A compelling case for animal testing
John Forman is a dedicated if unconventional New Zealand activist, but his cause is one which is putting him at odds with the more vocal and occasionally militant end of the Kiwi activist spectrum – anti-GM campaigners and those who protest against animal testing. Forman, the executive director of the New Zealand Organisation for Rare […]
MoreMicrobe underpins $10 million govt clean tech investment
I’m at NZBio (updates on twitter @smcnz), where day two has been been dominated by updates from some of the country’s most innovative alternative energy start-ups. The back-story for Auckland-based Lanzatech is well known – the company was formed in 2005 with plans to extract clean fuel from biomass like waste wood and high-energy crops […]
MoreRemembering a New Zealand science icon
The tributes have been flowing for Sir Ian Axford, the eminent New Zealand astrophysicist who died this week aged 77. Like fellow New Zealander Sir William Pickering, who led unmanned space exploration missions for NASA, Sir Ian was a hugely respected figure in the space science community and in the 1980s helped lead space missions […]
MoreWho covers science in the New Zealand media?
When we set up the Science Media Centre back in June 2008, science reporting in the mainstream media was largely left to a handful of mainly junior reporters who had to juggle the round alongside general reporting duties and who weren’t destined to stick with science for long. The situation, thankfully, has changed somewhat for […]
MoreLenski and 50,000 generations of E. coli
Richard Dawkins didn’t mention it during his visit to New Zealand, but a long-running experiment that most clearly demonstrates how evolution works celebrated a major milestone last month. Since 1988, at his lab at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski has been running an ongoing experiment that demonstrates on a […]
MoreDawkins and Aldrin down, Rees to come
It has been a huge couple of weeks for the celebration of science, with visits from evolutionary biologist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins and Apollo 11 astronaut and moon walker Buzz Aldrin. And the season of science-themed visits isn’t over with Martin Lord Rees, the cosmologist and president of the Royal Society of London still […]
MoreThe evolution of gratitude
It was a shame Richard Dawkins only spoke for an hour at his Wellington event last night. He was only able to get halfway through his lecture before having to break off for a Q&A sessions which was handled superbly by local writer Bernard Beckett. But he repeated his familiar message that we should take […]
MoreMonbiot: All out war on science
The Guardian’s George Monbiot has a thoughtful column this week about the attacks on climate science and how they have widened to take aim at science in general. The last sentence of his column would seem to aptly sum up the state of public opinion on climate change: The battle over climate change suggests that […]
More
PETER GRIFFIN 
You must be logged in to post a comment.