As I left the office this afternoon I said to my colleagues, ‘I’ll be in a bit later tomorrow, I have an interview with a vampire.’ At which they all laughed, because they know this means I’m off to my regular appointment at the NZ Blood Service centre, over by the hospital.
Continue readingMonth: September 2009
plant growth responses to touch
Commenting on my last post about plant behaviour, Jim mentioned a paper by Marian Smith on plant responses to being touched or shaken. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the link to work, but I did a Google Scholar search on the name & topic & got this: Plant growth responses to touch – literally a ‘hands-on’ exercise! […]
Continue readingwhat’s your favourite (transitional) fossil?
A couple of weeks ago Brian Switek’s blog Laelaps included a post on transitional fossils (those things that some creationists will tell you simply don’t exist… ) Brian’s post was sparked by this story (OK, maybe the writer of was aiming for ‘balance’, but really!) & he suggested that others might like to emulate him & write […]
Continue readingplants – much more than you expect
One of the Biology Standards year 13 students study is called ‘Describe animal behaviour & plant responses’. Now, if ‘behaviour’ = response to a stimulus, then that’s really what plants are doing too. I guess it’s just hard to think that something (usually) green, (usually) fixed in place, & with no nerves or muscles is […]
Continue readingscience blogging in new zealand
I’ve been blogging for 2 years now & following other people’s blogs for rather longer than that. But I’ve only ever been aware of a few other NZ science bloggers; there’s so much material out there that unless you go looking for something specific, an individual blog can get lost in all the ‘noise’. But […]
Continue readinga rather strange decision
A fellow blogger drew my attention to a recent decision by the Broadcasting Standards Authority. It seems that Dr Shaun Holt, a medical doctor who appears regularly on TV1’s Breakfast show, has been slated by the BSA over some comments he made (several months back now) concerning chiropractic. The BSA found that the show – & by […]
Continue readingscience-based medicine vs the ‘natural’ kind
This week a very dear friend of mine is having surgery for bowel cancer, having already gone through a course of comibined chemo/radiotherapy in preparation. When I was talking with her last week, she commented that she wasn’t looking forward to the operation, but the prospect of a few more years of reasonably comfortable life […]
Continue readingcritical thinking 101: reading news stories on science
You’ve probably gathered by now that I get quite irritated by the way that some news reports portray science. But it’s not always easy to know what to look for, in terms of the tell-tale signs that let you know that all may not be as it first appears. Fortunately the inestimable Ben Goldacre has […]
Continue readingmalaria & sickle-cell anaemia
I ran a Schol Bio tutorial out at the uni yesterday & the last exercise we did involved going over a question from last year’s paper. This question looked at sickle-cell disease (SCD), which is seen in individuals who are homozygous for a recessive mutation – on chromosome 11 – that affects the haemoglobin molecule. The mutant […]
Continue readingthe usefulness of parachutes has not been scientifically tested
This post’s about another of the papers a teacher sent to me recently, with the subject line ‘science can be fun’. The title of this one is Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials (Smith & Pell, 2003). I have to say that I chuckled […]
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