or, more specifically, a question of lethal allelesA. Lethal alleles were first noticed back in 1905 by Lucien Cuénot, and identified for what they were by Castle & Little in 1910. These two studies, looking at inheritance of yellow coat colour in mice, found that only mice heterozygous for this gene had yellow coats, despite […]
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Featured image: Venus, a cat that is either a clear example of the outcome of X-chromosome inactivation, or a chimera. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, senior high school students are currently sitting their external exams. This year’s Level 2 Biology papers have attracted quite a bit of attention from teachers, who’ve expressed concerns about the […]
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I’m running Schol Bio tuts again this year, & I like to start each session off with a question on some aspect of biology, just to start everyone thinking in that space. In the last session I presented two images (see below) and asked the students: what are possible genetic explanations for what you’re seeing […]
Continue readingI’m really enjoying running on-line tuts with Schol Bio students, because the questions & discussions are so interesting. (So, hopefully the students enjoy them too!) Last week we got onto talking about the enzyme lactase and the fact that in some populations many individuals continue to produce it into adulthood (thus making them lactose-tolerant, & […]
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What is a mastodon, anyway? Like mammoths (on the left in the image above), mastodons were common during the last ice age, but the two elephant-like creatures are fairly distant relatives. The more-familiar mammoths were close cousins of modern elephants (a fact that is of interest to those considering doing a Jurassic Park on mammoths – […]
Continue readingA few days back an article in The Guardian popped up in my newsfeed. It was quite old – published in 2016 – but it looked interesting, so I read it & also tracked down the original paper. The article & research paper describe work done to develop and test a potential tool for unpicking […]
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Recently I was told I needed to go to the Youtube channel of Dr Sam BaileyA and watch one of her videosB. So I did. This particular video is called The Truth About Virus Isolation, and yes it’s on Youtube, and no I’m not linking directly because I refuse to link to such a misleading […]
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Yesterday I got told to “do some research” &, by extension, to think critically. The biologist in me cringed a little when I read it (and not because of the advice about doing research). Biology teachers I know suggested that perhaps everyone should take the NCEA standard that lets students learn about the basic […]
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 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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