Alison Campbell • Apr 19, 2015 •
As you'll have gathered, I'm finding Facebook - and now Twitter - great sources of information, whether it's for teaching, sharing with my students (& others!), or blogging about. And today, this paper popped up on my Twitter feed:... Read More
Alison Campbell • Dec 15, 2011 •
And yes, punctuation & grammar skillz, I has them :-) That apostrophe really is in the right place - read on to find out why.The tale of the panda's thumb is well-known, & an excellent example of how the action... Read More
Alison Campbell • Dec 05, 2010 •
Well, I've just got back from a series of conferences (3 in the space of 10 days) - & all of them about teaching! I was getting pretty tired by the end of it all, but at the same time... Read More
Alison Campbell • May 23, 2010 •
I've had this one in my 'must write about' file for a little while: in the May 7th edition of Science, a large research team announced that they'd produced a draft sequence of Neandertal DNA (Green et al. 2010). Using DNA from... Read More
Alison Campbell • May 05, 2010 •
Personal & societal attitudes to death shape the way we view the inevitable ending of our lives. And experiencing the deaths of others, particularly those close to us, can affect us greatly. But at a much deeper, cellular level, death... Read More
Alison Campbell • Apr 09, 2010 •
I wrote a few days ago about the over-hyped media stories around the then-upcoming release of a new Science paper about a possible new hominin species. At the time is seemed really strange & definitely a spoiler rather than a teaser... Read More
Alison Campbell • Apr 07, 2010 •
The earliest forms of life on Earth were prokaryotes, & they dominated the biosphere for around 2.5 billion years. And slowly they changed it - aerobic photosynthesis by cyanobacteria ('blue-green algae') led first to the oxygenation of the oceans &... Read More
Alison Campbell • Apr 05, 2010 •
This morning's NZ Herald carried a story from the UK Telegraph under the headline "Child's skeleton missing link to man's ape-like forebears.' It could have been worse: the Telegraph's headline was 'Missing link between man & apes found' (sigh). I read the article... Read More
Alison Campbell • Apr 03, 2010 •
One of our first-year bio labs sees our students using potometers to determine how transpiration is affected by things like light, humidity, & wind movement. Those of my readers who are school students may well have done something similar, but... Read More
Alison Campbell • Mar 29, 2010 •
The latest edition of Nature carries an item that raises the possibility of another new - & recent - new hominin species, this time from Siberia (Krasuse et al., 2010). A few years ago, when the story about Homo floresiensis first broke, I... Read More