Why am I mentioning this? Because when I was taking part in Primary Science Week, dinosaurs did get a mention. Most children seem fascinated by dinos (partly, I suspect, because they are big, dangerous, & safely extinct, as Stephen Jay Gould once remarked), and that fascination can lead them into all sorts of science-based questions. Perhaps we should make more use of dinosaurs, in primary education. (Plenty of opportunities there for building dino-science into literacy and numeracy work, after all!)

** although the pedant in me insists on noting that pterosaurs, pliosaurs, & their ilk were most definitely not dinosaurs!

So there I was, with a room full of eager youngsters, their teachers, the bones and a whiteboard. The time flew by - in fact, we went well over time, talking for nearly 2 hours rather than the scheduled one. The students were great - attentive, courteous, curious, enthusiastic, & deep-thinking, and the questions they asked were at times really challenging. We talked about common descent; relatedness; common ancestry (& why the common ancestor of humans & chimps would look different from both); why infant chimps and humans look more similar than the adults; natural selection; mutations; human migration patterns; why carnivores have bigger brains than herbivores; how scientists actually 'do' science and why their ideas on an issue might change; what the two words in a binomial name tell us; radiometric dating; how to tell the age of an individual at death; how to tell the gender of a set of human remains; why Neanderthals became extinct... and along the way we somehow got onto anencephaly, & ethics! 

I think we all enjoyed it, and everyone gained some new knowledge. Personally I found those two hours great fun, but also challenging and, well, quite tiring! I don't know that I could manage to be a primary school teacher, actually :-)

One of the key things I got out of today, actually, was a reminder of the huge enthusiasm that young students have for science. The desire for knowledge, and the thinking skills, that I saw today were truly inspiring. But that keen scientific curiosity is also something that we need to feed, and support, and encourage. Primary school teachers, in particular, need all the help they can get in this area. So next year, if you're asked to contribute to National Primary Science Week - say 'yes"! In fact, why wait until then? I rather think your local primary school might be glad to hear from you now :-)

Effective practice in science teaching and learning in Years 5 to 8 was evident in less than a third of the 100 schools [surveyed for the report]. The wide variability of practices between highly effective and ineffective practices was found across all school types.

And

Few principals and teachers demonstrated an understanding of how they could integrate the National Standards in reading, writing and mathematics into their science programmes. In the less effective schools principals saw science learning as a low priority. They struggled to maintain a balance between effective literacy and numeracy teaching, and providing sufficient time for teaching other curriculum areas, but particularly science.

And

Knowledge-based programmes were evident rather than interactive thinking, talking, and experimenting approaches... Student involvement in experimental work was variable.

A while back now, I wrote a brief piece commenting on the ability of at least some chimpanzees to recognise numbers. So it didn't come as a huge surprise to hear that members of a baboon troop could distinguish between 'real' words and random strings of letters. Yes, really.

A group of psychologists led by Jonathan Grainger (Grainger, Dufaur, Montant, ZIegler & Fagot, 2012) have just published a paper in Science entitled "Orthographic Processing in Baboons (Papio papio)", where 'orthography' is a standardised system for using a particular writing system (script) to write a particular language. The team noted that most research on visual word recognition hasn't treated words as 'visual objects', instead dealing with the relationship between information at the letter level and 'higher-level linguistic properties including semantics & syntax. But it seems that the ability to recognise words as entities resides in a part of the brain that's also involved in recognition of objects & faces, and primates are pretty good at faces, so Grainger & his colleagues decided to investigate whether baboons could extend their facial recognition skills to identifying words. 

It's not just the biologists; chemists seem to have enjoyed coming up with funny names for new chemical compounds. Moronic acid, anyone? You'll find a lengthy list at Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names - but you may wish to exercise a little discretion as to whether you wish to call some of the names out loud :-)

It's a variant on the old "if men evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys", only slightly more accurate - in the sense that we are much more closely related to apes than we are to monkeys, lol. But both versions are wrong, based on a misunderstanding on the nature of evolution, and I wonder if the sign's author would be willing to look at the evidence for the real state of affairs.

