arsenic & ancient mummies

The daughter & I love reading Elizabeth Peters’ ‘Amelia Peabody’ books: lovely rollicking yarns with a leavening of actual historical events, likeable characters, and a delightful, gentle poke at Victorian standards (of writing & other behaviour). And, as they’re set in Egypt, the occasional mummy. We’re fascinated by mummies as well 🙂

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an update on ida

In today’s Science journal there’s an update (Gibbons, 2009) on all the hoop-la associated with the unveiling of 47-million-year-old Darwinius massillae (aka ‘Ida). I commented earlier that the hugely overblown press coverage that accompanied the publication of Ida’s description in PLoS One was a worrying thing.  It described Ida as a ‘missing link’ (a claim that the authors of […]

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so true…

Well, I got a giggle from it  🙂 It is sort of true, though – there are an awful lot of blogs out there, & one thing that puts me off returning to some of them is a distinct lack of regular updates. The husband complained over the weekend that I take blogging far too […]

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what turns on zebra fish

Achievement Standard 90716 expects you to know something about a range of animal behaviours, including intraspecific relationships (territoriality, cooperative interactions, reproductive behaviours, hierarchical behaviour, competition for resources) – & the relationship between behaviour patterns & environmental factors. Quite a range of stuff there – although it’s worth remembering that these are not isolated, stand-alone categories. With […]

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science communication is fun!

In a couple of weeks it’ll be time for Fieldays again. We’ve lived in Hamilton for 13 years now, but last year was the first time I’d ever been out to this major agricultural event. And I went out there every day – because I’d been closely involved in the development of the Univesity’s stand […]

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only in mice…

Just a quickie & a link: Ben Goldacre’s got an interesting post on the total misreporting of several bits of research, in the UK media. (Having read one of the ‘news’ items, on ‘man-flu’, I have to say that in that case the reporter was pointed in the right direction by the researchers themselves. But […]

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a wonderful fossil – but not a missing link

 You’ve probably already seen the following image, as it’s been splashed all over the media recently: From Franzen et al. (2009) PLoS One 4(5): e5723 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005723.g001 NB ‘Plate B’ is the ‘counterplate’ of A; while A is complete & genuine, it seems that B was altered to make it appear more complete (& thus more attractive to […]

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