I read quite a few science blogs & just stumbled across this excellent post about polio virus: the vaccines we use against it, the virus's evolutionary responses – oh heaps of stuff. And a chilling photo of a ward full of polio patients in iron lungs: in extreme cases the patients lost the ability to breathe […]
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scientifique kiwis
Gosh, we had a good Cafe Scientifique this week. My friend & colleague, Dave Lambert, was there to talk about his latest project – sequencing the kiwi genome. (That's kiwi bird, not kiwi people.) And he wants to get you involved!
Continue readingbetter s*x from headless males…
On Monday night a newspaper article caught my eye – the reporter had picked up on a study suggesting that, if you’re a female praying mantis, eating your partner during sex can actually be quite beneficial…
Continue readinguse of colour by early sapiens
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 readingforensic 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.
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