I’m purposefully choosing to write about topics that aren’t specific to the biology and epidemiology of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, ie., the virus that causes coronavirus-19) for a few reasons. First, I typically post once or twice a week but things with this virus are changing daily so I won’t be able … Continue reading
I’m not willing to jump on some bandwagons. You won’t find me stockpiling toilet paper. I definitely won’t be buying a mask to wear which probably wouldn’t fit properly, would make me touch my face more, might give me a false sense of security as I rub my eyes after touching a door handle, and … Continue reading
I’m not very good at sitting at my desk at work. I have a sit-stand desk so that helps, but I still fidget a lot. I use a wobble board and I’ve recently added squatting in. I started this because I’m working on a couple figure skating moves that require, basically, a one legged deep … Continue reading
Back when I did outdoor programming, I used to give classes of 20 kindergarteners snowshoes. They would then run en masse across the snow. On occasion, you could see the poor small mammals, who had been happily hanging out beneath the snow, run out ahead of the kids. The kids and their snowshoes were crushing … Continue reading
In the final week of Black History Month, I went looking for a Black researcher to profile and, thanks to Twitter and the hashtag BlackSTEM, I found Rita Orji, a Computer Science professor at Dalhousie University. So, today’s post is all about a review of the literature on persuasive technology for health and wellness by … Continue reading
Admittedly, this topic is big, multifaceted, and developing, so today’s post isn’t going to look at the entire field. I’m focusing on one paper by Hannan, Moffitt, Neumann, and Kemps (2018). I was inspired to investigate this because I kept coming up with reasons that I didn’t need to go do the run I planned … Continue reading
Our DNA is located in 23 pairs of chromosomes. These chromosomes have genes located at specific locations that contain the recipes for everything made by our bodies. The ends of the chromosomes have telomeres, which are repeating sequences of specific base pairs (the alphabet of our DNA) that don’t code for anything and act like … Continue reading
I’m not a big Valentine’s Day person, so I thought I’d look for a different take on the day of love and what I found was some amazing graphics and almost 180,000 people sharing a love of birds and science. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a program called eBird that has been operating for … Continue reading
In light of today being the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, I went searching for research done by a women to profile today. I decided to start close to home and look through the biology department at the University of Alberta (U of A) where I did my undergrad and did not … Continue reading
Have you ever looked at the tracks of a snowshoe hare and wondered which way it was travelling? My experience is that most people think that the hare that left the tracks in the photo was travelling south. The two prints that are next to each other at the top of the photo are the … Continue reading