This week I had one of those light-bulb moments. Of course, it comes in the middle of relaxing in bed, which can be quite disturbing. But I guess it's better than jumping naked out of the bath and running down the street. (Eureka! A streaker!) But I was thinking about the extinct great auk (and the lovely understated stuffed one in Norwich Museum) and that the eggs of the great auk were so understudied and precious that records of the patterns of all the known ones are carefu

Sorry for a period of quiet, I've had a bit of a tooth ache and been trying to book a visit to a dentist. It's all because raspberries are coming in season, and I've been enjoying Eton messes under the guise of healthy eating. (It's nothing to do with gnashing of teeth over the baffling election results... honest.) But that also means I've been jamming raspberry seeds in my perfectly shaped molar-dimple-raspberry-seed-receptacle - resulting in that jarring hellish sensation

A long overdue update on the magic lantern slides that I acquired at auction, originally from the marvellous J. A. Fairfax Fozzard, the previous Cambridge University professor of Anatomy. I have previously written about his studies of how a chicken lays an egg, and pictures of incubating some weird alien parasite (or possibly just puppies). Now I have finally put the whole set of medical slides online. Unfortunately, I can't label them, as in most cases the slides aren't labe