Today I heard that one of my favourite authors, Sir Terry Pratchett, had died (at the relatively young age of 66). And I cried. In his Discworld novels he created a world full of the most amazing characters, and while their voices – and through them his – will continue to speak to us, their […]
Continue readingYear: 2015
it’s amazing what you find in the spam folder
I've just spent an entertaining 10 minutes or so clearing out my spam folder. I don't go there often, but a student had asked why I hadn't answered their email & since I hadn't actually received one in the in-box, I thought I'd best check spam. (And there it was. General hint to students: really […]
Continue readingyes, we have some bananas – just not gm ones (yet)
Back in 2010 I wrote a post about bananas, following on from a Schol Bio question the previous year. As well as looking at the genotypes of modern bananas, I highlighted the fact that the original wild banana was not a particularly appetising object, with little flesh and a lot of large, hard seeds. Selective […]
Continue readingthe mysteries of cannibal octopus s*x
And oh, how I wish I could say it was me who came up with that title! But it wasn’t; it was the BBC, headlining a fascinating article about how octopuses get it on. It seems it’s rather difficult to be a male octopus with mating on his mind. Like a female spider, his prospective […]
Continue readinga mantis? or a fly?
So, which is it? A mantis? Or a fly? (Image by kind permission of Daniel Llavaneras) In fact, the creature shown in this gorgeous image by Daniel Llavaneras is neither mantis nor true (Dipteran) fly, although its common name is 'mantisfly'. Instead, it belongs to the insect family Mantispidae (a group that includes lacewings and antlions). Like real praying mantids, matisflies walk […]
Continue readingrip frank’n’louie, the diprosopic cat
Seeing this image of a fish with 2 mouths reminded me that I needed to finish writing about Frankenlouie, a janus-headed (diprosopic) cat. It's funny how the mind works, because the fish definitely isn't a janus-fish: that would require the mouths to be side-by-side rather than one above the other. (While this is a rather […]
Continue readingthe 10 commandments of rational debate
Critical thinking is a necessary tool for understanding the world we live in. And I don’t believe we teach it particularly well. I know that students in high school science classes learn how to assess the validity/reliability of a source, for example, and that’s great, but on top of that we need to get students […]
Continue readingonly the bones remained
And at the end, there weren’t many of those. One of the things we talk about in biology class is the importance of decomposers. Most students think in terms of bacteria when this topic’s raised, & maybe things like fungi. But there is more to the breakdown of a body than those microorganisms. Think worms, […]
Continue readinga tale of two tails
Lizards, like us, are chordates. One of the defining characteristics that all chordates share at some point in their development is the presence of a notochord: a stiff rod of tissue that runs along the dorsal side of the animal, just beneath the hollow dorsal nerve cord. (Yes, hollow. This is the result of its […]
Continue readingtrue facts about owls
A lot of my friends seem to like owls, if their tendency to post photos of adorable fluffy feathered faces on Facebook is anything to go by. I rather like them too; we live close to a gully & it’s lovely hearing the moreporks calling at night. Once or twice one has sat in a […]
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