It’s been pointed out to me that this post could be construed as dissing the EPP drug & its producers. This was not in any way my intention – the post was about the fairly poor reporting around a couple of medical science stories, ending with a wish that science journalists were more aware of […]
Continue readingMonth: December 2009
australian red beech
We saw this lovely tree on the shoreline at Cape Tribulation. The flowers last just a day before their petals fall. I took this particular photo because I liked the way the fallen petals exposed the colourful reproductive structures – I’m always on the lookout for images to use in my lectures. This reminds me […]
Continue readingwhat researchers really mean
From xkcd – & thanks to Orac where I saw it first. I wouldn’t mind a hovercar…guess I’m not in the right area 🙂
Continue readingmay your christmas be filled…
… with good things: wonderful company pleasant surprises and good food but perhaps not too much of that last one – you don’t want to end up like Winston:
Continue readingbotanical architecture
Plant roots don’t just grow down under the soil surface. A few posts back I wrote about the aerial roots of strangler figs: beginning as thin hair-like structures, they thicken into strong cables & eventually their interlaced networks engult the trunk of the hapless host tree. Then there are the pneumatophores of mangroves and bald […]
Continue readingcassowaries: crucial to rainforest ecology
This is the only photo we got of a cassowary, on our recent jaunt to Australia. (I’ll stop rubbing it in soon, I promise!). She was sitting in the corner of an enclosure at the Habitat in Port Douglas. Like our own kiwi, cassowaries belong to the ancient flightless group of birds known as ratites. Cassowaries […]
Continue readinggreat balls of sand
We went for quite a few walks on the beach while we were in Port Douglas, usually in the early morning before things got too hot! We were surprised by the near-total lack of shells washed up on the sand (the copious cuttle-fish ‘bones’ didnt’ count). And fascinated by the way that the sand between […]
Continue readinga whale of a community
‘Community’ is one of those words that has different meanings in science & general use. Every time I set an essay that asks students to talk about biological communities, someone will tell me about ant communities, or monkey communities, or human communities. But a biological community is a group of populations from several different species, living & interacting […]
Continue readingpreparing for the future
Just catching up on my ‘official’ reading, including the Education Review. The November 13th issue (see? I said I was behind!) included a series of articles to do with the government’s draft Tertiary Education Strategy (or TES for short). One in particular caught my eye as it was related to something I wrote a while ago, on […]
Continue readingowlcat. definitely not coming to a place near you, any time soon
Owlcat: Makes me chuckle when I think about it. Not just because Lolcats make me LOL (they do), but also because the idea of an owlcat epitomises a standard creationist argument. It goes something like this: if evolution is true, how come there aren’t any crocoducks/owlcats/<insert laughable hybrid here>?
Continue reading