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Category: new science stories

polio & evolution

April 11, 2008 | Alison | evolution, nature of science, new science stories, scholarship biology

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

April 4, 2008 | Alison | evolution, genetics, new science stories

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!

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better s*x from headless males…

March 26, 2008 | Alison | animal behaviour, evolution, new science stories, scholarship biology

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…

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use of colour by early sapiens

March 22, 2008 | Alison | evolution, human evolution, new science stories

This one’s been sitting in my ‘good blogging material’ folder for a while now: time to have a look at it, I think.

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forensic genetics & an evolutionary puzzle

March 5, 2008 | Alison | evolution, genetics, new science stories

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 […]

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cell phones & male fertility

March 1, 2008 | Alison | critical thinking, new science stories, scholarship biology

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.

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good web articles on evolution issues

February 28, 2008 | Alison | evolution, new science stories, scholarship biology

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.

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coevolution of weta and fleshy fruits

February 24, 2008 | Alison | evolution, new science stories

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).

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giant fish extinctions

February 7, 2008 | Alison | new science stories

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.

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coevolution of bats & flowers

January 31, 2008 | Alison | evolution, new science stories, scholarship biology

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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Swan girl - portrait of the author as a young scientist This blog in response to comments from secondary school biology teachers. I hope to use it as a way of encouraging critical thinking, looking at scientific papers that are relevant to the Level 3 curriculum and to Scholarship.

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