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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A few days back an article in The Guardian popped up in my newsfeed. It was quite old – published in 2016 – but it looked interesting, so I read it & also tracked down the original paper. The article & research paper describe work done to develop and test a potential tool for unpicking […]
Continue readingYou’ve probably come across the name Kary Mullis recently, via social media. He’s best remembered for his invention (along with a team of other researchers) of the Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR for short (and for many biology students was probably immortalised in their memories via this earworm of an advertisement¹). This turned out to […]
Continue readingJust this morning a journalist sent me a link to a press release about a new paper looking at how SARS-Cov-2 affects the vascular system, & asked me to comment on it for a article. If you’d like to read the actual paper you can find it here, but be aware that it does get […]
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Recently I was told I needed to go to the Youtube channel of Dr Sam BaileyA and watch one of her videosB. So I did. This particular video is called The Truth About Virus Isolation, and yes it’s on Youtube, and no I’m not linking directly because I refuse to link to such a misleading […]
Continue readingWhile checking my spam folder (before yeeting the contents permanently) I noticed that I’d been sent a bunch of email ‘newsletters’ from the group “Voices for Freedom.” Out of interest I opened one, just in case the contents were worth a post or two – & indeed they were. The writers of the newsletter state […]
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This evening I was engaging in polite conversation (well, I was polite, anyway) on an RNZ Facebook post about – you guessed it! – the covid19 vaccination program. One of those present offered up a link to a blog post by Joseph Mercola to support a claim he was making about the vaccines. When I […]
Continue readingA year ago I posted an explanation on vaccine “ingredients”, in relation to some wild claims made about the measles vaccine in the context of Samoa’s measles epidemic. From what I’ve seen on recent RNZ comments threads, an update for the time of SARS-Cov-2 is required. So, here’s purple making a statement about the Pfizer […]
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