On the news last night we watched fascinating footage of dinosaur footprints, found at a location in somewhere near Nelson, in the South Island. (A secret location – if their whereabouts should become widely known, you can bet there’d be unscrupulous fossil hunters in there, chipping out slabs of rock with footprints in them, for […]
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viral evolution – ‘evolution before our eyes’
A quick post (I’m hoping to write something more substantial on a new paper, but at the moment I’ve got student appointments all day & I’m writing this in the gaps between two of them): this link is to a video (teachers – it’s downloadable) about an experiment demonstrating rapid evolution in a plant virus (the […]
Continue readinga tale of several fishes
Well, Marcus & I have just completed a Scholarship preparation session in New Plymouth – it was (I hope!) a useful & enjoyable time for all involved. Marcus & I enjoyed it anyway – we both get a buzz out of working with groups like this (one of the reasons, as far as I’m concerned […]
Continue readinganother contender for ‘best blog post title’
I thought it would be hard to beat ‘When zombies attack’. That was, until Grant alerted me to this one: ‘Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time’. The fiend! How did he beat me to this?? Ed Yong has written all about it on his blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science, and you can find the […]
Continue readingself-grooming in cows
From time to time my Significant Other’s thoughts turn to life in the country. This can manifest itself in the purchase of lifestyle-block magazines. I was flipping through one this morning & came across an item on self-grooming in cows, & thought I’d look into it a bit further as it seemed to fit with my […]
Continue readingblood-sucking vampire moths!
On the way to work this morning I was listening to a Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, & one of the topics under discussion was vampires. Vampire moths! How cool is that? Vampire bats I know about, & vampire finches, but blood-sucking moths? I had to find out more…
Continue readingsensory perception in t.rex
In a couple of weeks I’m heading off (with my colleague Marcus Wilson) to Taranaki, for another Schol Bio preparation day. These are always fairly full-on, but there’s still time for a bit of R&R. Last year Marcus & I went along to New Plymouth’s excellent museum, Puke Ariki, which was hosting a dinosaur exhibition […]
Continue readingscience or magical thinking?
Coming back from last night’s Cafe Scientifique over in Tauranga, the speaker** & I were talking about the nature of science, and moved from there to the seemingly quite widespread acceptance of what could be called ‘non-science’. One of the modalities that falls in the ‘non-science’ group, we agreed, is homeopathy. And this led us to […]
Continue readingstomata & plant immunity to bacterial infection
My students & I spent our last couple of tutorials talking about how the mammalian immune system functions: innate immunity, acquired immunity, the whole lot. Our immune system is a wonderful & complex thing. But, just as we tend to overlook the fact that plants show a variety of behavioural responses to their environment, I […]
Continue readingthe music of science
There are a lot of creative people out there 🙂 A week or so back I showed my first-year class a rap video about DNA. One of them just asked me to put it on Moodle for them, so I went looking…
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