For we didn't evolve 'from' modern apes. In taxonomic terms, humans are apes: placed in the primate sub-order Anthropoidea along with gorillas, chimpanzees & bonobos, orangutans, & gibbons. Morphological & DNA evidence indicates that our nearest living relatives are the chimpanzees, with whom we last shared a common ancestor around 6 million years ago. At 4.4 million years old, Ardipithecus ramidus is the oldest known hominin - & it wasn't particularly chimp-like. Which is hardly surprising, as the ancestors of both humans and chimps/bonobos have been following separate evolutionary trajectories for all that time. As the team who discovered and described 'Ardi' have commented (White et al., 2009): 

Perhaps the most critical single implication of Ar.ramidus is its reaffirmation of Darwin's appreciation: humans did not evolve from chimpanzees but rather through a series of progenitors starting from a distant common ancestor that once occupied the ancient forests of the African Miocene. 

T.D.White, B.Asfaw, Y.Beyene, Y.Haile-Selassie, C.Owen Lovejoy, G.Suwa & G.WoldeGabriel (2009) Ardipithecus ramidus and the palaeobiology of early hominids. Science 326: 64 (authors' summary**) & 75-86. doi: 10.1126/science.1175802

** Teachers - the summary would be a good introductory read for your senior students.

Orac ends his essay with the following quote, an answer to those who ask why we have yet to cure cancer (even when using personalised therapies that in some cases target the genes themselves):

The reason we haven't cured cancer yet is because we haven't figured out how to overcome the power of evolution. Right now, cancer seems almost always to find a way. Until we figure out a way how to block all the ways it can find, personalised therapy will be effective in only a small proportion of cases.

Today's class was a real experiment for me, & although I try lots of different things in my classes, it was also a step outside my normal comfort zone. (But hey! life would be a bit boring if we always stayed safely inside that zone!) Why? Because I put into practice an idea I stole from my friend & colleague Kevin Gould (who also very kindly let me use the resources he'd developed): today was "design-a-plant" day, & probably to anyone looking into the lecture theatre during the first 30 minutes or so it would have looked as if chaos definitely ruled.

Last Friday I gave everyone an information sheet: descriptions of the features of leaf, stem & root that you might see in plants adapted to different environments. Today I trotted off to the lecture room with a box full of overhead transparency sheets, overhead pens, & printed scenarios (descriptions of a particular environment). The lecture theatre was already full – everyone had come ahead of time! This definitely wasn’t usual (it’s not that they normally trickle in late, but we're talking seriouslyearly); obviously they were expecting something special. Gulp.

We showed her to friends over dinner (barbecued lamb that had marinated for the day in a delightful mix of soy sauce, garlic, rosemary, lemon zest & lemon juice, with various other dishes on the side), but no-one knew what our little moth might be. And lacking a decent close-up lens on the camera, I couldn't mount a photo here for other, wiser eyes to identify.

But tonight I've just had an e-mail from our dinner guests, who identified her in a book they were browsing through in a second-hand bookstore in Thames. She's a female bag moth, Cebysa leucotelis, shown here in a photo from the Landcare Research website:

This is a strongly dimorphic species, as the male - who is capable of sustained flight, unlike his partner - looks quite different, a dull brown with pale yellow spots on his hind wings & bars of the same colour along the leading edge of each forewing.

The husband was suspicious, lest they be of the same ilk as the pantry moths currently littering the traps in my store cupboard. But no, bag moths apparently eat lichen & algae on the walls of buildings. So our enchanting little house guests can stay, without fear of further disturbance (at least until the next barbecue!).

TO: Faculty Head of Science / Head of Biology Department 

Please find a link to the critically acclaimed resource (http://programmingoflife.com/watch-the-video) dealing with the nature of science across disciplines/strands.

