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Year: 2013

just like ‘alien’ – moray eels have *two* sets of jaws

December 19, 2013 | Alison | animal diversity

Around 14 months ago the husband & I were spending a lazy holiday in Rarotonga. We did quite a bit of snorkelling on the reefs, and especially enjoyed our experiences at Muri, where we saw a good range of reef fish in near-ideal conditions (as in, clear, calm, relatively shallow water). There were several moray […]

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kiwi evolution – a new take on an icon’s ancient past

December 18, 2013 | Alison | Uncategorised

'The' kiwi (Apteryx spp.) has always been a bit of an enigma, not least for the fact that it lays an absolutely enormous egg in comparison to its body size. In one of the essays in his book Bully for Brontosaurus (1991), Stephen Jay Gould argued that this differential in egg/body size was due to the […]

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secrets from an ancient graveyard

December 16, 2013 | Alison | new science stories

One of my current favourite TV programs is Time Team – I enjoy learning little bits of history & Tony Robinson's happy enthusiasm is so contagious (but I still think of him as Baldrick). So you'll understand that I was happily distracted this morning when, while looking for something else (isn't that usually the way?), […]

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selecting for maladaptive behaviour

December 13, 2013 | Alison | animal behaviour, evolution, genetics, new science stories

One of the questions that often comes up in my first-year bio classes relates to natural selection and human evolution. Does the fact that modern medical science keeps alive people who in previous centuries might have died, mean that we're countering the effects of natural selection? As you can imagine, this generates quite a lot […]

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shaking up the academy? or, how the academy could shake up teaching

December 10, 2013 | Alison | education

This is something I originally wrote for my 'other' blog over at Talking Teaching. Last week I spent a couple of days down in Wellington, attending the annual symposium for the Ako Aotearoa Academy. The Academy's made up of the winners of the national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards, so there are around 150 or so […]

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nz’s pisa rankings slip, & the soul-searching begins

December 5, 2013 | Alison | education

The latest PISA results are out, and NZ – despite remaining in the 'above the average' group for OECD countries – has nonetheless  slipped in this measure of achievement in reading, maths administered by the Programme for International Student Assessment . This is of concern, & there are probably multiple complex causes for our decline. […]

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the daily mail comes late to the pig-ape hybridisation idea

December 2, 2013 | Alison | critical thinking, human evolution

In posting an item about the 'pig-ape hybridisation' suggestion for human origins, the Daily Mail is a) coming rather late to the story (a slow day in the newsroom, perhaps?) and b) showing more regard for sensationalism than for good investigative journalism. The story's one I've posted about before (& I've reposted my original piece […]

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the fascinating psychology behind conspiracy theories

November 21, 2013 | Alison | critical thinking, nature of science

I've just read (via the NZ Skeptics page on FB) a fascinating article on Slate about the psychology of conspiracy theorists. In it, Will Saletan describes a series of studies from the past 20 years, that attempted to understand why a fair proportion of people seem to incline towards conspiracy theories (for example, a 2007 poll […]

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why did the pigeon cross the road?

November 19, 2013 | Alison | animal behaviour, education

if I lived in Hawkes Bay I'd be keen to attend this Royal Society public lecture, & I'll certainly be watching the video, which will be available after. It looks like being of interest & value to senior Biology teachers. The ninth lecture in the 10X10 series   Why did the pigeon cross the road? […]

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a glorious (but deadly) cephalopod

November 18, 2013 | Alison | animal diversity, evolution

Every now & then the husband goes on a fossil-fossicking expedition, in order to add to his collection of things long dead & turned to stone. There are a number of good sites in the Waikato region, and one of them has yielded quite a few belemnite remains: specifically, the bullet-shaped fossilised internal shells of […]

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Swan girl - portrait of the author as a young scientist This blog in response to comments from secondary school biology teachers. I hope to use it as a way of encouraging critical thinking, looking at scientific papers that are relevant to the Level 3 curriculum and to Scholarship.

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