… but not in the middle of the night. As I’ve got older, I’ve found that little bouts of nocturnal restlessness in the legs department have become more common. Apparently it’s called "restless legs" syndrome (RLS), which for me presesnts as a rather unpleasant, hard-to-resist feeling that you just have to move your legs, sometimes […]
Continue readingYear: 2012
arsenic & old crimes
A commenter on one of Orac’s posts (& now I’m darned if I can remember which one) informed the others present that, while arsenic can be fatal for humans, it doesn’t kill rats. (It was part of a discussion on animal testing, which means the post was probably this one.) Now, I am a fan […]
Continue readingwonderful quotes about science
"Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world." – Louis Pasteur (via ScienceAlert on Facebook, where you can find many cool things.) At ScienceAlert I also found this wonderful quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson: The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not […]
Continue readingwhat is science?
That’s a question that many science blog-posts examine, implicitly if not explicitly. I do it here (quite a lot, recently!) when writing about various pseudo-scientific claims, & the same goes on over at Sciblogs NZ. It’s an interesting question that sometimes receives rather slick, glib answers. Over at Science-Based Medicine, Kimball Atwood has written a […]
Continue readingmotivating tomorrow’s biologists
That’s the title of Susan Musante’s paper in the latest issue of Bioscience (& many thanks to David Winter for sending it on). It’s a summary of some key points made by speakers at an NAS convocation called "Thinking evolutionarily: evolution education across the life sciences." Now, I find science fascinating, exciting, & endlessly interesting, […]
Continue readingcritical thinking – a classroom resource
I joined Facebook about a year ago – primarily to access the NZIBO pages, but subsequently I found I quite enjoyed keeping up with what friends & family are up to. More recently I’ve added ‘entities’ like ScienceAlert, & through that particular link I’ve just found an excellent series of short videos on critical thinking. […]
Continue readingwhy things got bigger (rpt)
One of my tasks at the moment it the revision/rewriting of the study guide (along with my actual lecture notes etc) for my A semester first-year biology class. As part of that I’m reviewing some of the material I give the students to read & came across a previous post of mine on the relationship […]
Continue readingshould universities offer courses in ‘alternative & complementary therapies’?
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald tells its readers: Scientists urge unis to axe alternative medicine courses. According to the article, [a]lmost one in three Australian universities now offer courses in some form of alternative therapy or complementary medicine, including traditional Chinese herbal medicine, chiropractics, homeopathy, naturopathy, reflexology and aromatherapy. We were talking about it […]
Continue readingchris stringer talks about human origins
Just a heads-up for teachers & students: next month Chris Stringer will be giving public lectures on human evolution in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch & Dunedin. (No Hamilton talk! I am sad 🙁 I’ve got an all-day meeting that means I’d never get up to the Auckland event in time.) From the latest Royal Society "Alert": […]
Continue readingweb 2.0, postmodernism, & attitudes to science
A new post by Orac discusses various tactics of the anti-vaccine movement, with reference to a new paper published in the journal Vaccine. (Link is to a pdf – apologies if this isn’t accessible to all as it’s well worth the time spent reading.) In the paper (entitled Anti-vaccine activists, Web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm – […]
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