convergent evolution: the pandas’ thumb
And yes, punctuation & grammar skillz, I has them :-) That apostrophe really is in the right place – read on to find out why. The tale of the panda’s thumb is well-known, & an excellent...
View Articlemore on active learning in the biology classroom
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...
View Articlean anti-fluoride view: democracy is ok as long as it delivers what we want
At least, that's how it sounds in this Waikato Times report on the first day of presentations relating to submissions on Hamilton City Council's draft annual plan. One of those submitting was quoted...
View Articlescience embargoes & early releases – an update on the ‘new hominin’ story
I wrote a few days ago about the over-hyped media stories around the then-upcoming release of a new Science paper about a possible new hominin species. At the time is seemed really strange &...
View Articledeath shapes us all
Personal & societal attitudes to death shape the way we view the inevitable ending of our lives. And experiencing the deaths of others, particularly those close to us, can affect us greatly. But at...
View Articlesequencing the neandertal genome
I’ve had this one in my ‘must write about’ file for a little while: in the May 7th edition of Science, a large research team announced that they’d produced a draft sequence of Neandertal DNA (Green et...
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paradoxical frogs
Well, I’ve just got back from a series of conferences (3 in the space of 10 days) – & all of them about teaching! I was getting pretty tired by the end of it all, but at the same time it was really...
View Articleanother missing link…
This morning’s NZ Herald carried a story from the UK Telegraph under the headline “Child’s skeleton missing link to man’s ape-like forebears.’ It could have been worse: the Telegraph‘s headline was...
View Articlechanges in the early oceans –& their impact on the evolution of animals
The earliest forms of life on Earth were prokaryotes, & they dominated the biosphere for around 2.5 billion years. And slowly they changed it – aerobic photosynthesis by cyanobacteria (‘blue-green...
View Articletips for effective on-line science outreach
As you'll have gathered, I'm finding Facebook – and now Twitter – great sources of information, whether it's for teaching, sharing with my students (& others!), or blogging about. And today, this...
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