A couple of years ago now (before I got into this blogging thing, anyway) there was a brief flurry of media interest over a study that – according to various stories in the press – showed that the Maori population has a higher frequency of a ‘warrior gene’ & that this explained all sorts of […]
Continue readingI was moved to wonder about this after seeing another article in today’s Herald about ageing. Or, more particularly, about slowing/stopping the ageing process & thereby extending the period of our natural lifespan. Rapamycin got a look-in as well. And there was something about how the French manage to lead long & presumably healthy lives. (Having […]
Continue readingI do love the fact that there is always something new to learn. And often, to pass on to my students. Like the ‘Lost City’ – a surreal landscape of ghostly white towers that’s formed around alkaline vents deep under the Atlantic Ocean. Now, I know about the ‘black smokers’ – fragile black towers belching […]
Continue readingI’ve been marking essays a lot of the day & there are still a fair few waiting for me to give them some attention, so this is going to be brief. But reading through them all has spurred me to make a couple of comments relevant to your Schol preparation. One is something I’ve said […]
Continue readingI got an e-mail yesterday from a biology teacher (thanks, Ayelet!) with three pdfs & the subject line ‘science can be fun after all!’. And the three attached papers definitely showed that 🙂 ‘Excellent blog material,’ I thought to myself…
Continue readingA comment on my post about human pheromones got me thinking a bit more about the topic 🙂 Just how much do we know about these signalling chemicals & our ability to detect them? Many animals use scent as a basis for communication. Many female moths release a sexual pheromone that males can detect from […]
Continue readingFrom time to time I’ve heard it said (by those in the creationist camp) that evolution has no relevance to modern medicine. Um… hello? antibiotic resistance in bacteria, anyone? And an understanding of evolution can also be put to good use in examining possibilities for new treatments, as ERV describes in her latest post.
Continue readingI’ve just finished reading The Science of Sherlock Holmes, an engaging little book that has the subtitle: from Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the real forensics behind the Great Detective’s greatest cases. I’m a sucker for CSI, so when I saw that title in the library, I simply couldn’t resist. (At this point I should […]
Continue readingLike other animals, humans produce pheromones – chemical signals released by one individual that carry information to another. (Unlike other animals, we also spend a lot of time & money modifiying those pheromones: bathing, deodorants, perfumes…) However, while the significance of pheromones in other animal taxa has been studied fairly thoroughly, there’s been less scientific […]
Continue readingI was in a schol bio tutorial the other day & one of the students asked a really intriguing question – one that I hadn’t really thought about before. Apparently the class had watched the series Walking with cavemen a few weeks ago, & at some point (she couldn’t remember which species it was) the narrator […]
Continue reading