.. but perhaps not for the squeamish, not over lunch anyway! Grant & I were e-chatting about some of the great science images we’d seen, & I thought of this one: via PZ comes some stunning imagery of a python digesting a rat. Here’s my favourite from that gallery. (Come to think of it, one […]
Continue readingYear: 2010
a good example of thinking critically
One of my regular readers wrote to me today, about an advert that she’d stumbled across recently. I asked if I could reproduce it here (changing some names) as it’s a very good example of someone thinking critically about claims made for a particular product.
Continue readingrolling brown stuff
Today I saw an image that reminded me of a recent newspaper article that discussed a proposal to introduce ‘foreign’ dung beetles into New Zealand. (I’m assuming it’s a follow-up to an earlier news item from 2009.)
Continue readingengagement techniques for teaching evolution
This is a re-post of something I’ve written for the ‘other blog’ over at Talking Teaching. I’m hoping those of my readers who are biology teachers might find something useful in it, & that we might get a discussion going on this key topic of teaching evolution, given its prominence in the new Science curriculum. […]
Continue readingfurther ruminations on writing an essay
This post’s triggered by the fact that I’ve just spent several hours reading through draft essays that students have asked me to check for them. I definitely don’t go through & correct every last thing, but I do identify areas that need work, & I’ll give examples of how to improve things. For example, I’ll […]
Continue readingevidence supporting an hypothesis of crank magnetism
Orac often talks about ‘crank magnetism’ – the tendency for people who believe strange stuff in one area, to be attracted to other areas of oddness as well. (As far as I can tell, the terms was originally formulated on the denialism blog.) Anyway, having an hypothesis (the above crank magnetism) one must test it – […]
Continue readingthe specialities of mad scientists
Oh noes! I am doomed!! It seems (fictional) biologists are almost as likely to be mad scientists as those of the nucular persuasion (click on the graphic for a better-quality image, courtesy of Mad Science): I should hang out with the chemists more often…
Continue readingthe great tree of life
This one’s for both teachers & students (& of course, anyone else interested in evolution and evolutionary trees): the Evolutionary Genealogy website 🙂 It’s a site that "seeks to promote the teaching and acceptance of the biological theory of evolution by emphasizing one of its great lessons: that life on Earth is one big extended […]
Continue readinga cultural divide
What follows is a re-post of something I originally wrote for my ‘other’ blog over on Talking Teaching. One of the things that I find profoundly irritating is hearing tertiary teaching staff decrying the efforts of their colleagues in the secondary education system. [Edit: here I must add that it’s not something I hear regularly […]
Continue readingprized science
This one’s for anyone with an interest in chemistry – the Prized Science video series, which aims to look at the significance of chemistry in our lives. My colleague Merilyn Manley-Harris alerted me to this site, & the information she sent through to me follows below. So far there’s just the first video of the series […]
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