A couple of years ago I sat in on a colleague’s botany lectures & was enchanted to hear about a green sea slug – green, because it eats algae & sequesters the algal chloroplasts within its own cells. A solar-powered sea slug!
Continue readingTag: new science stories
a 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 readinga ‘good mother’ whale
Over the years palaeontologists like Philip Gingerich have done a great deal to unravel the fossil history of whales. There are now a range of ancient specimens that show us the changes that occurred as whales adapted to an aquatic lifestyle. Now Gingerich & his team (2009) have described a new archaeocete (ancient whale) that, […]
Continue readingsequencing the neadertal genome
A few days ago now there was a splash of excitement in the newspapers: a research team had announced that they’d sequenced the Neandertal genome. (They didn’t use exclamation marks but you could imagine them there.) I thought at the time that it sounded interesting, but it was a bit unusual that the announcement preceded […]
Continue readingdolphin vs squid
People seem to have a fascination with dolphins – they often interact positively with humans, & they show a wide range of complex & adaptable behaviour patterns. A new paper (Finn et al. 2009) describes complex prey handling in a wild bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) off the South Australian coast. Given that it’s fairly hard to […]
Continue readingan excess of warts
Like many young women her age, my daughter recently received information about Gardasil, a vaccine that offers protection against some types of the human papilloma virus (HPV). HPV is a virus that infects the skin & mucous membranes. It comes in more than 100 forms, some of which cause things like warts (including genital warts). Others […]
Continue readingterror of the ancient seas?
I was first introduced to the wonders of the Burgess Shale by reading Steven Jay Gould’s book, Wonderful Life. And I was hooked – fascinated by the weird beauty of many of those Cambrian organisms. The one that made the greatest impression was Anomalocaris: a predatory animal up to a metre long, with a ring-shaped battery […]
Continue readingbone-eating worrrms!
‘Worms’ is a very general term that we tend to use for the variety of invertebrates that are soft-bodied & have a tubular body with a mouth at one end & an anus at the other. The familiar earthworm belongs to a group of worms called the annelids – worms with segmented bodies. There are […]
Continue readingrivers as ‘medicine cabinets’
I came across an interesting article in yesterday’s Herald. The headline read: Drug firms turn rivers into flowing medicine cabinets. (Not like any medicine cabinet I’d want to put a hand into!) It seems that some waterways in India contains alarmingly high concentrations of a whole range of antibiotics – the result of drugs companies dumping their […]
Continue readingwhy things got bigger
The earliest fossils we have are of prokaryotes – a major taxonomic grouping that includes both bacteria and members of the Archaea (things like blue-green algae, aka cyanobacteria). And like modern prokaryotes, those early life-forms were tiny. Most of us are far more familiar with some of the eukaryotes, and perhaps a major reason for […]
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