Following from my last post, there’s more to say about colour blindness in my family. This time we’ll look at my side of the family. My maternal grandfather was red-green colour blind. That means my mother is a carrier of red-green colour blindness, with a “faulty” (well, “alternative” would be better) X-chromosome. And as a […]
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Colour vision
We’ve known for a while that child number 1 (male) is red-green colour blind. This comes as no surprise – with his maternal grandfather being the same. The genes responsible lurk on the X-chromosome. That means mother is a carrier of red-green colour blindness, and child number 1 had a 50:50 chance of picking up […]
Continue readingHydrophobic cabbage
Saturday afternoon saw a break in the rain, and I was able to get out into the garden. The first thing I did was to harvest a red cabbage for dinner. The nice bit of the cabbage is the tightly rolled leaves in the middle, but surrounding that are a whole lot of larger leaves, […]
Continue readingBiological variability and Pakistani batting collapses
So, yesterday we had our Science Communication students looking at social media and blogging in particular. Alison Campbell and I talked through what makes a good science blog, and the students got to explore sciblogs.co.nz and look for themselves*. In the coming week, the students need to put up a blog entry themselves. (I’m afraid […]
Continue readingCell phones give you cancer. Yeah, right.
It’s been a couple of weeks since the NIH studies on mice, rats and cellphones hit the headlines. The studies were released with perfect timing to be used in our Science Communication paper – a third-year level paper for science undergraduates on communicating science ideas well. In short, we had half the class look at […]
Continue readingThe difference between an engineer and a physicist
As a researcher who has recently published an article in the elegantly-named journal ‘Biomedical Physics and Engineering Express’ (in other words, biology, medicine, physics, engineering all in one) it’s clear to me that the boundaries that we often like to use to define ourselves are rather blurry. I am a physicist (yes!) but also, at […]
Continue readingStatic hair
It’s one of those annoying laws of nature that the times you want to do a demonstration of static electricity with a Van der Graaf generator are the times when the atmosphere is least suited to it. Damp conditions equals a damp demonstration. But yesterday was really good. No Van der Graaf generator needed – […]
Continue readingFuel consumption: fewer vehicles means less than fewer emissions
So, school holidays are coming to an end. My son is breathing a big sigh of dismay. And, like so many other commuters, so am I. I’ve enjoyed two weeks of being able to get to and from work (especially the ‘to’) without traffic hold ups and ‘having to go the long way around’. My […]
Continue readingNew Zealand: It’s time to up our game on disability
I read with delight the announcement that the NZ government will now relook at how it funds those who care for family members with disability, and repeal section 4A of the NZ Public Health and Disability Act. That is a big step in the right direction. But it does need to be put into a […]
Continue readingSucking up Spaghetti
No. I’m not talking about 6 year old boys sticking one end in their mouth and sucking. I’m talking about vacuuming-up old bits of uncooked spaghetti on the kitchen floor. So, on taking the vacuum cleaner over the kitchen floor at the weekend, I could see that there were a few broken strands of uncooked […]
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