Facebook certainly leads me to read papers that I normally wouldn’t. For whatever reason, a post about deodorants popped up on my feed, from the Wendyl’s Green Goddess page. In the blurb for a sale of products was the following: Conventional products contain aluminium ingredients which have been linked to cancer. Do your skin and […]
Continue readingCategory: new science stories
human evolution – new discoveries, & how do we accommodate them in our teaching?
What follows is loosely based on a workshop I ran at this year's Biolive/ChemEd secondary science teachers' conference. (A most excellent conference, by the way – kudos to those organising & presenting.) I've added a bunch of hotlinked references. Back when I was in 7th form (or year 13 ie a rather long time ago), […]
Continue readingthe ‘fishing’ chimps of bakoun
I'm currently supervising a graduate student who's writing a review of the literature on tool use in wild chimpanzees. This has become a most enjoyable interaction: it's a topic I've been interested in for quite a while now, so the supervision role is an excuse to extend my own knowledge, and it's great helping the […]
Continue readingparts of our genome are actually viral
I've just come across a most excellent article by the Genetic Literacy Project. In it, Nicholas Staropoli notes that a proportion of the human genome actually has viral origins. This might sound a bit strange – after all, we tend to think of viruses as our enemies (smallpox, measles, and the human papilloma virus come […]
Continue readingselection and dog breeds
So, I own a pocket wolf. … … Oh, OK, I own a little black mini-poodle. But, like all dogs, he has the same number of chromosomes as a wolf! There've been several articles posted recently about the evolution of domestic dogs. While we've tended to think that domestication didn't begin until humans began to […]
Continue readingtunicates – apparent simplicity belies a complex past
Tunicates are more commonly known as 'sea squirts' – little blobby marine creatures that squirt water when you touch them (hence the name). We don't hear about them often, except perhaps when they make the news for all the wrong reasons. But from an evolutionary perspective they are fascinating little creatures – and it's largely […]
Continue readingthe bedbug genome and their bloody habits
Once upon a time, I wrote about traumatic insemination in bedbugs. (Those of my friends who are still traumatised by learning about the reproductive habits of various slug species may not wish to follow that link.) Now, two papers just published in Nature Communications describe the results of sequencing & examining the genome of the […]
Continue readingpolyps + glowing proteins + hosts = disco snails!
By now many of you have probably seen images of green-glowing zebrafish, or pigs whose snout & trotters glow in the dark. In both cases the animals are genetically modified and are expressing a fluorescent protein originally sourced from a jellyfish. (The body form of a jellyfish is a medusa, while that of sea anemones & […]
Continue readingjust how small can a small snail be?
When I was a kid I used to collect shells on the beach – got my Girl Guides 'collectors' badge & everything 🙂 So I really enjoyed reading this post over on Sciblogs NZ. And that in turn reminded me of an article I saw recently on microsnails. According to that article, "Microsnail" is the […]
Continue readingthe speed of a chameleon’s tongue
In 2012 the world was introduced to some of the smallest-known vertebrates: tiny chameleons. My good friend Grant wrote about them at the time, & I set an essay assignment for my first-years on these tiny beasties. How tiny is tiny? The following images are from the original paper, published in PLoS one by Glaw, Kohler, […]
Continue reading