| PART III OF VI 
LEARNING BY PURE OBSERVATION
by David Secko
A CHEMIST RESPONDS TO "A SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT."
by W. Stephen McNeil
OF EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLE
by Timon P. H. Buys
ELSEWHERE AND OVERHEARD
by Caitlin Dowling
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Dear Reader,
Recently, for kicks, we decided to take a great leap of faith and simply accept (without review or hesitation) the next submission that appeared in our email inbox. Fortunately for us, the writing was reasonable, tantalizing even, and as an added bonus, the science content was sufficiently sound. If you are willing, you can read it here. In any event, our point is this: we are still absurdly new to this, so take advantage of our easy-going submissions guidelines. Glory is only around the corner.
LEARNING BY PURE OBSERVATION.
by David Secko
Simply observing a person learning to move in a new environment is enough to help you unconsciously learn these movements, says new research by Canadian scientists.
Andrew Mattar and Paul Gribble, from the University of Western Ontario (UWO), recently found that people watching a video tape of another person learning to move a robotic arm performed this same task better than those who didn’t observe the learning process.
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PHYSICS ENVY AMONG BIOLOGISTS: FACT OR FICTION?
by T.J. Nelson
Physicists often state their belief that all biologists would rather be physicists, but became biologists only because they were not very good at math. As evidence for this, they point to such findings as the fact that the vast majority of published studies in virology, cell biology, endocrinology, and even microbiology, use few if any partial differential equations or elements of number theory, and only one paper written by a biologist in the past 25 years (in the field of neurophysiology) has ever used tensor calculus.
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A CHEMIST RESPONDS TO "A SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT."
by W. Stephen McNeil
Well, it's a good thing that science experiments on webpages aren't subject to the traditional anonymous peer review process. It they were, Jaime would probably get a reply something like this:
"Dear Mr. Weinman,
"We regret that we cannot accept your manuscript for publication in its current, or likely any, form. The reviewers have pointed out a number of glaring deficiencies and omissions, briefly summarized below.
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“I'm ahead, I'm a man/
I'm the first mammal to wear pants”
- Pearl Jam, “Evolution”
In the Beginning…
Many people believe that there is a conflict between science and religion when it comes to the question of how life began on Earth. While only a minority of people situate themselves squarely on one side of this debate, the topic tends to draw the attention of everyone. This is because the answer to the question of where we came from serves as the jumping off point for defining our morality and our purpose here on Earth. Quite simply, once we know what brought us into being, we know where to ask for instructions. Consequently, any explanation put forward, especially one that purports to be absolute, must be able to withstand an enormous amount of scrutiny.
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I was three years old. By this point in my life, the residents of Sesame Street had educated me about as well as any community of puppets could reasonably be expected to educate any small child. Family legend has my father holding me, age fifteen months, as he selected an ice cream treat from the Dickie Dee vendor outside our Virginia home. I don’t know if I recognized the varieties of snacks, but apparently I could make some sense of their names. “I,” I enunciated, pointing. “C. E. C…”
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MYSTERY ORGANISM BAFFLES GIRL ADVENTURER.
by Bethany Lindsay
I’m a girl that likes to know what she’s looking at.
I have a degree in biology, and I’ve spent the past few summers exploring Eastern North America, learning about the wildlife there. Those trips left me with an urge to identify every interesting plant, animal, or mineral I see, so that I can play the role of Madame Know-it-all the next time I see it.
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ELSEWHERE AND OVERHEARD
by Caitlin Dowling
“It is kind of like finding Elvis.”
Frank Gill of the Audubon Society, an American bird conservation group, on the sighting of a woodpecker, thought to have been extinct for 60 years. (Scientific American)
"You see the toads crawling along the ground, swelling and getting bigger as they go until they are like little tennis balls, and then they suddenly explode."
Vet Otto Horst on the rather mysterious spectacle of exploding toads in Hamburg. (ananova.com)
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HIPPOPOTAMUS
by Carolyn Beckman
Many years ago, a hippopotamus decided to learn typing. As you may imagine, the task was difficult and discouraging. The hippopotamus however was unusually persistant. First she learned the parts of the typewriter, then she studied all available typing manuals, (even one for an antique which had neither name nor function in any western language; It could best be likened to a linotype machine which set type for haiku poetry in Japanese.) and finally she enrolled in a good secretarial school.
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| | | | For those that prefer a print version, please download our beautiful pdf file.
(part i pdf)
(part ii pdf)
home (again)
about (us)
archive (of stuff)
submissions (or suggest)
notes (on masthead)
bioteach (.ubc.ca)
A SUBMISSION EXPERIMENT
PHYSICS ENVY AMONG BIOLOGISTS: FACT OR FICTION?
by T.J. Nelson
EUPHEMISMS THAT ALSO SOUND LIKE STRANGE TISSUE ENGINEERING PROJECTS
by David Ng
IN WHICH OUR PROTAGONIST LEARNS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BASE CASE.
by Moebius Stripper
MYSTERY ORGANISM BAFFLES GIRL ADVENTURER.
by Bethany Lindsay
HIPPOPOTAMUS
by Carolyn Beckman |
