This is a piece I first wrote for Talkingteaching 🙂 Yesterday I was up in Auckland at Scicon (the national secondary science teachers’ conference. There’ve been some great presentations, including a lovely on on bioluminescence by fellow sciblogger Siouxsie Wiles (did you know that our very own NZ glow worms mate for hours & then […]
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literate primates?
A while back now, I wrote a brief piece commenting on the ability of at least some chimpanzees to recognise numbers. So it didn’t come as a huge surprise to hear that members of a baboon troop could distinguish between ‘real’ words and random strings of letters. Yes, really. A group of psychologists led by Jonathan […]
Continue readingcancer – an example of evolution at the cellular level
It’s more than 3 years now since a very close friend died of cancer. At the time, I wrote briefly of how cancer cell lines can evolve resistance to chemotherapy. Now Orac has written a much longer essay discussing the same thing. It’s well worth reading & would probably make an excellent resource for working […]
Continue readingparasite goes bananas before s*x
That got your attention, didn’t it? It certainly got mine when I was scanning the Science alert news page a wee while ago. The parasite in question is Plasmodium, the single-celled organism that causes malaria. (I’ve written about Plasmodium before as it has a rather interesting evolutionary history.) And the research in question was published […]
Continue readingif meetings really lower iq…
… 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 readingthese legs were made for walking…
… but not in the middle of the night. As I’ve got older, I’ve found that little bouts of nocturnal restlessness in the legs department have become more common. Apparently it’s called "restless legs" syndrome (RLS), which for me presesnts as a rather unpleasant, hard-to-resist feeling that you just have to move your legs, sometimes […]
Continue readingwhy things got bigger (rpt)
One of my tasks at the moment it the revision/rewriting of the study guide (along with my actual lecture notes etc) for my A semester first-year biology class. As part of that I’m reviewing some of the material I give the students to read & came across a previous post of mine on the relationship […]
Continue readingweb 2.0, postmodernism, & attitudes to science
A new post by Orac discusses various tactics of the anti-vaccine movement, with reference to a new paper published in the journal Vaccine. (Link is to a pdf – apologies if this isn’t accessible to all as it’s well worth the time spent reading.) In the paper (entitled Anti-vaccine activists, Web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm – […]
Continue readingscientists have cured cancer! – or have they?
The other day my friend Renee sent through this link, & her thoughts. "This article (& website) set my woo-ometer off big time," she said. The article’s entitled Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice, and begins thusly: Canadian researchers find a simple cure for cancer, but major pharmaceutical companies are not interested. Researchers at the […]
Continue readingit must be the silly season
… 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 […]
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