Or at least, they are, the way I do things 🙂 (Had a busy weekend that included spending much of yesterday out here at work running a Scholarship preparation day for local bio students – hence the lack of posts & my desire to do something light & fluffy today!)
Continue readingYear: 2010
more on ‘sweet poison’: aspartame – truth vs fiction
I’m a regular visitor to Science-Based Medicine. Today there’s a post about aspartame by Steven Novella, which caught my eye given my own interest in this topic. The first paragraph follows below, but I encourage readers to go across to SBM for the full article 🙂 If you believe everything you read on the internet, […]
Continue readingretail therapy better than s*x?
From the UK’s Telegraph (& via the NZ Herald) comes the attention-grabbing headline: ‘Finding a bargain feels as good as sex‘. Well, I’m a fan of a good bargain (mmmm, coats…) so of course I read on. And was, as usual with such headlines, disappointed.
Continue readingconspicuous facultative mimicry in octopuses
Or should that be octopodes? Anyway, this is so much more interesting than so-called psychic octopuses: an octopus whose mimicry can make it more conspicuous, not less. The ‘mimic’ octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus – now, there’s a name that Terry Pratchett would appreciate) is arguably the best colour-changer on the block, & it combines its colour-trickery with […]
Continue readingsunday snippets
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 readingdiscussing 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 reading