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Climate change and human evolution

October 22, 2007 | Alison | human evolution, new science stories, scholarship biology

Models of human evolution give quite a bit of attention to the role that climate change may have played in the evolution and dispersal of hominin species, both ancient and modern. A study just published presents evidence of an extreme and prolonged drought in East Africa, spanning 135,000 – 75,000 years ago – the time when the Out […]

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Can plants hunt?

October 20, 2007 | Alison | new science stories, plant responses to the environment

Is this a trick question? No. While the majority of plants are free-living autotrophs, some are parasites on other plants (think mistletoe, for example). And while the seeds of many of these parasitic plants won't germinate unless they are in contact with host plant tissue, this isn't true of dodder (Cuscuta species). Dodder actively seeks out […]

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Ants, drugs & aphid slaves

October 18, 2007 | Alison | animal behaviour, nature of science, new science stories

I was browsing SciTech Daily Review (always a good source of breaking science stories) when this headline caught my eye: Ants drug their aphid slaves. What a tantalising title! It led me to a just-published article (T.H.Oliver et al. 2007) looking at how ants control the aphids that they 'farm'.

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Magnetism & navigation – in bacteria

October 16, 2007 | Alison | new science stories

Last week I was doing a session with some local Schol Bio students & we were talking about navigation & migration. One of the cues animals use to navigate round their world is magnetism – more specifically, sensitivity to the Earth's magnetic field. We agreed that we'd heard about some birds (e.g. pigeons) using magnetic cues, […]

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Things to think about when reading a scientific paper

October 14, 2007 | Alison | critical thinking, nature of science

Sometimes I base these blogs on a scientific paper that's caught my eye. I'm hoping that sometimes you'll search out the original reference and read it for yourself. But when a paper is cited in support of an argument – how can you decide whether the contents stack up?

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Our feathered friends?

October 11, 2007 | Alison | new science stories

This one isn't strictly curriculum-related – but it's such a neat bit of palaeontological detective work, I thought it was worth sharing 🙂

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Homo erectus – more variable than first thought

October 9, 2007 | Alison | human evolution, new science stories

Perhaps the best-known fossil of Homo erectus is the one known as the Nariokotome boy (or Turkana boy) – a boy who, when he died at around 9 years old, already stood nearly 160cm tall. Members of this tall, long-legged species are generally regarded as being the first of our genus to move out of Africa […]

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Gene targeting technique wins a Nobel Prize

October 9, 2007 | Alison | genetics, new science stories, scholarship biology

Just a quick link to an article this time – the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine has been awarded to the scientists who developed the technique of gene targeting. This has allowed scientists to 'knock out' single genes, & by doing this to work out their function. My favourite science blogger, Orac, has just posted […]

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Further food for thought

October 7, 2007 | Alison | critical thinking, nature of science

After I posted Food for thought?, I got a message from a student saying that she'd seen the study reported on the Documentary Channel. She thought the results looked good, but commented … it never stated if they had a control, possibly placebos, so that it can be assesed whether some of the children merely concentrated more […]

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Food for thought?

October 2, 2007 | Alison | critical thinking, nature of science

We hear a lot, these days, about eating healthy foods (& not too much of anything!). If you read the ads, and sometimes news items, you'll find some particular foods promoted as being particularly good for you. One of these is fish oil, rich in omega-3 oils and supposedly good for brain development, among other […]

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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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