The need (not urge, need!) to do housework finally caught up with me this weekend, & now that’s over I really need to do some final preparation for my classes tomorrow. So here are a few snippets to tide you over…
Continue readingMonth: September 2010
discussing death
I’ve just read an article by Joanne Kenen, who discusses the ever-difficult question faced by emergency-room doctors of when to raise end-of-life issues with a patient. Because I’ve had a bit of a discussion over at SciBlogs on the issue of how well we communicate about science in general, I thought (it being Friday) that I […]
Continue readingpreparing for scholarship exams
It’s that time of year again, & I’m working on my resources for the sessions I’ll be giving (in Hamilton on September 19th) & over in Hawkes Bay in October) on preparing for the Scholarship Biology exams. By now many of you will have made the decision to sit these exams, & I hope I’ll […]
Continue readingsweet poison?
One of my readers has forwarded an e-mail purporting to warn of the dangers of so-called aspartame poisoning. This particular e-mail has been circulating since at least 1998 & has been eviscerated on sites such as the hoax-busting Snopes.com, but I thought I might address some of its wilder claims here anyway (I feel like […]
Continue readinga genetic window on marsupial evolution
I suspect that many people, asked where you’d find marsupials, would answer ‘Australia’ & leave it at that. But while we may be most familiar with Skippy & his ilk, those pouched mammals across the Tasman have close cousins half a world away – in South America.
Continue readingbeery bladders & other oddities
Beery bladders… yes, OK, if you drink enough beer your bladder will fill up, but that’s not the focus of a delightful post by Scicurious on Neurotic physiology. It’s a tale of how doctors followed their noses to find that several seriously ill patients had yeast infections – and a decidedly beery odour. And no, they […]
Continue readinglegionella – an intracellular pathogen
I know I’ve said it before, but you really do learn something new every day 🙂 I was browsing through my collection of Science alerts & an item about Legionella caught my eye. Legionella pneumophila is the bacterium that causes Legionnaires’ disease, so named because it was first identified when several people attending a 1976 meeting of […]
Continue readingpicking out the drunks, and other interesting tales
A week or so back, one of the weekend papers ran a story on just how many beers someone needed to drink before they’d be legally too drunk to drive. The Significant Other & I were staggered to find that the answer was, A Lot. (Around 9, as I recall.) Speaking for myself, about 2 […]
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