Science related stories and commentary
Last night I spent a great evening dining with previous Harkness fellows in Wellington. I’m incredibly fortunate to be heading to the US early next year on a Fulbright-Harkness Fellowship to look at the future of public interest journalism and hopefully pick up some ideas that could be applied here in New Zealand. Here’s a […]
MoreOver the weekend I paid 99 cents for a quality piece of long form science journalism that I downloaded and read on my iPad. Who published it? The New Yorker? Atlantic Monthly? National Geographic? No, the article is the first of what will hopefully be a long series published online by Matter, which bills itself […]
MoreThis is the second in a series of posts on my recent visit to South Africa and Swaziland. Part 1 is about South Africa’s fracking dilemma. The border town of Matsamo is anything but inviting as you wait in the immigration queue on your way into the mountain kingdom of Swaziland. The day we arrive […]
MoreThe convictions of the Italian scientists of manslaughter has more relevance here in New Zealand than you might think. In the wake of the Christchurch earthquakes, the scientific community and GNS Science in particular came in for scrutiny over how effectively it communicated the risk of earthquake activity in the lead up to September 2010, […]
MoreScientists around the world have reacted with dismay to conviction of six italian scientists and a former government official on manslaughter charges. The seven were convicted after prosecutors successfully argued that public statements they had contributed to a false sense of security in the Italian city of L’Aquila ahead of the 2009 earthquake that killed […]
MoreSir Richard Friend, the Cambridge University physics professor who has just completed a lecture tour of New Zealand, recently stacked all 78 volumes of the 2005 editions of Physical Review on the floor of his office. “I probably broke all sorts of OSH rules,” says Sir Richard, whose towering wall of paper comprised 80,000 pages of […]
MoreOf all the press releases that flow into my inbox, some of the quirkiest are from Waikato Hospital. Take today’s tale (I’m publishing the release in full below as it relates the story well). What struck me in particular with the case of this unfortunate meat packer, is that Tamati would even consider losing the […]
MoreThis is the first in a series of science-related posts based on my recent trip through parts of South Africa and Swaziland. Follow up posts will look at rhino poaching, Swaziland’s AIDS crisis, the sustainability of game parks, the geology of the Drakensbergs and South Africa’s Square Kilometer Array project. Check out my photos from […]
MoreThe concept of the newspaper science section pretty much died a death in New Zealand a few years ago as the squeeze on newsroom resources saw specialist sections ditched in favour of running science stories in the paper’s general or “A” section. Some saw that as a good thing, suggesting that cramming science stories into […]
MoreThe Government has released Building Innovation, the second progress report of six in its Business Growth Agenda. The document gives a pretty good overview of what the Government has done and intends to do in its efforts to boost innovation in the economy. It also shows our major weaknesses when it comes to the R&D […]
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PETER GRIFFIN 
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