The Telegraph has a story on the possibility of cloning Neanderthals, with the fetching headline: ‘I can create Neanderthal baby, I just need willing woman.’ (You can read the NZ version on Stuff.) My first thought was ‘eeewww’. (And, as a friend commented, it’s stories like this that get science a bad name.) Once past that […]
Continue readingI’m starting to think about this year’s teaching: what I’m planning, what worked last year & what didn’t, things that need to be revised. One thing I’ll be doing a bit more of is ‘flip teaching’, something that worked well last semester in helping students learn about & gain an understanding of recombinant DNA technologies. […]
Continue readingMy significant other is forever telling me that Facebook is a total time-waster. Sometimes I do tend to agree – but also, one can Find Out Stuff! Like the study I’ve just heard about via Science Alert, on how children get information about genetics and DNA – things we might regard as being in the […]
Continue readingToday in the Herald I learned that eye colour can reflect personality. Apparently [r]esearchers from the University of Queensland and the University of NSW analysed the eye colour of 336 Australians – most with a northern European background. They answered a series of questionnaires measuring aspects of their personality like agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. The […]
Continue readingOne of the things I like about my job is that there’s always the opportunity to learn new things. Today I learned about episomes. Not being an actual geneticist & all, it was a novel term to me. An episome is defined as: a portion of genetic material that can exist independent of the main […]
Continue readingFrom the Herald’s website, we hear that [a]ll children are psychic and they’re tuned in to their abilities now more than ever, according to one of Australia’s top intuitives. Oh, really? And there’s more: "We’re starting to see little kids who can see spirits, who can actually validate who it is. It’s different to a […]
Continue reading… then there’s little hope for the world 🙂 I attend a lot of meetings; that’s the nature of my job. This morning the Dean came in & waved the front section of the NZ Herald under my nose. "Look," he said, "all those meetings are really bad for you." Scenting a way of getting […]
Continue reading… not only do we have at least one homeopath using heat to treat burns (yes, really! That piece of burning stupid – to use an Oracian aphorism – is admirably covered here by Grant), but we also have the Daily Mail announcing that scientists have discovered – ta-daah! – a hangover cure (hat-tip to David […]
Continue readingThis week I’ve found myself becoming quite frustrated with the way alternative ‘therapies’ are being presented in the NZ Herald. Two of the three described to date are – as described – essentially massage therapies (as Michael Edmonds has noted here) & hardly need the overlay of pseudoscientific claims (unless, perhaps, to gain wider acceptability?). […]
Continue readingThis morning’s Herald ran an article on ‘alternative therapies’ – New Zealanders’ beliefs about their effectiveness, & a Herald reporter’s experience of one such ‘therapy’. (Apparently there will be more to come over the next few days.) The article presented some results from a recent UMR research poll – as it was provided ‘exclusively to […]
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