David Winter • Apr 03, 2011 •
Today marks the end of the Daylight Savings Time in New Zealand, so local readers will have had an extra hour at their disposal to sleep through, get more work done, or explain to their children that they are meant to stay asleep for longer today. Howe... Read More
Alison Campbell • Dec 07, 2010 •
Things have been totally hectic since I got back from the conference trail - all the usual end-of-year stuff plus heaps of students coming in for advice about their study plans for next year. (Hint for future students - try... Read More
Alison Campbell • Nov 18, 2010 •
With the implementation of the 2007 NZ Curriculum comes the need for teachers to think about how best to help their students to develop an understanding of the nature of science.The Nature of Science is the overarching unifying strand. Through it, students... Read More
Alison Campbell • Nov 05, 2010 •
One last post for raising-awareness-of-the-science-behind-vaccination week :)On one of Grant's threads, an antivaccination commenter has posted links to very old images of smallpox victims from a German publication. The commenter implies that these patients acquired the infection as a result... Read More
Alison Campbell • Oct 03, 2010 •
This is a re-post of something I've written for the 'other blog' over at Talking Teaching. I'm hoping those of my readers who are biology teachers might find something useful in it, & that we might get a discussion going... Read More
Alison Campbell • Aug 29, 2010 •
X-rays were discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Roentgen, a discovery that was to bring him the first Nobel Prize for physics. (No, I'm not really going to trespass on Marcus's territory! Well, not for long.) Like many other scientists of... Read More
Fabiana Kubke • Aug 25, 2010 •
(Slides 6,7) I have always been fascinated by the series of studies in electrophysiology that led to our current understanding of how electrical signalling takes place in neurons. And no collection of classical electrophysiology is complete without the 1952 article by AL Hodgkin and AF Huxley on the sodium and potassium currents in the giant [...] … Read More
David Winter • Aug 18, 2010 •
I'm going to be spending the rest of my week keeping up with my real work. Neither science nor the internet have chosen to rest while I catch up with that, so there are lots of interesting things happening that you should be reading about. ***First, th... Read More
Fabiana Kubke • Aug 17, 2010 •
(Slides 3,4,5) One of the articles we read in my biophysics class was a 1942 article by Curtis and Cole. At the time, those working on the electrical properties of neurons were in agreement that during the action potential the membrane did not simply ‘depolarize’ (i.e., lost its electrical polarization) but that it rather reverted [...] … Read More
Fabiana Kubke • Aug 12, 2010 •
At SciFoo I got a chance to give a lightning talk. These are 5 minute talks, similar to Ignites and PechaKuchas. It is fair to say that is was nerve-wracking! And 5 minutes seem like an eternity when you are that nervous! But I am rehashing it here as an extended version of the 5 [...] … Read More