I’ve always been interested in dinosaurs, & I loved Jurassic Park. Especially the raptors – they reminded me of birds in many ways. Which makes sense, of course, given that the majority consensus is that birds evolved from maniraptor dinosaurs 🙂 Anyway, all this means that dino headlines are always going to make me look twice. As I […]
Continue readingTag: nature of science
badscience – the book
I’m back. Yes, it was a great holiday – & no – it wasn’t long enough 🙂 And yes, I did spend a lot of time lying around under an umbrella by the water, reading books & generally applying myself to relaxing. Anyway, one of those books was Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, which follows on from his blog of […]
Continue readingit’s different at uni – part 2 (& a guest post!)
This is a little different: a guest blog by a friend of mine. Grant works as an independent scientist through his one-man consultancy, BioinfoTools, which mainly develops software for analysis of genetic and molecular biology data, and offers data analysis,contract research and science writing. He has his own research interests currently with a central theme […]
Continue readinghuman-chimp similarities – evolution? or design?
(Another link-&-comment today – I’m at a conference & a bit short of time for longer posts.) The Sensuous Curmudgeon offers a dry commentary on a web-post by the Discovery Institute oops Institute for Creation Research (thanks to the Curmudgeon). The DI post is itself a commentary on a recent research paper looking at the […]
Continue readinganother example of critical thinking…
… this time about climate change. It’s on the blog Hot Topic, where the author has written a rather sceptical review of an item in the Dominion-Post newspaper. The newspaper story included the statement that greenhouse gases don’t cause global warming – rather surprising, given that in the absence of some level of greenhouse gases the […]
Continue readingsomething fishy here…
It seems that fish oil is back in the news. This morning’s Herald carried an item about a school that’s trialling the use of omega-3 fish oils in enhancing student performance. They obviously haven’t heard of the Durham ‘trials’ in the UK…
Continue readingrain man? – rainfall & autism
I get a daily compendium of science-related headlines – yesterday one in particular caught my eye. It said: Autism linked with rainfall in study: Children who live in the US Northwest’s wettest counties are more likely to have autism, but it is unclear why.
Continue readingvolcanic eruptions & human bottlenecks
We know, from looking at the amount of genetic variation in the global human population, that it went through a fairly pronounced bottleneck around 70,000 years ago. This has been variously attributed to the founder effect, with only small populations moving out of Africa into Europe & Eurasia, and to the devastating consequences of the […]
Continue readingwhat everyone should know about science
I was just reading Charles Darwin’s latest blogposts (it seems he’s off to sea again – I hope he’s over the seasickness that plagued him on his first Beagle voyage) & followed his ‘science education’ tag to this little gem: what everyone should know about science. What else do you think should be on the list?
Continue readingmore on the pau d’arco question
The question in question was about the proposed use of the herb pau d’arco as a prophylactic against MRSA: Evaluate the claims of the therapist, then use your biological knowledge to discuss the advice given. What are the possible evolutionary & ecological outcomes of the proposed treatment?
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