Short

The Search For Unintelligent Life

Imagine an alien. If you’ve been influenced by movies and television at all, the creature you’re picturing is probably two-legged, two-armed, bipedal and with a reminiscently human layout – head, eyes and mouth somewhere near the top. And while most of us recognise that this vision of extra-terrestrial life is a bit silly, conversations about life elsewhere in the universe are often still painfully unimaginative.

Guest Blog

Genetically Modified Myths Examined

Genetically modified organisms, especially plants, get a lot of hate. People – even some very environmentally conscious people – seem to fear or hate GM crops. Yet, as someone who is very worried about climate change, very worried about the human-induced mass extinction event that is happening before our eyes, and worried about the livelihoods of farmers and about those people that have so little food they go to bed hungry every night…

The Shifting Sands of Society

19 April, 2015 by

A Guest Post for Curious Meerkat by Leon Vanstone.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Comp-Sci.

Imagine you were alive thousands of years ago. Technology is primitive. Food is scarce. Life is tough. Wi-Fi signal is terrible. You spend most of your time foraging for food and what little spare time you have when the sun goes down is spent essentially doing science. Now this isn’t very advanced science, I’m talking about bashing rocks together, discovering fire, making spears, but nonetheless this is science and progress is slow.

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Which is slimier?

14 April, 2015 by

Question:

Is a Slug Slimier than a Snail? (asked by Anonymous)

Answer:

Land snails and slugs like the ones you get in your garden are members of the class Gastropoda, along with sea snails, sea slugs and limpets. However, they do not represent distinct branches of the evolutionary tree – slugs are just species of snail that have lost their shell. There are even some snails that have a reduced shell – halfway between slug and snail. So this makes it difficult to answer the question.

However, there are some good reasons why slugs (shell-less snails) might seem to be slimier than their shelled counterparts.

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Evolving the Modern Dinosaur

4 April, 2015 by

There are more than 10,000 species of living, breathing dinosaurs on Earth today. It’s just that we call them birds. And while a chicken might seem like a measly ancestor for the enormous T-rex, modern birds can teach us a lot about dinosaur evolution. A huge genome sequencing project, which recently culminated in the publication of nearly 50 genome sequences and the most accurate tree of bird evolution to date, has further blurred the line between bird and dinosaur. Spurring a plethora of studies into the origins of our modern feathered, singing friends, the December 2014 edition of Science taught us that the transition from dinosaurs to birds was gradual and began long before the Dinosaurs were gone. It taught us that it involved multiple independent origins of bird song, a characteristic that now dominates around 10% of the genome. And it taught us that the evolution of flight was facilitated by new genes and new gene regulation, but also by the loss of genes.

Making a Chicken from a T-Rex

Last October, the Therapod Working Group constructed a new phylogeny (family tree) for Dinosaurs, based on morphological characteristics measured in fossil remains of over 150 different species. The new tree revealed fascinating insights into the nature and pace of avian evolution.

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Sloths Move Slow, Evolve Fast

11 March, 2015 by

Sloths might be notorious for their leisurely pace of life, but research published last year shows they are no slow coaches when it comes to evolution.

Sloths, as we know and love them, are small, slow-moving creatures found in the trees of tropical rainforests. But modern sloths are pretty odd compared to their extinct relatives. Sloths (Folivora) are represented today by just six species in two families; the Megalonychidae (two-toed sloths) and the Bradypodidae (three-toed sloths). But 20,000 years ago there were perhaps as many as 50 species of sloth spread across the globe, and most were relatively large, ground-dwelling animals quite unlike modern sloths. While most modern sloths weigh in at a modest 6kg, extinct species such as Megatherium americanum and Eremotherium eomigrans could weigh up to 5 tonnes!

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Alternative Medicine I – The Ultimate Dilute: Homeopathy

3 March, 2015 by

Homeopathy. One of the most popular alternative medicines in the Western world, and perhaps the most widely misunderstood. The science against homeopathy, like the skeptics, is unequivocal. The British Homeopathic association list homeopathy as a possible treatment for long-term chronic problems such as eczema, chronic fatigue syndrome, asthma, migraine, IBS and depression, but numerous healthcare bodies agree there is no evidence that homeopathy is effective in treating any health condition.

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How long does fossilisation take?

12 February, 2015 by

Question:

What is the minimum amount of time it takes to fossilise something? (asked by Nick)

Answer:

Fossils are defined as the remains or traces of organisms that died more than 10,000 years ago, therefore, by definition the minimum time it takes to make a fossil is 10,000 years. But, that is just an arbitrary line in the sand – it means very little in terms of the fossilisation process.

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Climate change puts pollinators out of sync

6 February, 2015 by

One of the biggest concerns, as the climate and environment around us changes, is the continuing decline of pollinators. In the UK, insect pollinators are estimated to be worth £430 million each year for their role in pollinating our crops. Research published last December provides strong evidence that temperature rises associated with climate change are negatively impacting on the relationships between plants and their pollinators.
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The Truth and Lies Behind Alternative Medicine

3 February, 2015 by

Alternative medicine: a phrase that is heavy with connotations, emotions and frankly, a great deal of confusion. Whichever side of the debate you find yourself on, the opinions are usually strong, stubbornly held, and generally backed up with too few facts for any kind of meaningful discussion. It is for these reasons that I usually try to avoid the topic entirely. But avoiding the issue gets us nowhere. So lets do it properly, if we’re going to do it at all. Over the last year I have read no less than 144 scientific papers on seven different so-called “alternative medicines”, in search of the truth behind the hype. From acupuncture to homeopathy, from reiki to hypnotism, I’ve searched high and low to find out what really works, what doesn’t work, what is helpful and what is potentially harmful. This series will explain what I’ve found in a fair and scientific way. It is not meant to offend anybody, merely to arm us all with the facts, so that we can make our own informed decisions.
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