On Saturday I was over in Taranaki, doing some revision work with a group of Schol Bio students. After we’d finished I had a look through their feedback forms. While most felt they’d got something from the session, a few said that they felt ‘more concerned’ about the exam than they had before the session. This in […]
Continue readingSexual signals and strong, silent males
On hot summer nights male crickets chirp constantly in their attempts to attract mates, rubbing a toothed ‘file' on one forewing over a ridge on the other forewing to produce their song. But this can be a risky business, as it might not be only females who are drawn by the males' calls. Predators and […]
Continue reading“Punk eek” and speciation
The concept of punctuated evolution – bursts of evolutionary novelty separated by long periods of stasis – was first proposed by Stephen Jay Gould & Niles Eldredge in 1972. Since then, there's been an ongoing debate among evolutionary biologists about how significant ‘punk eek' could be in the evolution of new species. (Remember that they aren't […]
Continue readingClimate change and human evolution
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 […]
Continue readingCan plants hunt?
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 […]
Continue readingAnts, drugs & aphid slaves
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'.
Continue readingMagnetism & navigation – in bacteria
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, […]
Continue readingThings to think about when reading a scientific paper
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?
Continue readingOur feathered friends?
This one isn't strictly curriculum-related – but it's such a neat bit of palaeontological detective work, I thought it was worth sharing 🙂
Continue readingHomo erectus – more variable than first thought
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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