… to which I knew the answer. It was ‘homeopathy’. Quite a few science bloggers comment on homeopathy from time to time. I haven’t done so myself, before this – partly because I haven’t been inclined to stir things up.,.. But recently I’ve read material that rather bugs me.
Continue readingMonth: July 2009
i cannot brain today…
I have to say, at the moment I’m feeling a bit like this chap: Mainly because we are currently ‘between’ registrars & so I don’t seem to have a life! But I shall press on – with a question from the 2006 paper on human evolution.
Continue readingtime for a little humour
Courtesy of PZ – a wonderful collection (well, I got a giggle out of them!) of dreadful puns & other science-flavoured jokes. Enjoy.
Continue readingof crusts & cancer
When I was little, I remember, my mother was forever trying to get me to eat all of my sandwiches: "if you eat your crusts, your hair will curl." (It didn’t. If that particular tale was true, I’d have a massive afro. It must date back to a time when curly hair was particularly desirable, & […]
Continue readingthe university of google strikes again…
In the community paper that arrived in our letterbox this morning there was a letter expressing very strong ‘anti’ feelings with regard to folate. The writer would, he said, boycott bread if this dreadful chemical was added. Google ‘folate & prostate cancer’, he said, & all would be revealed. (This was in reference to the […]
Continue readingcongratulations to our olympians!
Our International Biology Olympians, that is. My School at Waikato, along with the Department of Biological Sciences, has been hosting several days of the NZ Olympiad team’s training camp for 4 years now. This sees students from all round the country coming into our first-year labs to get hands-on experience of many of the techniques […]
Continue readingmore on poo – this time, it’s penguins
Funny how one thing leads to another 🙂 While I was looking around for extra material on moa coprolites, I happened across this National Geographic page on penguin poo & its significance to scientists studying Emperor penguins. Because the birds’ breeding colonies are so big, & because the penguins stand around in their colonies for so […]
Continue readingfossil poo & moa diets
When I was looking for the original paper for my post on moa feather colour & reductionism, I found a whole lot of other equally interesting stuff. As one does. (It’s just so easy to wander off down some interesting side path & get completely distracted from the original task…) One of those ‘other’ papers […]
Continue readinglies, damned lies, and science
That’s the eye-catching title of my current reading matter – the book Lies, Damned Lies, & Science by Sherry Seethaler. And reading it led to the following musings: Science is complex. Yet too often it’s presented – in the media, but also in textbooks & science classes – as a series of stand-alone facts (in the […]
Continue readingmore comment on folate
One of the reasons put forward for not adding folate to bread is the perception that this will lead to a rise in some forms of cancer (specifically, prostate & colo-rectal cancer). The Science Media Centre has posted a commentary from Dr Murray Skeaff, who’s the Professor of Human Nutrition down at Otago. He discusses […]
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