Tagged With: biology
Species of the Week: the Coelacanth
Many species of Coelacanth, a primitive fish, are present in the fossil record, but they were thought to have gone extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Then, in 1938, a museum curator on a South African fishing trawler caught a living species: Latimeria chalumnae. Decades later, in 1998, a second species, L. menadoensis, … Continue reading
A colour change for laboratory mice
Mice are the most widely-studied mammalian model organism, but not all lab mice are alike. Most varieties, or strains, of mice used in science originate from mice kept as pets by enthusiasts at the end of the 19th century. Scientists in many fields such as immunology prefer to work using a strain called C57BL/6 (known … Continue reading
A personal thought on photography, art, biology and science
A guest blog from Dr Wei-Feng Xue, winner of last year’s photography competition “What inspired you to be a biologist?”. Wei-Feng is a Lecturer in Chemical Biology at the University of Kent and uses his flikr photostream to communicate photography. People often ask me, as a child what did I want to do when I … Continue reading
Amazing plant facts from PlantSci
The Society of Biology hosted its first academic conference this week, which was a huge success. I certainly learnt a lot from the talks at PlantSci 2012, and thought I’d share some of my top facts. The conference opened with an inspiring address from Professor John Beddington, the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor. He spoke of … Continue reading
Launch of the Degree Accreditation Programme
The Society of Biology’s Degree Accreditation Programme has been progressing rapidly over the past two years. We launched our pilot in June of 2011 and it was successfully completed in February of this year enabling us to hold our Accreditation Awards Ceremony last Tuesday. Speeches by Andrew Miller MP, Dr Mark Downs and Professor David … Continue reading
My Society of Biology Life Sciences Careers Conference experience
Progressing through the British higher education system, a student like myself will have inevitably attended numerous career development and employability talks. However, when I signed up to the life sciences careers conference, I had little idea of what to expect and simply assumed I’d get given a lot of leaflets and free pens. Well, on … Continue reading
What’s the Harm?
In the current edition of The Biologist, Edzard Ernst FSB highlights the non-science (and nonsense) of homeopathy. Why is this important? Because I think it is vital to make a distinction between ideas that are based on evidence, and those that are not. I believe that this is a central function of the scientific professional … Continue reading
Species of the week: The Green Turtle
The green turtle, Chelonia mydas, occurs throughout tropical waters and, to a lesser extent, in subtropical seas as well. They nest occurs in more than 80 countries worldwide. Green turtles are slow growing and long lived; those that reach maturity may live to be 80 years old. Fully grown they are approximately 69 to 79 … Continue reading