Corylus Cornuta For Tearless Teething…

[A re-post but with some good stuff that you might otherwise have missed - more medical nonsense and some stuff about teeth.] “…it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” Macbeth Act 5 Scene 5 I often hear it said that ‘even a child of 12′ knows enough […]

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The Nodes Of Ranvier…

The human nervous system consists of the brain, spinal cord and a network of nerves travelling all over the body. The brain and spinal cord together are known as the central nervous system (CNS). This system controls the voluntary and involuntary actions of the body. By voluntary I mean the sort of actions that you […]

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The Trouble With Two Brains…

Just a little video (actually rather a long 10 minute one!) because Plutonium199 mentioned the corpus callosum in answer to a question on a previous post about the brain. The corpus callosum is the part of the brain that enables the right and left hemispheres to communicate. If it is damaged or removed (for example […]

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Incontinentia Buttocks…

All my talk yesterday of diffusion and smell inevitably made me think about flatulence. Flatulence is the polite word for farting. Apart from Her Majesty the Queen, everybody suffers from flatulence from time to time. Flatus (a Latin word I believe) refers to gases produced in the gut although a proportion of a trump may […]

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Osmosis…

One of my favourite classroom moments of the last few years was when discussing density. I said that osmium was the densest metal, and therefore the densest material that one would be likely to meet on Earth, at 22.59 g/cm3 (with iridium as a close second on 22.56 g/cm3). A voice chimed up from the […]

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Ah, Drums Again…

I love drummers, as can be seen by clicking on the HCTR tab. I was looking for Mah Na Mah Na by the Muppets (as you do) and found a video of Animal ‘battling’ Buddy Rich. Mr Rich was one of the greatest jazz drummers of all time and his soloing was the stuff of […]

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Surface Area : Volume Ratio…

The cell is the basic unit, or building block, of all known forms of life. It has a membrane containing cytoplasm in which all of the essential reactions for life take place. There are two types of cell, prokaryotic cells and eukaryotic cells. Eukaryotic cells have discrete structures within them that perform different jobs. The […]

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Wiltshire Gazette & Herald…

When I am visiting my parents in Wiltshire, my main regional paper is the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald. There are other more local ones but this is the one that we have always taken. When I was very young I used to scour its pages for crimes or mysteries in my nearby villages that I […]

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Faerie…

A little bit more about ‘selective breeding’ with reference to flower production in the video below. Please sit through it to the end as it contains a twist! Some pretty sound Mendelian genetics and a simple explanation of how breeders produce the strains of plants and animals we commonly see. Then the host fires in […]

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Bits Of Brain…

You may remember the video/song about the brain I posted a few months ago. Since then I have been meaning to find out more about the most complex organ of the human body. There are four basic regions to the brain, each of which may be composed of different structures. The evolutionary development of our brain maps […]

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The Super Cow Is Lowing…

Two quite long video clips today – sorry about that! The first is an interesting excerpt from National Geographic about the artificial selection of characteristics in Belgian Blue cattle. The Belgian scientist does refer to what he is doing as natural selection (2.45) but it is very much artificial selection. The reason that such dramatic […]

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Gaspar…

Notable Gaspars are hard to find and they are even rarer if there has to be a science connection. There is a composer called Gaspar Sanz (1640-1710) who wrote a piece called Canarios, of which there are dozens of renditions on YouTube. It sounds to my ears as though it has mistakes written into it, […]

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