This is an item I originally wrote for the Science on the Farm website. But because I briefly mentioned the A1/A2 milk thing in the last post, I thought I could usefully bring this across to the Bioblog as well. The 2006 Scholarship Biology paper included a question on the genetics of A1 and A2 […]
Continue readingMonth: July 2008
thinking about the exams
This is a re-post of one from late 2007. I was in at a local school last week, talking with their scholarship candidates, & we talked about a lot of this stuff. So I thought it would be worthwhile to post it again (at the top of the queue, so to speak!) so as to […]
Continue readinginterference competition in wolves & coyotes
This post is based on an interesting paper that I’ve had in my blogging folder for a while now. The researchers (Berger & Gese, 2007) looked at the impact of interference competition between wolves and coyotes on the coyotes. The study was based in the Greater Yellowstone Ecological Area, & was possible because wolves were […]
Continue readinghormones, s*x, & fidelity…
At Scicon, Bernard Beckett talked about getting people excited about science by telling stories about cool science stuff. One of his examples was how he told one of his classes about what makes voles monogamous or promisuous. Racy stuff! I remember reading about this some years ago in a book by US author Natalie Angier, […]
Continue readinganother excellent blog to share
The Wild Side is by writer & evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson – it’s her blog in the New York Times. (She also wrote Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: the definitive guide to the evolutionary biology of sex.– a really good book full of great snippets of information about the weird and wonderful ways of […]
Continue readinghow not to design an experiment
On the Panda’s Thumb today I read a review of a very poor experimental set-up indeed. Apparently demonstrating that beneficial mutations (here, antibiotic resistance) lower the fitness of the organism possessing them, it actually does no such thing because of the multiple flaws in its design. But read the review – the reviewer (ERV) studies virology […]
Continue readingpossibilities for future research into evolution
A week or so back I posted comments by Massimo Pigliucci about future directions for evolution research. He was speaking in the context of an international workshop where these new ideas and directions were up for discussion. Well, that workshop’s over, material from it is available on-line (parts 1, 2, & 3), and the participants […]
Continue readingthe beauty & wonder of science
I remember reading one of Richard Dawkins’ books in which he made the comment that a rainbow does not become any less beautiful just because we understand how it’s formed. Now I’ve come across a similar statement in another book (The Single Helix) by one of my favourite science writers, Steve Jones.
Continue readingmore on the nature of science…
… & another excellent blog for you to visit. I’ve just discovered OpenParachute. Its author writes a fair bit about the nature of science & I’d like to share one of these posts with you.
Continue readinga most wonderful quote on the nature of humanity
Completely off-focus – but I found this quote on another blog, from Robert Ingersoll’s essay on "Why I Am an Agnostic", & it had a great deal of meaning for me. Too good not to share, in fact. Let us be true to ourselves — true to the facts we know, and let us, above […]
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