Cold Shoulder
Warming-swarming says Wellington scientist Vincent Gray, whose anti-global warming beliefs challenge scientific orthodoxy.
News of New Zealanders via Global Media
Flat Out
Chaos and interacting sound waves power new-generation flat speakers. New Zealand’s Soundlab is at the head of the pack, in sound-delivery technology.
3G in 3rd M?
The auction of New Zealand’s 3G radio spectrum frequencies has been an on-again, off-again affair – will it take till the third millennium?
PPL Piggies
PPL (Scotland, US, NZ) presented the world with five cloned piglets – the beginning of interspecies organ donation and top five important science event 2000.
Download a Friend
Auckland-developed virtual faces read your email in your own voice. Download for free at lifeFX.com.
Nobel Award
New Zealander and Nobel laureate for Chemistry, Dr Alan MacDiarmid, receives his award from His Majesty the King of Sweden.
Virtual Success
Virtual Spectator, the New Zealand company behind the America’s Cup graphics, plans to revolutionise the way all sport is viewed, allowing spectators to view reconstructed plays from every angle.
E-tax
IRD sets a dodgy precedent, requiring Dominz to hand over personal details linked to all .NZ domain names.
Meteorologist Dies
James M. Austin, Dunedin-born and educated TV meteorologist, MIT teacher and D-day weatherman, died in Boston aged 85.
Root Problem
ICANN, the US agency that registers regional suffixes like .nz, is trying to charge for its services. The Internet Society of New Zealand has threatened to look elsewhere for root service, raising the spectre of an…
Digital Planet
New Zealand is the leading edge of the digital planet, with the highest IT spending (per capita) in the world.
Wave Action
A South Pacific-style reef in Bournemouth is the brain child of Prof Kerry Black of Waikato University. The big waves will help turn the resort into the next “coolest city in the universe”.
Ideas on IQ
1994’s The Bell Curve suggested that Black Americans have a lower average IQ than other groups – a suggestion that appalled Waikato academic James Flynn. Flynn suggests IQ tests reflect environment as much inherent “intelligence”, calculating that…
SPF15+ Orchards
The phrase apple-red cheeks will no longer apply to New Zealand apples coated in kaolin clay to ward of the sun. “The kaolin-based product has cut sunburn damage on apples in half.”
International Treasure
Enterprising techno-toy hounds have devised a use for hand-held GPS systems: geocaching. 120 caches have been laid in 31 states and 13 countries, including Australia, New Zealand and Chile.
Drink Up
High-calcium milk Anlene, manufactured by New Zealand Milk, is shown to ward off osteoporosis in Asian women. Dairy exporters will have to bone up on their Asian languages to spread the word.
Clean Green Methane
While some countries battle automobile emissions, New Zealand scientists at the Rumen Microbiology Unit, Palmerston North, are working on producing a gas-less sheep. It’s a tricky business though: “There’s no point in getting rid of the methane…
Out Out Damn E-mail!
Deleted files may come back to haunt you, says Peter Gutmann of Auckland University. “It is possible to install a computer that overwrites data when you hit the Delete key, making it much harder to recover….
Against the Grain
New Zealand scholar Aurelia Mulgan’s The Politics of Agriculture in Japan launches a “brutal assault on antifactual strategies such as rational-choice theory, but also brusque rejection of social science as science”.
Avvid Attention
New Zealand Government Departments can talk to each other with maximum efficiency, thanks to AVVID, “one of the largest end-to-end IP telephony networks in the world.”
Great Steaming Geysers!
18 year old Rawiri Waru’s developed a system to check Rotorua’s geysers don’t run out of steam, winning himself a Grand Award and an internship at Bayer AG in Singapore at the Worldwide Young Researchers for…
Frankenfood
New Zealand’s Royal Commission on Genetic Engineering is being watched closely as the first chance for citizens of any country to say what they think about Frankenfood.
E-e-e-e-readiness
Kiwis are on to it online. This has been confirmed by a Vic University study that lists NZ among the top four countries in the world for e-commerce and connectivity. The edge has the world’s fastest…
Dr MacDiarmid and His Fantastic Electric Plastic
New Zealand’s Nobel duo becomes a trio; Masterton-born and Wellington-educated chemist Alan MacDiarmid has joined Ernest Rutherford and Maurice Wilkins as a Nobel Prize (chemistry) laureate. MacDiarmid and his two colleagues discovere conductive plastics which have been…
TAPping into Productivity
Synapse TAP, the alternative computer input system designed by Kiwi Neil Scott of Stanford, doesn’t just allow disabled workers to perform jobs: TAP’s voice and gesture-guided system gives users a edge over their able-bodied counterparts.
