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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 Articleconvergent 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 Articledissecting the predictable (in this case, ffnz on broadbent et al)
A paper just out by Broadbent et al (2014) describes research which used data from a 38-year-long longitudinal study of Dunedin children to examine claims that exposure to fluoride in childhood has a...
View Article"If you’re going to get lectured at, you might as well be at home in bunny...
There's an increasing body of literature demonstrating the benefits of active learning for tertiary students taking science subjects. This is a topic I've written about before, but I'm always...
View Articlehuman facial features the result of being used as a punching bag? somehow I...
I saw this story in the newspaper yesterday, & again today on one of the science feeds: Researchers in the US have studied the skulls of ancient human ancestors and concluded that fist-fighting...
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if fish had nightmares, these spiders would feature in them
If asked, "what do spiders eat?", my answer would probably include insects, spiders, other arthropods, and maybe birds. I'd never have thought of fish! And yet it seems that fish-eating by spiders is,...
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one of the largest living insects?
If you don't like spiders then you probably wouldn't like this either: from China come reports of what's claimed to be the largest known aquatic insect. (I can't find any actual published scientific...
View Articlefluffy the dinosaur
Over the last 20 years quite a bit of evidence has accumulated indicating that at least some dinosaurs were feathered, much of it in the form of beautiful fossils from China. Up until now all the...
View Articlerapid evolution in cane toads
In her book Paleofantasy, Marlene Zuk discusses cane toads (Bufo marinus) as an example of just how rapidly evolutionary processes can work. These amphibian pests were introduced into Australia in...
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 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 Articlesticky little lizard feet
Evolutionary change can be fast – Peter and Rosemary Grant’s long-term & ongoing research project on the Galapagos finches documented rapid responses to environmental changes, for example, as does...
View Article‘this app promises to read your DNA’– colour me skeptical
I find much of the information that comes to me via various science feeds interesting, informative, & useful. But sometimes I see a headline & an article that give me a serious facepalm...
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the costs of transpiration
One of our first-year bio labs sees our students using potometers to determine how transpiration is affected by things like light, humidity, & wind movement. Those of my readers who are school...
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...
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