I would now like to turn to a third value that science has. It is a little more indirect, but not much. The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, [...]
April 27, 2011 at 3:36 pm
Core student Nora Spalholz (CAS’14) checks out the surviving shrimp in the ecosystem she and her partners built two weeks ago in a lab session of CC106: Biodiversity. Photo by Cydney Scott, from BU Today.
Prof. Daniel Hudon gives five great reasons for YOU to register for, and to participate in, the 2nd annual Ecolympics. The Ecolympics are coming: April 1-15, 2011 Help mobilize for Planet Earth.
February 25, 2011 at 5:54 pm
(featuring the voice of Prof. Daniel Hudon) The Ecolympics are coming: April 1-15, 2011 Help mobilize for Planet Earth.
February 25, 2011 at 3:22 pm
The second-ever Ecolympics, April 1-15, is going to be bigger and better than last year’s, and you can help: by contributing to the Core Eco-quotes Project. As you know, Core is about tackling the big questions in life and certainly one of the biggest these days is how can humans best live with and within [...]
February 15, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Following the tradition started last year, the Core Curriculum is proud to continue in the effort to raise awareness of the value of biodiversity, and how we can positively and negatively affect it. Professor Daniel Hudon provides context for this year’s events on the Ecolympics blog: This year is the International Year of Forests and [...]
February 10, 2011 at 5:31 pm
Do you see them? Those monkeys are banging away at their typewriters, trying to type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Every time there’s a problem involving randomness, the monkeys get called into action. But these are not your average monkeys. No, these are gedanken monkeys. They can madly type 24 hours a day, seven [...]
February 4, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Mitochondria are a silly place to store genes. They are often glibly called the powerhouses of the cell, but the parallel is quite exact. Mitochondrial membranes generate an electric charge, operating across a few millionths of a millimetre, with the same voltage as a bolt of lightning, a thousand times more powerful than domestic writing. [...]
February 3, 2011 at 11:52 am
The word ‘fact’ is always likely to make biologists tremble in their boots, as there are so many exceptions to every rule; but one such ‘fact’ is virtually certain about oxygenic photosynthesis – it only evolved once. – Nick Lane, in his discussion of the evolution of photosynthesis, page 73, in Life Ascending: The Ten [...]
February 2, 2011 at 12:01 pm
The chimeric ancestor of the eukaryotes apparently succumbed to an invasion of jumping genes from its mitochondria. – Nick Lane, in his discussion of the evolution of cellular complexity, page 115, in Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, a book now studied in CC106: Biodiversity
