Rates of suicide in Aotearoa have remained stubbornly high, despite government efforts to address the issue through the suicide prevention strategy and action plan and other measures. | Continue reading
As many companies aim to build diverse workforces, candidates from historically marginalized communities continue to report unfair recruitment practices and limited opportunities. Building an equitable organization starts during the hiring process, with potential supervisors play … | Continue reading
In 1783, the City of London was gripped by a court case which symbolized the brutal economics of slavery. Two years previously, the Liverpool slave ship Zong had set out from Accra, in present-day Ghana, with 442 men, women and children crammed in its hold. | Continue reading
Eight years ago, the world agreed to an ambitious target in the Paris Agreement: hold warming to 1.5°C to limit further dangerous levels of climate change. | Continue reading
With the growing human population placing enormous pressure on food resources, it is estimated that by 2030 there will be an additional half a billion people to feed. This, combined with the rising cost of living, has amassed worldwide concern for the future of food security. | Continue reading
Extreme weather seasons are putting Australia's energy systems more at risk of sabotage, the government's annual Climate Change Statement warns. | Continue reading
Who could have imagined how quickly we would return to pre-COVID routines? | Continue reading
Hygiene poverty is a pervasive and hidden problem in Ireland and cuts across all income levels, according to the first comprehensive study of the issue in Ireland. | Continue reading
Big businesses like to tell us that, as consumers, we all pay for food theft. We've been sold a narrative that as consumers who don't steal, we pay for the theft of food by others on our grocery receipts. | Continue reading
In 2021, Health Canada announced a freeze on changing maximum residue limits (MRLs)—the maximum allowable pesticide residues acceptable under Canadian law. This decision followed substantial public outcry following Canada's most widely used weed killer glyphosate's proposed MRL i … | Continue reading
Human aging may have been influenced by millions of years of dinosaur domination according to a new theory from a leading aging expert. The 'longevity bottleneck' hypothesis has been proposed by Professor Joao Pedro de Magalhaes from the University of Birmingham in a new study pu … | Continue reading
Alex Gutierrez worked for MUR Shipping and its predecessors for nearly 30 years. But in 2018 he was told, in line with company policy, it was time to set a retirement date. | Continue reading
The costs of environmental pollution caused by plastics in cigarette butts and packaging amount to an estimated US $26 billion every year or US $186 billion every 10 years—adjusted for inflation—in waste management and marine ecosystem damage worldwide, finds a data analysis publ … | Continue reading
The idea of irreversible inhibitors adhering permanently to a target protein has gained increasing attention for application in potential drug development. However, one of many hurdles is the possibility of protein mutations making otherwise effective drugs pharmacologically inac … | Continue reading
The scientific worldview has made great contributions to humanity's flourishing. But, as science advances into territory once firmly held by religion—attempting to answer questions about the origins of the universe, life and consciousness—science communication often paints a fair … | Continue reading
As this year's UN climate summit (COP28) gets under way in Dubai, scientists studying Earth's frozen regions have been delivering an urgent call for action to policy makers. But is anyone listening? | Continue reading
When Hurricane Maria struck the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica in 2017, it caused the kind of devastation which is unthinkable to larger countries. The Category 5 hurricane damaged 98% of building roofs and caused US$1.2 billion (£950 million) in damage. Dominica effectivel … | Continue reading
About 350 million people across Africa speak one or more of the 500 Bantu languages. New genetic analysis of modern and ancient individuals suggests that these populations probably originated in western Africa and then moved south and east in several waves. The study has been pub … | Continue reading
We are seeing more Indigenous businesses in Australia. This is important, given these businesses produce social impact, support Indigenous economic self-determination and maintain strong levels of Indigenous employment. | Continue reading
Icelanders are no strangers to volcanic eruptions, but right now the country waits in a state of limbo. | Continue reading
Many of us were anxious and fearful during the COVID pandemic, but we've probably started to feel a lot better since lockdowns have stopped and life looks more like it did previously. | Continue reading
The record storm surge in October 2023 caused severe damage to the German Baltic coast. Effective adaptation scenarios to rising sea levels are, therefore, becoming increasingly urgent. In two recent studies, researchers at Kiel University have modeled both the flooding extent al … | Continue reading
For nearly fifty years, astronomers have come up empty-handed in their search for stars within the sprawling structure known as the Magellanic Stream. A colossal ribbon of gas, the Magellanic Stream spans nearly 300 moon diameters across the Southern Hemisphere's sky, trailing be … | Continue reading
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the speed with which available health and safety information evolved was novel to most people around the world. To assess how the public handled the changing guidance, an international research team compared information consumption among citizens of … | Continue reading
From precise inkjet printing to clear vision through spectacle lenses—the influence of droplets and their movement shapes numerous areas of our daily lives. While droplets should remain precisely in place on inkjet prints, it is desirable that they move quickly across the surface … | Continue reading
