Last week I attended the launch of Science OlympiaNZ, a charitable trust set up as an umbrella group to support New Zealand’s various International Science Olympiad programs (& very generously supported by the Todd Foundation). Among the speakers was Max, a member of this year’s highly successful NZ International Biology Olympiad team. Max gave a great speech, & I […]
Continue readingMonth: November 2009
things that go BANG!
No, this has nothing whatsoever to do with biology… well, that’s not quite true – there’s an exploding whale included 🙂 I remember that one year, early in my secondary schooling (yes, a loooong time ago!), there was a rumour that some young man at Hastings Boys High had disposed of some illicitly-acquired sodium by […]
Continue readingtopical 1080
A couple of years ago now, we held a Cafe Scientifique with the topic 1080 – friend or foe? Topical then (it drew a large crowd, wtih people from both sides of the debate) & just as topical now. On the one hand, 1080 is promoted as our current best option for the control of possums, […]
Continue readingten questions about intelligent design
A while ago now I wrote about the ’10 questions to ask your biology teacher’, promoted by Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute. It seems that – in the US anyway – creationists cdesign proponentsists have moved on: the list has transmogrified into ‘Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about intelligent design’. Over on […]
Continue readingflorence nightingale was a statistician
Just a quick post as I’m away on a panel meeting & my brain is tired – but here’s something else from my file of ‘things I didn’t know’: Florence Nightingale was a statistician. Now, I heard all about Florence Nightingale when I was a kid. She made a major contribution to the development of […]
Continue readinglumping, splitting, and the morphological species concept
A couple of weeks ago Marcus Wilson & I were down in Taranaki to run a Scholarship preparation day. During one of my sessions the biology students & I were discussing the concept of ‘species’. Most of you are probably familiar with the idea of a ‘biological species’, defined by its lack of ability to interbreed […]
Continue readinga question of isolation
I spent a lot of last weekend marking exam papers from my first-year bio students. Most of them chose one of my essay questions (it’s a team-taught paper & they had a choice of 3 essays in my section), & today one of the class told me that she’d really liked that question because it […]
Continue readingdinosaur footprints in new zealand
On the news last night we watched fascinating footage of dinosaur footprints, found at a location in somewhere near Nelson, in the South Island. (A secret location – if their whereabouts should become widely known, you can bet there’d be unscrupulous fossil hunters in there, chipping out slabs of rock with footprints in them, for […]
Continue readingviral evolution – ‘evolution before our eyes’
A quick post (I’m hoping to write something more substantial on a new paper, but at the moment I’ve got student appointments all day & I’m writing this in the gaps between two of them): this link is to a video (teachers – it’s downloadable) about an experiment demonstrating rapid evolution in a plant virus (the […]
Continue readingfluoride reloaded
From the Letters to the Editor (we should, apparently, be concerned that most people don’t know the form of fluoride in our drinking water…)
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