Students often get to look at hydras – tiny, fresh-water members of the group that includes sea anemones, jellyfish, corals, and the Portuguese man’o’war. All these cnidarians have a simple body-plan: two layers of true tissue with a jelly-like layer between them, a sac-like gut with a single opening that acts as both mouth and […]
Continue readingTag: new science stories
dogs, diets, & the impact of evolution
Yvonne d'Entremont (aka SciBabe) recently posted an article on 'alternative' foods and health products for pets, in her usual no-holds-barred style. It's always good to see pseudoscience called out for what it is, and in the case of pet-focused quackery it's a message that needs multiple repeats. Why? Because pets are dependent on us, & […]
Continue readingvegetarian spiders? what is the world coming to?
Like probably everyone reading this, I have always thought that spiders are carnivorous, sucking the precious bodily fluidsA from their prey. I mean, those fangs! And I was wrong, for it seems that some spiders eat some plant material alongside their liquid meals – and some are almost fully vegetarian. A just-published paper (Painting, Nicholson, […]
Continue readingtl;dr: antiperspirants don’t cause breast cancer
Facebook certainly leads me to read papers that I normally wouldn’t. For whatever reason, a post about deodorants popped up on my feed, from the Wendyl’s Green Goddess page. In the blurb for a sale of products was the following: Conventional products contain aluminium ingredients which have been linked to cancer. Do your skin and […]
Continue readingon sleep (& lack thereof)
Recently, I had an enjoyable chat with Graeme Hill on the subject of sleep. Also on the show was Karyn O'Keeffe, whose research interests are with the physiology of sleep (& the lack of it). My segment focused on the evolution of sleep and yes, I did quite a bit of reading in preparation! Sleep […]
Continue readingthe ‘fishing’ chimps of bakoun
I'm currently supervising a graduate student who's writing a review of the literature on tool use in wild chimpanzees. This has become a most enjoyable interaction: it's a topic I've been interested in for quite a while now, so the supervision role is an excuse to extend my own knowledge, and it's great helping the […]
Continue readingtunicates – apparent simplicity belies a complex past
Tunicates are more commonly known as 'sea squirts' – little blobby marine creatures that squirt water when you touch them (hence the name). We don't hear about them often, except perhaps when they make the news for all the wrong reasons. But from an evolutionary perspective they are fascinating little creatures – and it's largely […]
Continue readingpolyps + glowing proteins + hosts = disco snails!
By now many of you have probably seen images of green-glowing zebrafish, or pigs whose snout & trotters glow in the dark. In both cases the animals are genetically modified and are expressing a fluorescent protein originally sourced from a jellyfish. (The body form of a jellyfish is a medusa, while that of sea anemones & […]
Continue readingthe speed of a chameleon’s tongue
In 2012 the world was introduced to some of the smallest-known vertebrates: tiny chameleons. My good friend Grant wrote about them at the time, & I set an essay assignment for my first-years on these tiny beasties. How tiny is tiny? The following images are from the original paper, published in PLoS one by Glaw, Kohler, […]
Continue readingdid Ötzi have a tummy bug?
Well, probably not1, in the sense that most would place on the term 'tummy bug' (where a close proximity to the toilet is a Good Thing), but it turns out that he did have some rather interesting intestinal bacteria. Ötzi is perhaps better known as the 'Iceman', who died around 5,300 years ago in the […]
Continue reading