Advising time

Next week marks the beginning of Summer/Fall registration, so the better-prepared of my advisees have been honoring my request for advising appointments. At these meetings, we discuss their academic futures and, more pressing, their upcoming semester schedules. These talks are also beneficial in that I get to have informal chats with my advisees (some of whom come chat regularly anyway) and therefore get to know them quite well. In fact, last semester my Biology colleagues and I invited all of our freshmen advisees out for pizza, as we were each granted money from the College of Arts and Sciences to have a social gathering with these students. It was great to have so many new students together with the faculty in such a laid back setting. We really got to know eachother!

Service Learning and Extraordinary Students

I had intended to direct your attention to the intriguing science news of the week (potential new HIV treatment, long-life genes discovered, breakfast resulting in less weight gain, etc.), but instead I wanted to direct you toward the other links at the bottom of this page. These are links to my students' blogs that describe their Service Learning projects. They are doing a phenomenal job, and have recently posted interviews they conducted with people they consider to be experts on the topic addressed by each of their projects. They will next post answers to questions about some challenging scientific papers they've been assigned to read based on their interviews.
I also wanted to express my pride in an exceptional research student of mine, Rebecca (pictured above after a hot day of snake tracking), who recently submitted an application for a Dean's Undergraduate Fellowship for Research. If she receives this fellowship, she and I (and others) will continue our snake tracking in the summer and expand the project to include DNA analysis. She will then present these data in a poster at the ASIH (American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists) in Montreal this summer.
Our students are just outstanding!

Valentine's Day and Sexual Selection

Though a teeny bit late for Valentine's Day, I received this link to a NY Times piece speculating about the mechanisms of sexual reproduction in dinosaurs.

Darwin Day

Today is Charles Darwin's 199th birthday! Though next year (his 200th) will be cause for more celebration, I am planning to pay modest homage to Darwin by posting this link to the Darwin Day website, which includes information about his life and scientific contributions, and by continuing our timely discussion of natural selection in my Evolution class. When I was a graduate student, each February 12th I was in charge of procuring the "Happy Birthday, Chuck" cake that we all shared at our philosophy of biology discussion group. Though we're not conducting that elaborate of a celebration here, I have wished my fellow biologists here at Rockhurst Happy Darwin Day. Btw, Abraham Lincoln was born on the same day, (February 12, 1809), so I wish all of you a Happy Darwin-Lincoln Day!

Artificial Selection and M&Ms

Today in my Evolution course I began my expanded discussion of the crux of adaptive evolution, natural selection. In introducing the details of natural selection I began, as Darwin did in On the Origin of Species, by likening the mechanism to that of artificial selection. In the former, the ever-changing environment "selects" who will survive and reproduce, while in the latter, human preference is the arbitrator of what characters are passed on to the next generation. So I thought it appropriate when today I received a link to a post about M&M fitness. It's pretty entertaining, so read it if you get a chance!

New Mammal!

I am always pleased to hear about the discovery (rather than the extinction) of a new plant or animal, and the identification of a new mammal is quite remarkable. Recently, scientists found a new species of elephant shrew, which are neither elephants nor shrews. These 16 species of small mammals actually comprise their own Mammalian Order, the Macroscelidea. That means that they are so different from other mammals that they are the taxonomic (classification) equivalent of carnivores (Order Carnivora), insectivores (Order Insectivora), or primates (Order Primates). So this is a huge find!

new semester

Happy First Full Week of the New Semester! I'm becoming increasingly excited about what this spring will hold for my students. In Evolution (BL 4800), we are embarking on a Service Learning project that ties grid-computing (using networks of PCs/Macs to search for disease cures and to predict global climate change) to serving the global community (see links to projects below). There is a website describing such grid-computing projects, and anyone with access to a computer or even a PS3 can sign up to help. We also just finished watching and discussing a great documentary entitled Flock of Dodos, which presents the Evolution/Intelligent Design "controversy." It's worth seeing if you haven't already.

In my Human Anatomy & Physiology course (BL 2930) we are now using i>clickers, which are interactive tools that allow students to "buzz in" with answers to quiz questions presented during class. The questions are then followed by discussions and any follow-up questions students might generate.

We are only a few days into the semester but it has already been a lot of fun for me, and hopefully for my students as well!