HTTP/2 200 cross-origin-resource-policy: cross-origin etag: W/"fd037a3a020b255d45612b955641d7618458885f1372b7a4194410ae0ee25f32" date: Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:45:02 GMT content-type: application/atom+xml; charset=UTF-8 server: blogger-renderd expires: Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:45:03 GMT cache-control: public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, max-age=1 x-content-type-options: nosniff x-xss-protection: 0 last-modified: Fri, 07 Nov 2025 03:10:58 GMT content-encoding: gzip content-length: 8406 x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-29=":443"; ma=2592000 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74879152025-11-07T16:10:58.986+13:00A New Zealand student of genetics and biochemistry trying to hone his communication skills. Includes analysis of new science research, explanations of cool things, and the odd purple passageDavid Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.comBlogger96125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-68966460986978207652006-10-29T13:07:00.000+13:002006-11-04T16:32:01.342+13:00

Any regular readers of Science and Sensibility will by now have worked out that I have done my usual trick of getting busy with my real life and letting these pages go to seed. One of the things I’ve been doing quite a lot of in my long absence is poking around spider webs with my camera. Our flat has a ‘garden’ which might be better described as a small grassy fallow land. We are hardly going to

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1154510283363543822006-08-02T21:05:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:11.782+13:00

There are two blogging carnivals in full swing at the moment whihc celebrate the natural world - Words and Pictures is playing host to this month's Circus of the Spineless while Charles Daney at Science and Reason has collected a great set of posts for the 59th edition of the Tangled Bank (check out his idea for a physcial science carnival too).

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1154256236180788182006-07-30T22:29:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:11.707+13:00

Other people mark the first appearance of swallows as the great turning point of the year, me, I like my winged messangers a litte smaller. This afternoon I spied my first bumble bee since winter started. Past experience suggests we're still months away from the emergence of most of this year's queens put it's an exciting event all the same. Sadly when I spotted the early messanger I bereft of

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1154253931498111852006-07-30T22:04:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:11.630+13:00

Remember last month when all the heavy weights of the science blogging world were talking bout Heliconius heurippa - the Andean butterfly that appears to have arisen by hybridisation between two other Heliconius butterflies? Yeah, if I wanted to be big deal blogger that's probably when I should have put my two cents in. Of course being a big deal is hardly my motivation so I have no shame in

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1152846214897677362006-07-14T15:03:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:11.557+13:00

Radagast has found an amazing group of photos shortlisted for this year's Kongsberg Underwater Image Competition. There are stunnig photos in all the catergories but have to check out the images of microspopic specimens which include the photo at the top of this post. That photo might look like it's come to you curtousey of Buckminster Fuller (or perhaps an adenovirus) but it's actually

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1152830740634509662006-07-14T10:31:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:11.465+13:00

Meme Therapy is a cool blog looking at the world from a scifi/futurism point of view. One of their regular features is a 'brain parade' in which they ask various experts in a particular field to answer a question. They usually elicit some interesting conversation - you can check out a couple of them here and here. But now they've really blotted their copy book by including me in one of their

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1151662764820961102006-06-30T22:19:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:11.378+13:00

Welcome along to the 10th time the Circus of the Spineless has preformed for the blogosphere. I have decided to take hat you might call a systematic approach to presenting the submissions I've received ( and a few posts I hunted down too). The idea behind this presentation is that you will not only get to see pretty pictures of insects (and, oh there are some pretty ones this month) but that

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1151638383625246992006-06-30T15:33:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:11.286+13:00

Aramoana is a tiny settlement (home to 260 people) on the mouth of the Otago Harbour - about 20 minutes drive from my flat in Dunedin. In New Zealand the settlement's name is almost completely synonymous with a tragedy that played out there 16 years ago. On November 13th 1990 David Gray, a reclusive, gun collecting schizophrenic shot and killed 13 people before he was himself killed by armed

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1151038174920499662006-06-23T16:49:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:11.211+13:00

Come the end of this month the Cricus of the Spineless will be undertaking its first performance outside of the USA. I am proud to be able to announce that the first international performance of the renowned circus will be staged right here on Science and Sensibility at the end of this month. So if you've written about or photographed anything that is alive and doesn't have a spine then send me

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1151035506019743522006-06-23T16:05:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:11.136+13:00

There has been a real glut of great nature writing and photography in blogs over the last couple of weeks. Seeing the great posts that people like Bev and Wayne have put together has made me in equal parts jealous of those enjoying an insectfull spring/summer and motivated to get out and record a little of the natural world around me. Spurred by the great posts I've read I have been able to

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1149154613173415362006-06-01T21:15:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:11.061+13:00

The seasons must be changing in the northern hemisphere - it seems scores of insects have emerged fro their hibernation to completely take over this month's circus of the spineless (I count one non-insect post!) Down here in the deep south it's starting to really turn cold and most of the interesting insects hae hidden over-winter or laid their eggs and got out of here. But here are still

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1148787587339646162006-05-28T15:39:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:10.987+13:00

All the cool kids have been playing with this new toy that takes your website html and makes it into a pretty graph. So here is a graphic description of my web authoring style: The nice looking globe on the right side there will be my link-tastic side bar (blue dots are links and orange ones are the line breaks that go after them). The rest of the graph just goes to show my completely

