Last year's Schol Bio paper contained (as is usual) some interesting and challenging questions. One of them was about earwax. More specifically, the earwax phenotypes 'dry' and 'wet', and what their distribution can tell us about patterns of human evolution. (Note to those sitting these examinations: most questions have a reasonable amount of resource material […]
Continue readingAmong other things, I like to knit. My mother got me started, years ago, & I worked up to quite complex Fair Isle patterns on jerseys & shawls. But the kids weren’t all that keen on wearing woolly stuff once all the new ‘manmades’ came on the market, & a well-made jersey lasts a Long […]
Continue readingOr 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 readingI 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 readingThe ‘aquatic ape’ hypothesis (it can’t be described as a theory) has been around for quite a while, & in fact I’ve blogged about it before. So I was sorry to hear that Sir David Attenborough, who’s done so much to promote conservation issues and enhance our understanding of the natural world, appeared to have […]
Continue readingWhat follows is a piece I wrote (quite a while ago now) for students planning on sitting Scholarship Biology. It was intended to start them thinking 🙂 I’ve just been asked to contribute to a panel discussion on RNZ around this subject, so thought it might be timely to re-post this article (I think time […]
Continue readingThe Telegraph has a story on the possibility of cloning Neanderthals, with the fetching headline: ‘I can create Neanderthal baby, I just need willing woman.’ (You can read the NZ version on Stuff.) My first thought was ‘eeewww’. (And, as a friend commented, it’s stories like this that get science a bad name.) Once past that […]
Continue readingOn Facebook yesterday, Science Alert posted a picture of a cute little piggy. Why, they asked, do humans feel such love for baby animals? Assuredly, this is a psychology experiment waiting to happen! Not so. For one of my favourite science writers beat them to it, by about 30 years. And in a rather entertaining manner. […]
Continue readingWhen the news first came out that Prof Mike Morwood & Thomas Sutikna were going to be giving a public lecture about Homo floresiensis, I was first excited & then seriously annoyed: yay! great topic, but rats! can’t get down to it. So I was absolutely delighted to see the following in this week’s Royal […]
Continue readingWhile away on holiday (gloat!) I got the opportunity for uninterrupted listening to podcasts 🙂 One of these was a July episode of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, which included a discussion of the (in)famous Kennewick Man remains. These 9,000-years-old bones have been the focus of considerable controversy in the US, where they were […]
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