Interesting to see an attempt to link it into the current NZ Science curriculum with its focus on teaching the nature of science.

 PROGRAMMING OF LIFE

• The reality of computer hardware and software in life
• The probabilities of a self-replicating cell and a properly folded protein
• Low probability and operational impossibility
• The need for choice contingency of functional information

Freely share this resource with the teaching staff in your faculty/department.

Yours sincerely

Scientists Anonymous (NZ) 

Over the years I've had a fair number of conversations with my students about what's involved in being a university lecturer. They ask things like how I decide what to teach, how we develop programs, and - this year - just what I do when I'm not in front of a class. (They genuinely thought that I'm 'on holiday' when the teaching semester's over: I found this rather sweet *smile*.)

And someone will always ask, do university lecturers have any training in how to teach? After all, these days primary, secondary & pre-school teachers are all required to have professional qualifications in education.

The answer is, it depends. (I'm going to talk about university lecturers here as that's the area I'm familiar with.)

It's an interesting story. Like the other members of its genus, Plasmodium falciparum (which causes the most severe, potentially - & frequently - lethal form of malaria) has a complex life cycle. A mosquito that bites an infected human host will probably pick up P.falciparum in the blood it ingests, & can then transmit the pathogen to the next person it bites. Once in a new host, the malaria parasite reproduces asexually & goes through a number of life-cycle stages as it infects first cells in the host's liver & later the host's red blood cells. As the red blood cells swell with growing numbers of the parasite, they also accumulate a range of waste products produced by Plasmodium. Eventually the cells rupture & release both Plasmodium cells (all ready to infect more red blood cells) & those cells' wastes into the host's bloodstream, & this is what causes the physical symptoms of malaria. 

Eventually the parasite metamorphoses into its reproductive phase - a phase that has the banana shape mentioned above. Strange though it may sound, apparently the crescent-like shape of these sexually-ready parasite cells is essential for their survival. Once outside the red blood cells the parasites are potentially exposed to the host's immune system & can be targeted for destruction, but the banana shape seems to allow at least some to escape & survive long enough to be sucked up by another mosquito. (The actual plasmodial hanky-panky occurs in the mosquito's gut.)

The Melbourne University research that's described by Science alert has found when Plasmodium's ready for s*x a particular set of proteins forms a banana-shaped scaffold underneath it's cell membane. This is interesting of itself, as it's always nice to understand the mechanism by which something happens. But it's made the research team rather excited, because identifying the proteins involves raises the prospect of targeting them - using a drug or perhaps a vaccine - & disrupting formation of the banana-shaped scaffold.

Which would pretty much put a dampener on any further prospects of hanky-panky, disrupting the parasite's life cycle & so preventing the transmission of malaria. Great stuff!

Possession of an Achilles tendon is only one of the things that sets humans up for endurance running. Bramble & Lieberman (2004) note that long-distance running requires a whole suite of adaptations for skeletal strength, stabilisation, thermoregulation, and energetics. I'll summarise some of their comments here.

I was looking through the SciTech Daily website (a good place to go for new reading in a whole range of science areas) when I saw the link to an article on the evolution of running in Homo. Followed it, read the article - & thought, this is really interesting.

The article describes research on the efficiency of walking and running in humans. It notes that the Achilles tendon linking calf muscles to the heel is essential for energy-efficient running. Chimps and gorillas don't have this long tendon, and the research team comment that it would be very interesting to know at what point in our evolutionary history the Achilles tendon evolved:

I’ve written quite a lot about the benefits students may gain as a result of lecturers changing the techniques they use in the classroom. A while back I wrote about the idea of helping students to visualise a paper’s curriculum, & this semester I decided to try that out with my first-year biology class. Today was the first day of the new semester, & I thought I’d share what I did with them – it would be interesting to hear what others think of this approach, so please do add a comment :-)