Here’s a nice quote for you about the nature of science (courtesy of a commenter over at Open Parachute): There are two ways in which I think science, as a way of learning about the natural world can be distinguished from other proposed methods. First, science is not a personal and private experience. It is […]
Continue readingMonth: July 2009
food & folate
In this morning’s Herald is an article on the inclusion of folic acid (aka folate) in bread. This has hit the news recently because (among other things) bakers are concerned about the cost of adding this supplement to bread. (One figure that’s been bandied about is that someone would have to eat 11 slices of bread […]
Continue readinglive long & prosper?
Perhaps – if you’re a mouse… A couple of nights ago TV3 news treated us to a breathless little item about an antibiotic compound, rapamycin, that appears to promote longevity in mice. If it was applied to people, said the reporter, we could live for another 20 years or so! Gosh. Well, I can think of […]
Continue readingof what use are evolution blogs?
This is the title of both a recent paper in Evolution: education and outreach & the focus of an interesting post by Brian Switek on his blog Laelaps. I though I’d just link to both here for any of you who might be interested in getting into science blogging (including those I met at Biolive!) as […]
Continue readingthe things people do in the name of science
I’m just catching up with my reading material & ERV has an interesting post up about noroviruses (aka Norwalk virus – you’ll see why it’s called that when you read her post). One of the things she talks about is just how researchers originally got their gloves on the virus & demonstrated that it was […]
Continue readinggetting the big picture
One of the keynote addresses at the Biolive 2009 conference talked about systems thinking: helping students to see the interconnections that link the various concepts they’re learning – to ‘get the big picture’, to recognise that any given system (whether it be an ecosystem or a digestive system) tends to be rather more than the […]
Continue readingmedical news stories that make the headlines
Sometimes I suspect that you think I’m over-reacting to poor reporting of science stories in the media. Maybe I’m just picky, or pernickety, or – as my Significant Other would says – purely pedantic. So I was interested to see a paper in PLoS One (Ly & Lane, 2009) that looks at the quality of various […]
Continue readingmoa feathers & DNA – an example of reductionism
Now, here’s a misleading sentence for you: The giant moa has been "rebuilt" by scientists using DNA from prehistoric feathers, revealing the true colours of the extinct bird. It’s from a news story in the Dominion Post, although I first read it in the Herald. At the time I thought this would be a good topic for a […]
Continue readinganother primate fossil
and, from what Brian Switek says over at Laelaps, a whole lot more media hype. The new fossil is a 38-million-year-old primate from Asia, Ganlea megacania (the species name refers to the fact that it has enormous canine teeth). While the paper describing this fragmentary fossil (teeth & bits of jaw) describe it as a seed-eating monkey, […]
Continue readingoxygenate your brain!
I don’t often watch the TV news, but on Monday last week I didn’t feel like doing much else after work. Anyway, about 1/3 of the way through a story came on that had my critical radar twitching. It was effectively a puff piece about how employers were sending their workers on a course teaching […]
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