TV Comedian Stephen Colbert has gained a lot of mileage out of “truthiness” the term he coined back in 2005 to describe that gut instinct that drives a lot of our decision making, that may well be divorced from the evidence, from reality. Since then Colbert, his colleague John Stewart and others have delighted in […]
MoreThe United States is experiencing its worst drought since 1988, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture having declared area covering one third of US counties a federal disaster area What’s the impact of all of this – on agricultural production, on prices for food commodities? The Daily Observer, a paper from Ottawa, Canada, published the […]
MoreThe blueprints for Christchurch are out and by and large, they represent an ambitious and progressive vision for the future of our second biggest city. Interestingly, they also account for innovation and health precincts that could make Christchurch, already a major centre of excellence for electronics and high value manufacturing and with significant medical research […]
MoreThe University of Otago Department of Public Health’s scientific war on smokers continues with new research undertaken in Wellington showing 77 per cent of smokers having a cigarette in public places throw their butts on the ground. It may seem a trivial matter but consider this – around 5.6 trillion cigarettes are smoked anually, resulting […]
MoreOn the Sciblogs podcast this week, we head to the High Court where climate sceptics have this week been seeking a judicial review of NIWA’s climate records. We catch up with Sciblogger Gareth Renowden about the case and we talk to former NIWA climate scientist Jim Renwick about the current state of climate science and […]
MoreAnyone who is anyone seems to end up going to Antarctica – its a rite of passage for Kiwi journalists, b-list celebrities and scientists, though the latter tend to have a much more genuine need to venture down there on a regular basis. If you yearn to explore Shackleton’s hut or actually stand at the […]
MoreHot on the heels of the UK Government’s move to re-shape the science publishing system by requiring publicly funded science research to be open-access from 2014, comes research to suggest the impact of research varies little between subscriber-only and open access journals. The paper*, published today in BMC Medicine used citation rates and measures of “impact […]
MoreA matter of weeks after the UK G0vernment-commissioned Finch Report recommended a move to embrace open access science publishing, the Government has responded with plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014. The move is a huge endorsement of the open access model, which numerous countries […]
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PETER GRIFFIN 
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