This one’s been sitting in my ‘good blogging material’ folder for a while now: time to have a look at it, I think.
Continue readinguse of colour by early sapiens
Category: new science stories
forensic genetics & an evolutionary puzzle
At the moment I'm lecturing to our first-year biology class about plants. In my lecture about algae, there were a couple of slides about malaria. You might well ask 'why'; I know my students were thinking that. Well, I did have a reason – & today I found a brief summary paper (Keeling, 2008) on just […]
Continue readingcell phones & male fertility
Orac's just blogged on a new study that seems to show that heavy cellphone use contributes to male infertility. No doubt this will be all over the headlines in a day or so – so I thought I'd get in first & give you some practice in critical thinking while I'm at it.
Continue readinggood web articles on evolution issues
Here's a link to a set of articles that summarise talks on various aspects of evolution research. They're straightforward & easy to read, & should give you some interesting additional background to some recurring questions.
Continue readingcoevolution of weta and fleshy fruits
Here's another paper on coevolution – this one a bit closer to home. It suggests a coevolutionary relationship between a weta species and the characteristics of many fleshy fruits of NZ plants (Burns, 2006).
Continue readinggiant fish extinctions
I mean, extinctions of giant fish, not giant extinctions of fish! This is about a paper that I read last year & put aside as a 'general interest' topic for when I was looking for something to write about.
Continue readingcoevolution of bats & flowers
One of the questions in the 2007 90717 paper was on an example of coevolution in bats & flowers. I had a look at the original reference and it's such a neat example, I thought you might be interested in hearing a bit more detail about it.
Continue readingancient whales and their cousins
Like many people, I've always been interested in whales. My interest in whale evolution began when I was teaching about mammal evolution at Massey, and it really got off the ground when I read Carl Zimmer's excellent book, At the water's edge. Now there's a fossil that tells us even more about whales and their […]
Continue readingevolution has shaped women’s spines! Really?
Last week the NZ Herald carried a story, based on a new scientific paper, about how evolution had affected the shape of women's spines, resulting in an adaptation for weight-bearing during pregnancy. The paper (Whitcome et al. 2007) describes how men & women differ in the shape of their lumbar vertebrae, and relates this to the weight gain […]
Continue readingbattle of the brains
A day or so ago people were talking in the tea-room about a clip on TV that showed chimpanzees beating humans hands-down on a test of memory. This piqued my curiosity, because I don't watch a lot of TV & hadn't seen the show. But today I found a link to it – have a look! I […]
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