"Have you heard of a pyrosome?" asks Carin Bondar. My immediate answer was, no; no, I haven’t – but you know me, I’m always curious 🙂 Turns out that pyrosomes – which look almost other-worldly in the video below – are colonial tunicates: the same taxonomic group as the perhaps-more-familiar sea squirts. And that means […]
Continue readingYear: 2013
stunning spiders
I won’t post the photos here – but drop over to wired & admire the stunning spider images from photographer Nicky Bay. I think my favourite would have to be the Mirror Spider (Thwaitesia sp.), which looks as though it’s got a disco ball for an abdomen. And for awesome mimicry, take a look at […]
Continue readingdoes science literacy matter?
That’s the title of a post over on the Australian site, The Conversation (which I found by way of a piece on "Scientists, the media, & society" by Sir Peter Gluckman). The author of the piece, Ken Friedman, answers his question with an emphatic "yes, and here’s why". As he notes, The big question is […]
Continue readingcan people really sense exposure to emfs?
Back in 2007, I was the MC at a Cafe Scientifique focused on high-voltage power lines. Then, as now, there was concern that the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) around these high-voltage lines posed a health hazard, so I did quite a bit of reading around the subject (as always, we had experts along to lead the […]
Continue readingthe sea’s strangest square mile, indeed
From Shark Bay Films on vimeo, via PZ, comes this awesome video – life and death on the sea bed. It opens with a species of polychaete worm (aka bobbit worms**) – what an amazing stealth predator! And surely one to give small children – and first-year biology students! – nightmares. And there are ribbon […]
Continue readingthe male himalayan monal – an absolutely gorgeous bird
Another for the ‘gosh, isn’t this beautiful?!’ files: the Himalayan Monal (the national bird of Nepal). (Image via Facebook: Tambako the Jaguar; Flickr — with Robin Subba, Sarvesh Wangawad,Jeriko Angue, Roberto Delapisa, Jonas Mgr, Neelesh Suryavanshi, Shashank Asai,Sushant Bhujel and Pabitra Lamichhane.) This stunning bird (Lophophorus impejanus) is a type of pheasant, and like other pheasants the species is strongly sexually dimorphic: the males […]
Continue readingthe origins of humans lie in a – ahem! – far-fetched hybridisation event?
Or maybe not. The internet is a wondrous place: a source of information, of amusement, and – alarmingly often – of material that elicits a combination of ‘say what?’ and <head-desk>. And a hat-tip to PZ Myers for this particular example…
Continue readingancient jewelry
I don’t own much jewelry – probably because I’m not often inclined to wear it. And what I do have is mostly old, passed down from my mother & her mother before her. Old, but not anywhere near the age of the find reported in PLoS ONE by Marco Peresani and his colleagues (2013). The […]
Continue readingmmm, ravioli?
My blogging buddy Grant suggested an image competition as a way to lure me back into a blogging mindset **. And then, I saw this (courtesy of the FB page for the team at Amazing Earth): My first thought (following a passing glimpse) was, "embroidery". Followed, I’m sorry to say, by "mmmm, ravioli!" (In my […]
Continue readingfinal flight
On Tuesday morning I walked on the beach at sunrise, and saw a kingfisher hunting sand hoppers on the tide-line. It seemed somehow fitting for the day when the sun would shine on our old airman’s last fiight. For my father-in-law died on Friday and Tuesday was the day of his funeral: a loving celebration […]
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