sort of follows on quite well from that recent one about telomerase). There seems to be a bit of a run on this in the media – or maybe it’s just because I’m getting older & more sensitive to this stuff? It’s […]
Continue readingbadscience – the book
I’m back. Yes, it was a great holiday – & no – it wasn’t long enough 🙂 And yes, I did spend a lot of time lying around under an umbrella by the water, reading books & generally applying myself to relaxing. Anyway, one of those books was Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, which follows on from his blog of […]
Continue readinganother little filler (in more ways than one)
Completely off-topic but I had to share this one 🙂 It’s another bread recipe – I had a day’s leave before we left on this trip (I might share some photos if I can work them into a story somehow) & spent part of the morning trying out that bread book again (Ingram & Shapter, […]
Continue readingenzyme benefits?
(Another little something I prepared earlier…) Our daughter’s just drawn my attention to a brief item in the Listener‘s Health page. It reports on claims by Spanish researchers that increasing the amount of telomerase in the body could result in less cell death – &, by extension, longer lives. (Telomerase is the enzyme that repairs the […]
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