I wrote a few days ago about the over-hyped media stories around the then-upcoming release of a new Science paper about a possible new hominin species. At the time is seemed really strange & definitely a spoiler rather than a teaser – by the time the actual paper came out, there’d already be a set of […]
Continue readingMonth: April 2010
live from the nz international biology olympiad training camp
Today & tomorrow I’m down in Wellington. This year Victoria University is hosting the training camp for New Zealand’s Biology Olympiad aspirants, but I got invited to come down & help out at some of the lab classes. Which is great, because I don’t want to lose contact with the IBO organisation (or the the […]
Continue readingchanges in the early oceans – & their impact on the evolution of animals
The earliest forms of life on Earth were prokaryotes, & they dominated the biosphere for around 2.5 billion years. And slowly they changed it – aerobic photosynthesis by cyanobacteria (‘blue-green algae’) led first to the oxygenation of the oceans & then to the development of an oxygen-rich atmosphere (incidentally making life impossible for many anaerobic […]
Continue readinganother missing link…
This morning’s NZ Herald carried a story from the UK Telegraph under the headline "Child’s skeleton missing link to man’s ape-like forebears.’ It could have been worse: the Telegraph‘s headline was ‘Missing link between man & apes found’ (sigh). I read the article & have to confess a certain amount of disappointment – because this seems to be […]
Continue readingmore on bone-eating snotworms – the fossil years
A while back I wrote about some fascinating little deep-sea creatures – the ‘bone-eating snot-worms’ (Osedax sp.) that colonise the corpses of dead whales falling to the ocean floor. Now Brian Switek, over on Laelaps, has reviewed a paper suggesting that this bone-boring habit has been around for millions of years. The evidence is in the […]
Continue readingthe costs of transpiration
One of our first-year bio labs sees our students using potometers to determine how transpiration is affected by things like light, humidity, & wind movement. Those of my readers who are school students may well have done something similar, but for those who arent – a potometer allows you to measure the rate of water […]
Continue readingbest billboard ever?
A few posts ago I wrote something about ‘research’ into psychic phenomena, & why it was bad science. Now Orac has posted a sign that says it all: This highlights something that has always puzzled me about the claims made by various psychic practitioners, regarding their abilty to predict future events. Surely they’d have known? (I […]
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