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1148449759095534112006-05-24T17:00:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:10.897+13:00

I was met the other morning as I sped from my flat by this creature, hanging on to our front door. As you can see I deftly removed it with the aid of an envelope (after a series of less deft manouveurs with my fat fingers threatened to do it a greater injury than had been infliced on it before I came along - check out his lone antenna) but I couldn't resist the urge to take a few pics before

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1144562865655663432006-04-09T17:50:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:10.806+13:00

There has been much made this week of the discovery of the so called ‘fishapod’ Tiktaalik roseae – a fossil with some features intermediate between us land vertebrates and our piscine relatives. And so there should be, Tiktaalik gives us a real clue as to what our ancestors must have looked like 375 million years ago.1 When we talk about the origin of the tetrapod limb we are talking about the

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1137301060673197812006-01-15T17:51:00.000+13:002006-10-29T13:06:10.682+13:00

Wow, you stop posting for a couple of months and the whole blogosphere moves. Pharyngula, the biggest science blog that there is has joined a whole bunch of other science bloggers at… Science blogs. Pharyngula’s new home is here. My Dunedin counterpart Huw has re-launched his blog robotines with the oh so meta idea of blogging about writing blogging software with which to blog about writing

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1137214774941068712006-01-14T16:47:00.000+13:002006-10-29T13:06:10.608+13:00

So it appears I was correct when I suggested the posting rate around here might dry up a little while I was working on my summer fellowship. The combination of long working days, warm summer evenings and limited computers in the lab aren’t exactly conducive to blogging. However, today I have some time and a computer so I thought I’d share a few pictures and a few stories from a recent trip aimed

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1131681049723641372005-11-11T16:50:00.000+13:002006-10-29T13:06:10.540+13:00

While I'm talking about famous New Zealand Scientists I should note one that didn't make it into the top hundred kiwis (though he'd be in mine) - Alan Wilson. Wilson was an Otago trained evolutionary biologist that controversially applied new molecular techniques to studying the evolution of man. He was controversial because before his work most anthropologists had humans pegged as a long

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1131628833088599382005-11-11T00:04:00.000+13:002006-10-29T13:06:10.464+13:00

Prime TV has been running a series listing New Zealands's top 100 history makers. Suffering as the series did in' third network conditions' it didn't come across my radar until last week but I found the names and the stories that made up the top 25 pretty interesting - who knew Peter Snell's 800 metres record (run on cinders) would have won silver at last year's olympics? The final was tonight

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1130973676981515012005-11-03T12:21:00.000+13:002006-10-29T13:06:10.382+13:00

There's a glut of great science posts online at the moment so I thought I'd point them out to you. First off theres the science carnivals; The second performance of the Circus of the Spineless is underway at Snail's Tales (complete with creationist controversy!) and The Tangled Bank is in its 40th iteration at The Examining Room of Dr Charles. The Tangled Bank includes my post about the

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1130390812533003012005-10-27T18:26:00.000+13:002006-10-29T13:06:10.296+13:00

As you may have seen The Commissar has been constructing a family tree based on who inspired bloggers to get into blogging. A worthy project and one you should contribute to if you can and haven't yet. The Commissar's data combine to make a history of the branching patterns that have given birth to some of the blogs out there today. Scientists visualise these patterns using something called a

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1128661928769034892005-10-07T18:12:00.000+13:002006-10-29T13:06:10.121+13:00

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA For the first time a New Zealand researcher has been awarded the sought after Ig Nobel prize. James Watson , an historian from Massey University was awarded this year's Ig Nobel for Agricultural Science in recognition of his scholarly work The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers in a ceremony at Harvard University on Thursday. Mr Watson's work

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1127974919040074182005-09-29T18:21:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:10.039+13:00

Wow but Tony Gallucci is a busy man. No only does he maintain milkriverblog, a collection of posts as eclectic as they are excellent but he has, in recent weeks, hosted (with some flair) the Tangled Bank and I and the Bird. Not content with that he and a few others have gone an made a whole new blog carnival. The Circus of the Spineless will celebrate the most underrated and ubiquitous members

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1127919485804407222005-09-28T22:58:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:09.965+13:00

Sex is one of the most intriguing puzzles in evolutionary biology. Its very presence seems counterintuitive. If organisms are acting to get as many of their genes into the next generation as they can then why would they go to the extreme lengths that they do to mix their genes with someone else before they make babies? In fact, as John Maynard Smith pointed out, producing males incurs another

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1127884535553377482005-09-28T17:15:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:09.878+13:00

As you may have heard from around the traps today marks the first time that images of a live Giant Squid have been presented. These giant cephalopods were previously only known from remains, found in Sperm Whale stomachs and washed up on beaches. As you can see from this image reproduced at the National Geographic website the Giant Squid is an active hunter, following prey and attacking with

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7487915.post-1126858621548459952005-09-16T20:17:00.000+12:002006-10-29T13:06:09.789+13:00

There's an election tomorrow. I haven't said anything about it here because I really don't have a lot to say - I think the most important role a government can play is to help out those New Zealander's less fortunate than me so my vote will be going leftward and that's about it.f What I've always liked about elections is all the polls, graphs and pretty animations of the house filling up with

David Winterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09704684760112027351noreply@blogger.com2