What follows is loosely based on a workshop I ran at this year's Biolive/ChemEd secondary science teachers' conference. (A most excellent conference, by the way – kudos to those organising & presenting.) I've added a bunch of hotlinked references. Back when I was in 7th form (or year 13 ie a rather long time ago), […]
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yes, we have some bananas – just not gm ones (yet)
Back in 2010 I wrote a post about bananas, following on from a Schol Bio question the previous year. As well as looking at the genotypes of modern bananas, I highlighted the fact that the original wild banana was not a particularly appetising object, with little flesh and a lot of large, hard seeds. Selective […]
Continue readingrip frank’n’louie, the diprosopic cat
Seeing this image of a fish with 2 mouths reminded me that I needed to finish writing about Frankenlouie, a janus-headed (diprosopic) cat. It's funny how the mind works, because the fish definitely isn't a janus-fish: that would require the mouths to be side-by-side rather than one above the other. (While this is a rather […]
Continue readingmigration and ear wax
Last year's Schol Bio paper contained (as is usual) some interesting and challenging questions. One of them was about earwax. More specifically, the earwax phenotypes 'dry' and 'wet', and what their distribution can tell us about patterns of human evolution. (Note to those sitting these examinations: most questions have a reasonable amount of resource material […]
Continue readingcan people really sense exposure to emfs?
Back in 2007, I was the MC at a Cafe Scientifique focused on high-voltage power lines. Then, as now, there was concern that the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) around these high-voltage lines posed a health hazard, so I did quite a bit of reading around the subject (as always, we had experts along to lead the […]
Continue readingtool use – even more widespread than you thought
Yesterday my ‘Facebook science feed’ (ie daily browsing) brought me this stunning image (click the picture for the hyperlink). It’s from the book Thinkers of the Jungle: the Orangutan Report (Shuster, Smits & Ullal, 2008) & shows a young orangutan apparently using a long stick in lieu of a spear, copying local fishermen as they […]
Continue readinga little extrapolation is a dangerous thing
The other day one of my friends sent me a link to this discussion of a recently published paper. (‘Published’ in the sense that it’s available through archiv, which I gather means it hasn’t been through peer review.) The actual paper is available here. Basically, the authors claim that life has increased in complexity – […]
Continue readingare humans still evolving (a repeat visit)
What follows is a piece I wrote (quite a while ago now) for students planning on sitting Scholarship Biology. It was intended to start them thinking 🙂 I’ve just been asked to contribute to a panel discussion on RNZ around this subject, so thought it might be timely to re-post this article (I think time […]
Continue readingletting a good story get in the way of a few facts?
Today in the Herald I learned that eye colour can reflect personality. Apparently [r]esearchers from the University of Queensland and the University of NSW analysed the eye colour of 336 Australians – most with a northern European background. They answered a series of questionnaires measuring aspects of their personality like agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. The […]
Continue readingsharks don’t get cancer?
It turns out that if you thought that foetal lamb cells as a treatment for autism (& a range of other disorders & illnesses) was the pinnacle (or should that be ‘the depths’?) of silliness, you’d be wrong. Dr Huertgen has competition. It was previously believed that sheep were the best donor animals because of their […]
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