I was vaguely contemplating writing about a question in last year’s Schol paper, to do with antifreeze proteins in polar fishes, when a journal alert popped up in my in-box. It was for a paper entitled How do terrestrial Antarctic organisms survive in their harsh environment? (Wharton & Marshall, 2009). The uni has an extensive Antarctic […]
Continue readingMonth: April 2009
the need for science communication
By now the fact that senior NIWA scientist Jim Salinger lost his job last week has made global headlines (in the blogosphere at least). Apparently, he spoke to the media without approval from his superiors. OK, NIWA is a commercial entity & there are a lot of checks & balances to ensure that commercially sensitive information […]
Continue readinga good summary on swine flu
The front page of the Herald this morning was pretty much given over to swine flu – how many cases there might be in NZ, various public health concerns, that sort of thing. I thought it was a bit excitable, but still, understandable I guess & hopefully will raise public awareness of some of the issues […]
Continue readingan alien star-child?
Last week one of my students wrote to me about something they’d seen on TV: My friend & I saw this on Breakfast this morning. Although we don’t think it is all true, we are still interested because they talked a lot about the skull’s morphology & how they believe it is the offspring from a […]
Continue readingfish oil follow-up (& some more stats)
I’ve written previously on suposed ‘trials’ of the benefits of fish oil on kids’ school performance. One was the ‘Durham trial’, where a large cohort of schoolchildren was given fish oil supplements without any real scientific basis for doing so; another was in New Zealand. As I said then, one of the many problems with this […]
Continue readinghow the giraffe got its neck
I used to love Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories when I was a kid – my favourite was the tale of How the elephant got his nose (cue crocodiles, the great grey green greasy Limpopo River, & the insatiable curiosity of the elephant’s child). Charming stories & great fun, but of course no evidence that things actually […]
Continue readingthe past is the key to the present
I really enjoy reading Brian Switek’s posts on his blog, Laelaps – especially those relating to mammalian evolution & to the history of science. He’s just written a lovely piece about the evolution of seals, including the comment that this lovely fossil helps to explain why it is that seals (unlike whales & dolphins) swim […]
Continue readingthinking about Scholarship?
By now some of you may be thinking about entering for the Scholarship exam at the end of the year. I thought it might be helpful to look at some of the material related to this exam, so that you can get a feel for the qualities that the examiner is looking for. (And in […]
Continue readingankle joints & hominin evolution
Some of the many questions to do with human evolution centre on our way of getting around – just when did bipedalism evolve? Is bipedalism a derived state, found only in our own twig of the primate family tree? Or is it a feature seen in the last common ancestor that we share with our […]
Continue readingwhen people are most likely to accept outrageous statements…
I thought this fitted rather well with some recent posts 🙂 courtesy of GraphJam
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