The Second Plague Pandemic of the mid-14th century, also known as the Black Death, killed 30–60% of the European population and profoundly changed the course of European history. New research led by Penn State and the University of Adelaide suggests that this plague, potentially … | Continue reading
Optoelectronics detect or emit light and are used in a variety of devices in many different industries. These devices have historically relied on thin transistors, which are small semiconductors that control the movement of electrons and photons made out of graphene and other two … | Continue reading
Plants have two main uptake mechanisms to obtain iron (Fe) from the soils. The type of strategy employed depends on the botanical classification of the plant. In the so-called strategy-I mechanism, plants must first reduce the trivalent iron (Fe3+) into bivalent iron (Fe2+). Only … | Continue reading
Many people are keen on making healthy as well as sustainable food choices, and they often intuitively equate "healthy" with being "sustainable." A study by researchers at the University of Konstanz, the Johannes Kepler University Linz, and the Hamburg University of Applied Scien … | Continue reading
Quantum technologies are currently maturing at a breath-taking pace. These technologies exploit principles of quantum mechanics in suitably engineered systems, with bright prospects such as boosting computational efficiencies or communication security well beyond what is possible … | Continue reading
A team of microbiologists at McGill University's Redpath Museum, working with a colleague at Tattoo Lounge MTL, has investigated changes to the skin microbiome when a person has an ear pierced and a metal object inserted into the puncture. In their study, reported in the journal … | Continue reading
A team of evolutionary biologists and limnologists affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. has described the synchronous bioluminescent signals they observed being produced by a type of marine ostracod (Crustacea; Luxorina). In their paper published in the journal Proce … | Continue reading
Blood tests are a common, yet often painful, step in health care. But what if we could skip the needles altogether? Saliva and blood contain many of the same biomarkers, and collecting spit is as simple as drooling into a container. Researchers reporting in ACS Sensors have devel … | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Konstanz have discovered a new type of ultrafast magnetic switching by investigating fluctuations that normally tend to interfere with experiments as noise. | Continue reading
Remote teams are less likely to make breakthrough discoveries compared to those who work onsite, according to research led by the universities of Oxford and Pittsburgh into the rise of remote collaborations among scientists and inventors across the world. | Continue reading
A new study has confirmed that pesticides, commonly used in farmland, significantly harm bumblebees—one of the most important wild pollinators. In a huge study spanning 106 sites across eight European countries, researchers have shown that despite tightened pesticide regulations, … | Continue reading
Movement of rivers, mountains, oceans and sediment nutrients at the geological timescale are the central drivers of Earth's biodiversity, research published in Nature has revealed. | Continue reading
Have you ever wondered why we carry two copies of each chromosome in all of our cells? During reproduction, we receive one from each of our parents. This means that we also receive two copies, or alleles, of each gene—one allele per chromosome or parent. | Continue reading
New technology often calls for new materials—and with supercomputers and simulations, researchers don't have to wade through inefficient guesswork to invent them from scratch. | Continue reading
Scientists have discovered a rare sight in a nearby star system: Six planets orbiting their central star in a rhythmic beat. The planets move in an orbital waltz that repeats itself so precisely that it can be readily set to music. | Continue reading
Entanglement is a quantum phenomenon where the properties of two or more particles become interconnected in such a way that one cannot assign a definite state to each individual particle anymore. Rather, we have to consider all particles at once that share a certain state. The en … | Continue reading
New research has demonstrated the potential for the ADDomer platform to produce thermostable vaccines and reagents to tackle viral infections The study led by the University of Bristol and Imophoron, a biopharmaceutical company developing thermostable nanoparticle vaccines using … | Continue reading
High in remote mountains in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, a new plant will soon take atmospheric CO2 and pump it into rock—part of controversial attempts to target planet-heating emissions without abandoning fossil fuels. | Continue reading
Bees, wasps and ants belong to the Hymenoptera order and inject a whole cocktail of venomous ingredients when they sting. Despite their tremendous ecological and economic importance, little was previously known about the origins of their venom. | Continue reading
Blood vessels are responsible for the appropriate and efficient delivery of nutrients and oxygen to the whole body. To do so, they must grow and branch to reach every cell in a process called angiogenesis. The precise regulation of the sprouting and pruning of blood vessels is co … | Continue reading
Biodiversity—the total variation of life—is multidimensional. Its study encompasses multiple facets, such as taxonomy (the variety of species), phylogenetics (their evolutionary history) and functionality (the ecological roles that species play in ecosystems). Protecting biodiver … | Continue reading
Scientists have developed a new way to study the shapes of atomic nuclei and their internal building blocks. The method relies on modeling the production of certain particles from high-energy collisions of electrons with nuclear targets. Such collisions will take place at the fut … | Continue reading
In the search for new particles and forces in nature, physicists are on the hunt for behaviors within atoms and molecules that are forbidden by the tried-and-true Standard Model of particle physics. Any deviations from this model could indicate what physicists affectionately refe … | Continue reading