If you’ve seen today’s papers (& I guess it’s on TV/radio as well), you’ll know that the outbreak of measles that began in Christchurch seems to have spread to Auckland (by the simple path of someone picking up the infection in Christchurch & then travelling north, I suspect). A measles expert quoted on the Science […]
Continue readingIt’s always bothered me to hear statements along the lines of ‘now that we now the genome of [insert species name here], we know all about [insert species name here].’ That’s so far of the mark, because there is more to the genome than the string of As, Ts, Gs & Cs that make it […]
Continue readingI found the following on the Silly Beliefs website: [Someone] popped up on the Stuff web-site last month the day after the interesting magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Fiordland, suggesting we should expect further big earthquakes around the globe in the following week, because it was no coincidence that the Fiordland earthquake occurred a mere 30 minutes […]
Continue readingA few days ago I read an article about the discovery of a new species of bird – a ‘bald-faced bulbul’. It’s easy to think that there isn’t much more to discover in the world, with humans living in pretty much every habitable part, but in practice there arer still gaps in our knowledge & […]
Continue readingOne of the 2007 Scholarship exam questions sort of links to an earlier post I wrote, on xenotransplantation. It says Human disorders are increasingly being diagnosed and treated using biotechnological applications such as: • Genetic testing, including testing of adults through to pre-birth diagnosis (for example: pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PIGD) of embryos, amniocentesis or chorionic […]
Continue readingI’ve heard it said that the only ‘real’ science is experiment-based – things like palaeontology, astronomy & so on can’t get it right because they are ‘observational’, looking back into the past, & so can’t generate repeatable data. It’s usually said as the preface to special pleading for some sort of supernatural influence on the […]
Continue readingNow here’s a weird-looking little beastie: It’s a solenodon (although to me it looks a bit like those big rats – the Rodents of Unusual Size – in the fire-swamp scences of The Princess Bride… gosh, I enjoyed that movie!). And its chief claim to fame is that it’s a venomous mammal. Snakes, blue-ringed octopuses, spiders… there […]
Continue readingWhat’s wrong with catching the measles is the name of an excellent post over on Evidence-Based Thought. It was written following warnings from our Ministry of Health about the possibility of a measles epidemic – something which is already becoming a problem in parts of Europe & the US, where vaccination rates (& consequently herd […]
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