This article was written by William & Akira A chimera is an animal which has more than one group of different cells which came from different zygotes, but if the different cells did come from the same zygote, it is called a mosaicism. Chimera can often breed, but the fertility and type of offspring depends …
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Shallow Grave…
This article was written by Eden & Joshua (post scholarship success). ‘It’s official. The only thing we can be sure of in life is tax.’ Immortality has been on the minds of humans since the beginning of history, with one of the first books, written in about the 22nd Century BC: ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, …
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Taupes Répulsif…
The only thing that spoils the pristine garden view from my front door is the regular appearance of great piles of rich dark soil on top of the newly mown grass. C’est la taupe! Despite having, literally, thousands of acres of farmland around my garden in which to create their havoc, the local mole population …
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Hunting Again…
I went to the Boxing Day meet of the Avon Vale Hunt in Lacock yesterday; much as I did last year. The Daily Mail has a splendid photo of the meet in which you might spot a Summerfieldian. It was quite an interesting day because last week the RSPCA successfully prosecuted the Heythrop Hunt for …
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More Food Scares…
Of all the things I get fed up with, one of the most persistent is the way that science is reported in newspapers. To me it does not seem good enough to phrase a piece of research in an inaccurate way, present it to the public and then revel in the outraged reaction. Phrases like ‘Frankenstein foods‘ …
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Picture Mystery…
Of what is this a picture? There might be a prize for the first person to correctly identify it!
A Long Absence…
I know it is unacceptable but I have not felt inspired over the busy summer holidays to write anything profound for the blog. With the term up and running smoothly now it really is time to put pen to paper. I want to write about meat from cloned cows, the Telegraph article about red wine being good …
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Bottled Water…
Looking at the statistics for UK bottled water consumption is interesting. In 1980 we drank 30 million litres; by 1990 it had risen to 420 million litres; in 2000 it was 1.42 billion litres and 2010 is set to top 2.09 billion litres of bottled water consumed. I was interested by this paragraph from the …
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Odds And Ends…
Congratulations to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for winning the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on graphene. You will have read about it here because this blog is at the cutting edge of science innovation! Much has been made of the fact that they came to their discovery by ‘playing’ with sellotape and …
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Synthetic Organism…
I was asked today about Craig Venter’s momentous achievement in producing the first synthetic organism. My pupil had been reading the papers and was alarmed by what he had read. I suspect he had been reading the Daily Mail but I may be doing him a disservice. (The Mail’s more factual article is much better.) …
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