Teachers may find this one great fun for their junior science classes! Our Science Communication students have just told me about the movie, but here’s a rather entertaining clip. (Extra enjoyment may be found in identifying the voice artists.)
Continue readingTag: humour
wellness and access bars – i can’t even…
There's a 'Waikato Wellness Fair" just out of Hamilton next weekend. Along with the usual woo (homeopathy, reiki, & so on) comes something called 'Access Bars'. However, these are not accessible places to have a drink – oh no! they are something far more mystical than that. Apparently 'Access Bars' consist of 32 Bars of […]
Continue readingevery major’s terrible (sorry, G&S)
This is an amended re-post of something I first wrote back in 2012. We're in the lead-up to the start of the A semester & lately I've spent a lot of time lately advising students on their programs of study. (Consequently I'm a bit short of the time needed to give attention to serious posts […]
Continue readinghow do hedgehogs mate, and other sensitive questions of that ilk
So, last night I was asked how hedgehogs mate. The obvious answer was, carefully! My interlocutor suggested that perhaps face-to-face was most likely, but as far as I know, very few species (& that short list includes our own) do that. It turns out that care is indeed needed, for the male approaches the female […]
Continue readingthe budwig protocol – help, help, it’s being repressed
A friend recently pointed me (via donotlink – well done, Nicky!) at a post on healthnutnews (which reads a bit like an offshoot of mercola.com – this, it turns out, is hardly surprising). It's a while since I've read anything so full of total nonsense – well, a few days, anyway! The post, by one […]
Continue readingthe strange s*x lives of leopard & banana slugs
Following on from the private lives of snails, I bring you: slugs! (The first part of this post is largely a repost of something I wrote back in 2009.) Leopard slugs, like other terrestrial slugs & snails, are hermaphrodites. They produce both eggs & sperm, but must exchange sperm with another slug in order to […]
Continue readingsnail s*x toys
This morning when I went out to feed the goldfish, I encountered a pair of snails in flagrante delicto. I resisted the urge to step on them 🙂 However, I was reminded of a post that I wrote several years ago, on the sexual habits of snails, and thought it was worth a repost. So here goes: […]
Continue readingthe sonorous war cry of a very angry frog
I've always liked frogs. I remember, when I was probably around 4 years old, being fascinated by the tadpoles that Dad brought home in a big jar from a farm pond. Mum explained about how they'd gradually metamorphose (thought I doubt she used that word!) & we watched their legs slowly grow & their tails […]
Continue readingmusic to learn by
This was first posted over on Talking Teaching. I’m always looking for interesting ideas that might spark student engagement. A couple of days ago this rap video popped up on the ScienceAlert FB page: As you can see, it’s a fun post with a serious message & – I think – an excellent piece of science […]
Continue readingit’s amazing what you find in the spam folder
I've just spent an entertaining 10 minutes or so clearing out my spam folder. I don't go there often, but a student had asked why I hadn't answered their email & since I hadn't actually received one in the in-box, I thought I'd best check spam. (And there it was. General hint to students: really […]
Continue reading