It’s been a little while since I’ve had one of these published, but it’s good to be back! My latest Nature Education’s Student Voices blog post is up, and it’s on a topic both close and far from my heart: humanity. More specifically, it’s about how boring, biologically, Homo sapiens is as a species compared with the vast array of fascinating creatures that we mostly ignore every day, and if we would just take a second to appreciate them, we might stop putting ourselves up on [...]
|
||||||
|
Thank you so much to everyone who donated to get me to The Amaz!ng Meeting 9 in Las Vegas, because, as some of you might already know, all the money was raised and I will be in Las Vegas in less than a week! Hooray! Now, for those who thought it was a blatant ploy by yours truly to score a free holiday1 let me assure [...] » Continue reading “One small step for a student, one giant leap for young Australian skepticism!” Over on Student Voices, my latest blog post has been published, entitled Some Like It Very, Very Hot. It’s all about the crazy world of hyperthermophiles – organisms that can comfortably live in temperatures exceeding 60ºC – and some of the current record-breakers in the field: Pyrococcus furiosus, Geogemma barossii and Methanopyrus kandleri. There are few things more fascinating than these microbes, people, and their extreme biology continues to astound the scientific community. Here’s a little taste: To put these hyperthermophiles’ biochemical achievements in perspective, proteins in our [...] Khalil is the manager of Student Voices, a Nature Education community blog to which I contribute (in fact, a new post of mine about hyperthermophiles should go up relatively soon, pending some editing on my end), and his first feature print article was recently published in the journal Significance. It’s all about testing the hypothesis of universal common ancestry – that all three taxonomic domains (Eukarya, Bacteria and Archaea) share a common ancestor – and it’s a great read if you’re interested in learning how biologists [...] On Monday I mentioned that I’ve been asked to start writing for the Nature Education blog Student Voices. Well, my first post has been published, entitled Engineering Solar Bacteria, and it’s all about taking genes from marine bacterioplankton and putting them in E. coli, allowing them to use light as an energy source! A fascinating topic, something I might cover in more detail on Homologous Legs in the future. Here’s a little taste: Wouldn’t life be so much easier if we didn’t have to [...] » Continue reading “My new Nature Education post, on genetically engineered solar bacteria” Today’s science link is the Student Voices blog. Student Voices is a student-run blog hosted by Nature Education (affiliated with one of the world’s top science journals, Nature), where undergraduate science students write about and discuss science in the news, emerging research and the intersection of science, culture and politics. As I’ve repeatedly said, science communication practice by students of science is incredibly important in order to acclimatize them to discussing and explaining the wonders of science to others. The more students that do this the better, [...] |
Homologous Legs is the personal blog of Jack Scanlan, an Australian science communicator and biology student. Topics of interest here include the intelligent design/evolution "war", biology, philosophy, religion, music, and mostly coherent thoughts from a scattered brain. 
 
 |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2013 Homologous Legs - All Rights Reserved Banner graphics by Faster Pussycat Productions. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||||
Recent Comments