David Bradley's Nature Matters

It’s quite magical watching dozens of Sand Martins darting about in front of the holey cliff at RSPB Minsmere, viewable from the cafe table outdoors. The cliff is basically a rocky bank full of small holes and those holes provide these migrant visitors with nest sites for this summer’s breeding. They’ll burrow in, up to a metre or so, and make a chamber lined with vegetation and feathers as a nest at the end of the tunnel. The Sand Martin, Riparia riparia, is a small and understated bird, it’s…

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I’m well into my ninth season of garden moth trapping, which basically involves enticing moths into the garden using an ultraviolet lamp, hoping they will settle on the egg trays in the trap that act as roosting spots for them overnight, and then identifying, counting, and photographing them in the morning, before letting them back … Continue reading "Mercury – the winged messenger of the nocturnal gods"

There are countless AI medical diagnostic tools being used by health services the world over. They allow vast numbers of scans and images from patients, biopsy samples, and microscope slides to be checked over very quickly for obvious health problems. The NHS uses one called DERM to check suspicious skin moles. The AI is trained … Continue reading "Playing check-a-mole"

A paper in a well-known journal from a major publisher on the subject of using nanogels for wound healing is packed with bizarre phrases that have nothing to do with the paper. It came to light this week on BlueSky via research integrity expert Leonid Schneider of For Better Science. A quick scan of the … Continue reading "Reaction roll genocide"

I almost missed a moth in the garden last night, a Brindled Beauty, Lycia hirtaria, one of the geometer (inchworm) moths in the family Ennominae. It’s one of those species in which the males have plume-like antennae. It’s subtly, but distinctively patterned. Unfortunately, the one in the garden last night had lost most of its … Continue reading "Moth of the Moment – Brindled Beauty"

Once or twice a year, sometime in March and then again in early April, I put a little rubber bung in one of those little gauze laundry detergent bags and hang it a sunny spot in the garden. The rubber bung arrived from a lepidopterist supplies company  in March 2019 and is covered in a … Continue reading "Moth of the Moment – the royal succession"

First, it’s a tragedy when once-thriving coastal towns fall on hard times, leaving younger generations with few meaningful prospects. There was a time when fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers could expect a job for life in fishing or shipbuilding. The same over the whole country, even the world. That all began to erode decades ago, as … Continue reading "Depressing conversations"

Back in late 2023, a paper appeared in the journal BMC Genomics (Nakano M et al., 24(1):735; DOI: 10.1186/s12864-023-09841-0) that demonstrated that an extract from the caterpillar frass (faeces) of the Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio machaon) could block the proliferation of colon cancer cells, specifically HCT116 cancer cells. I must confess I’d not checked in with … Continue reading "Swallowtail frass and colon cancer"