This evening I was engaging in polite conversation (well, I was polite, anyway) on an RNZ Facebook post about – you guessed it! – the covid19 vaccination program. One of those present offered up a link to a blog post by Joseph Mercola to support a claim he was making about the vaccines. When I […]
Continue readingImage from Science News, courtesy S.Mitoh Autotomy. There’s a word you don’t see every day – but those familiar with lizards may well have seen the result. For autotomy is the scientific name for what I suppose we could also call “self-amputation”: the process whereby an animal deliberately sheds a part of its body (a […]
Continue readingIn the last week water fluoridation has made the headlines again, alongside the continuing articles and posts related to SARS-Cov-2 and the rollout of vaccines against it. One of the common features shown by quite a few of those opposed to these 2 public health initiatives (fluoridation & vaccination) is a tendency to claim that […]
Continue readingOn Friday we went for a walk in the Karangahake Gorge, and were very happy to discover (during the Windows Walk) that there are glow-worms in the darker parts of the mine workings. (Strictly speaking they’re glow-maggots as they’re the larvae of small flies/midges, but that is perhaps less attractive to the ear 🙂 ) […]
Continue readingToday I was told that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (now approved for use in the US, UK, & Canada) is a virus (screencap at the bottom of this thread). It really isn’t, but I’ve seen this one several times & so I think it’s worth unpacking a little further. (You can also read about mRNA vaccines […]
Continue readingA year ago I posted an explanation on vaccine “ingredients”, in relation to some wild claims made about the measles vaccine in the context of Samoa’s measles epidemic. From what I’ve seen on recent RNZ comments threads, an update for the time of SARS-Cov-2 is required. So, here’s purple making a statement about the Pfizer […]
Continue readingToday I came across an interesting share in a science group that I follow – an article about a “huge 25,000-yr-old hut” made of mammoth bones. Having really enjoyed Jean Auel’s “Earth’s Children” series, of course I was going to read on. But alas, the article was disappointing: the headline image didn’t match the story; […]
Continue readingBack in 2008, Dr Anthony Fauci (yes, that Dr Fauci) co-authored a paper that examined the interplay between influenza infection and secondary bacterial infection in mortality from the “Spanish flu¹” pandemic of 1918-19. He and his colleagues examined tissue samples taken during autopsies at the time of the pandemic, using their findings plus notes taken during […]
Continue readingThis is a post of two parts: the interesting tale of convergence involving crab-like creatures, and the very poor – nay, crappy (because I like the alliteration) – headline on a popular article about it. Part 1: the history of carcinization in crustaceans, described in this 2017 paper in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society […]
Continue readingI wrote this post a couple of years ago, but I think it’s worth revisiting it. Why? Because these crayfish are in the news again – apparently they’ve “taken over” a Belgian cemetery (or, more correctly, the waterways in that cemetery). Local scientists believe that someone must have had the crustaceans in a home aquarium […]
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