A couple of days ago our local paper carried a letter that included the bald statement: "vaccines cause ear infections." My first response to that one was: citations, please! That sort of statement is incredibly dangerous, because it’s essentially saying, don’t vaccinate if you don’t want your kids to get ear infections. (The letter writer […]
Continue readingMonth: August 2009
meet ben
Well, I managed to go just over 2 months without a dog…
Continue readingfrom chickens to dinosaurs?
In today’s Royal Society news clippings was an item concerning a scientist’s intention to manipulate chickens to get dinosaurs. Intriguing! A quick google search found a number of news items like this one – the researcher concerned believes that by flicking various switches during an embryo chicken’s development, he’ll be able to ‘reproduce the dinosaur […]
Continue readingscientific laws
Sometimes scientific terminology can be quite confusing – everyday words like ‘theory’ & ‘law, for example, mean something different when used in a scientific context. And just what is a law in science, anyway? I’ve just stumbled across a brief excerpt from an interview with Richard Feynman, where he uses some great analogies to answer that […]
Continue readinga possible fix for the problem of antibiotic resistance in bacteria
A while ago, in one of my posts on pseudoscience (there’s also some material on that on my Schol Bio moodle page, for those of you who have access), I commented on the issue of bacterial resistance to common antibiotics. This is a real problem & not one that’s going to go away. (It’s also […]
Continue readingapple juice & gallstones
A couple of years ago my father-in-law had an operation to remove a rather large gallstone, & with it his gall bladder. It had caused him a couple of urgent hospital admissions, through blocking the bile duct & causing a back-up of bile. He was quite seriously ill for a bit but is now fully […]
Continue readingdarwin & the appendix
The human appendix is often held up as an example of a vestigial organ – something that is much reduced in form from the homologous structure in other organisms (though not necessarily also non-functional). Darwin wrote a little bit about our appendix in The descent of man. Now it seems that a research team has done […]
Continue readingzombie attacks and worms with luminescent bombs
Every so often someone writes a paper with a really eye-catching title. I’ve come across two of these this week: When Zombies Attack! Mathematical modelling of an outbreak of zombie infection (no, honestly, I’m not making it up! You can read the original paper here) and Deep-sea, swimming worms with luminescent ‘bombs’ (Osborn, Haddock, Pleijel, Madin & […]
Continue readingwatch where you pee
This afternoon, while I was sweating out my frustrations via one of the gym’s cross-trainers, I listened to the May 20th podcast from The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Among other things, they discussed the candiru, a small freshwater Amazon fish that allegedly swims up the urine stream of someone urinating (stories aren’t clear as to whether you […]
Continue readingnature is neither kind nor unkind
– it’s the result of an intricate web of evolutionary relationships. Why’d I pick this topic? Because I came across Chet Raymo’s musings on Sacculina, a barnacle that over time has become an internal parasite on crabs. Female Sacculina larvae settle on a crab’s exoskeleton & injects a mass of cells that move to the crab’s abdomen, […]
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