On my recent epigenetics post, Heraclides pointed me in the direction of an article about polydactyly in cats. It contains the comment that these cats are also known as mitten or thumb cats because they can learn to pick up things, open latches or move objects with near-human dexterity. Well, OK, we had a cat who was […]
Continue readingTag: journalism
roses are red
But not, says a press release, for the usual reasons. Over my muesli this morning I read an item in the Herald (sorry, the link’s to the identical item in a UK paper cos the Herald website doesn’t carry it) saying that a group of scientists had ‘disproved the theory’ that competition for pollinators led to the […]
Continue readinga nice just-so story?
The Herald this morning had a breathless front-page story on how evolution explains why men are better than women at map-reading. My immediate reaction was, r-i-i-i-ght. It sounded awfully like a just-so-story from evolutionary psychology, to me.
Continue readingwhat women want
Ha! Got your attention! (& no, nothing to do with Mel Gibson.) What I really wanted to do was draw your opportunity to this post by PZ, over on Pharyngula. He’s talking about explanations offered by evolutionary psychology for various human behaviours. The article PZ’s commenting on was looking at people’s sexual responses to a variety […]
Continue readingheadlines can be misleading
And this one’s no exception: "Darwin was wrong" on the cover of New Scientist, no less. (& in smaller type: cutting down the tree of life.) This leads to a story about the significance of horizontal gene transfer to our understanding of evolutionary relationships. But why the headline (which will probably be grist to the anti-evolutionary mill…)? […]
Continue readingwaterflea helmets – lamarckian, or epigenetic?
Water fleas – Daphnia – are rather cute little freshwater arthropods: In some circumstances (water temperature, presence of predators), rather than having that sharp little point on their heads (top of the picture, above the eyespot) some Daphnia will have a longer, spikier ‘helmet’. And this is where it gets interesting: it depends on the mother. If a […]
Continue readingdoes drinking coffee lower the risk of developing alzheimer’s disease?
"Gosh" said my husband, rustling the newspaper. "You’d better start drinking coffee!" He’d just come across a report saying that drinking more coffee in one’s middle years is associated with a decreased chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease, or other forms of dementia, in old age. But is this enough to make me want to give up my […]
Continue readingsnowball earth
For anyone with a passing interest in global climates, present & past, the UK’s Birmingham University has put out an excellent article looking at the conditions that could have prevailed on a’snowball Earth’. The term ‘snowball Earth’ refers to a time (about 630 million years ago) when our planet was in the grip of a major ice […]
Continue readingthere’s journals, & then there’s journals…
Recently I read an article in the local paper that made me think about the hierarchy of research journals. (The story itself is about a piece of research suggesting that carbohydrates can be addictive & this is why some people can’t stop eating them. This isn’t within my area of expertise & I have yet to […]
Continue readingif it sounds too good to be true…
… it probably is. The latest example of this comes from a newspaper story, wherein a visiting professor (I can’t remember what he was a professor of) was expounding on what the world would be like in 2070. Among other predictions, he felt we’d have dishwashers that cleaned the dishes without detergent, water – or energy. […]
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