This year my husband planted a little patch of glass gem corn (apparently a type of “flint” corn) in our vege garden. We harvested the cobs today, and you can see where the name comes from. I noticed that you could get a good idea of what the main colour of each cob would […]
Continue readingI’m going to borrow a line from Dame Anne Salmond, who says it better than I ever could. The Government’s decision to cut humanities and social science research from its major funding stream is both bad policy and scientifically illiterate. That’s from this excellent opinion piece by Dame Anne on newsroom, & I urge you […]
Continue readingAotearoa NZ has for many years funded what’s known as “blue-sky” research via the Marsden Fund. This afternoon, social media platform BlueSky¹ is full of posts commenting on the NZ government’s decision to remove social sciences from the funding pool, and to require that 50% of funded projects be of “economic benefit” to the country. […]
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or, more specifically, a question of lethal allelesA. Lethal alleles were first noticed back in 1905 by Lucien Cuénot, and identified for what they were by Castle & Little in 1910. These two studies, looking at inheritance of yellow coat colour in mice, found that only mice heterozygous for this gene had yellow coats, despite […]
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Featured image: Venus, a cat that is either a clear example of the outcome of X-chromosome inactivation, or a chimera. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, senior high school students are currently sitting their external exams. This year’s Level 2 Biology papers have attracted quite a bit of attention from teachers, who’ve expressed concerns about the […]
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I’m running Schol Bio tuts again this year, & I like to start each session off with a question on some aspect of biology, just to start everyone thinking in that space. In the last session I presented two images (see below) and asked the students: what are possible genetic explanations for what you’re seeing […]
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You get rubbish. Tonight TV1 & Stuff both shared an “article” (which also featured in the Daily Mail) about what working from home will do to us in the future, including a 3D render of “Anna”, with clawed hands, hunched back, sunken eyes, & other horrors. It’s the result of a research study, they said. […]
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Image from Pixabay, via photosforclass.com A couple of days ago TVNZ rather credulously carried a story under the headline that “garlic can help” cure flu or covid-19, seemingly based on this article in the Financial Review. Presumably with the added benefit of keeping vampires away. However… from the Financial Review piece That is, the TVNZ headline […]
Continue readingI’m really enjoying running on-line tuts with Schol Bio students, because the questions & discussions are so interesting. (So, hopefully the students enjoy them too!) Last week we got onto talking about the enzyme lactase and the fact that in some populations many individuals continue to produce it into adulthood (thus making them lactose-tolerant, & […]
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With the discovery last week of 2 cases of measles in Auckland, I thought I’d pull together a few of the posts that I wrote during our last outbreak (in 2019) but which are still very relevant. Measles isn’t a benign disease, and unfortunately vaccination coverage for it has declined over the last few years, […]
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