NZ 3-D LCD
Images on your monitor create the illusion of depth, but remain flat. Now a Kiwi company, Deep Video Imaging, has created a new kind of double-skinned monitor which delivers true depth of field and allows the display…
Through Now
Seepower, global/ Wellington IT company Compudigm’s data visualisation software, delivered smooth connection of more than 500,000 calls from Stadium Australia on the opening day of the Olympics.
Seeding Change
New Zealand scientists from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research have been collaborating with their Australian and British counterparts in experiments that may hold the answer to global warming. By adding extra iron to the…
Soft-soaping Protector
Waiuku orchardist Chris Henry has created the world’s first organically acceptable soft-soap fungicide. The product, branded as Protector, is “just what environment conscious growers and customers have been demanding”.
Fair Go, Mate!
Game theory is used by many branches of the social sciences to help explain some the seemingly irrational behaviour of humans. Paul Walker, a New Zealand academic, has constructed a time-line of the development of games theory…
Stirling Effort
British energy companies are looking at the Stirling engine produced by NZ company WhisperTech. By 2025, 13m households in Britain could have their own little power station installed with this technology.
Kiwi Cunning Conquers IQ Test
In a Sunday Times report noted science commentator Bryan Appleyard ponders the limits of DNA science and why ‘designer intelligence’ is not such a good thing, using the evidence of New Zealander James Flynn and his…
Cyberpunk Sisters
Female hackers have proved so elusive that they slip under the radar of sociologists. ABC News investigates part of an underground subculture better known for the misogynistic stink of a high school boys’ locker room – geek…
The End of an Aussie Icon: Hats off to NZ Scientists
“It just may spell the end of the world’s ugliest headgear: that staple of the Australian tourist shop regular, the cork-fringed hat.” Two researchers from Massey University have developed a technique that kills female fruit flies in…
Immunising Roadkill to Protect Livestock?
Imagine a countryside filled with possum traps, not designed to kill, but to entice the pesky pest in for a quick facial spray to vaccinate them against bovine TB. Hailing some edge thinking the Guardian writes: “It…
Rutherford and Oliphant: the Physics of the Affair
From tree-pruning to atom bombs, on the death of physicist Sir Mark Oliphant the Guardian remembers the contribution his friendship with Sir Ernest Rutherford made to Twentieth Century science, ” greatest personal triumphs in science came in…
The Truth is Out There
An international effort to find biological life in the stars, Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (‘Sophia’), a joint project between NASA and the German Aerospace Centre, will spend two months of every year in New Zealand, the…
Organic Expert Export
Organic farmer Evelyn Eng-Lim is introducing the organic lifestyle to Singapore and hopes to set an example for other farmers to follow, “If other farmers see that it is commercially viable, then they will be convinced…
Kiwis Have the Secret to Animal Magnetism
It sounds like a line from a bad personal ad, but a team of New Zealand biologists, led by Dr. Michael Walker, in an upcoming issue of Nature, report findings from innovative research into ‘the sixth…
Out of Africa Theory of Evolution
The Economist ponders the ‘where did we come from’ question, referring to the out-of-Africa theory first developed by New Zealand biochemist, the revolutionary Allan Wilson, and his colleague Rebecca Cann. They studied genetic material from a variety…
Kiwi Linguists Chart Man’s Journey Across the Pacific
University of Auckland linguists Russell Gray and Fiona Jordan, “may have solved one of the greatest mysteries in human prehistory – how people managed to colonise the Pacific”. Writing in the journal Nature they analysed 77 languages…
Global Leader in 3d Paint Technology Brings Texture to Cyberspace
Auckland company Right Hemisphere has released ‘Texture Weapons’ its latest imaging product said, “to represent a breakthrough in 3D content creation for broadcast, game developers and industrial design.” What was once an arduous task is now once…
Dotcom Carnage Paves the Way for Kiwi Hard Science
USA Today speculates that the dotcom slump will see investors’ interest return to science-based research companies, including LifeF/x, which is creating realistic-looking, computer-generated talking heads for use on Web sites. The company is building on years of…
Kiwi Innovation Solution to Indian Sea Erosion
“The State Minister for Minor Irrigation Kumar Bangarappa informed that a permanent solution to arrest sea-erosion in the coastal belt of the Mangalore district would be evolved as per the New Zealand model.”
Kiwi Wave Expert Helps the Brits Hang Ten in Bournemouth
The stereotype of the stoic sunburnt pommie enduring another much-mocked English summer is all about to change thanks to a world expert kiwi who specialises in making artificial waves. It might still be cold, but Professor…
Innovative Computer Mapping to Curb Crime
New Zealand police are, introducing a high-tech solution to beat burglaries. They are using a NZ$6million computer-mapping programme to allow police to zero in on burglars’ homes as well as break-in hot spots, said…
Wild Weather
New Zealander Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado, is in the middle of the wild weather/global warming storm.
New Zealand Firm Hails Taxi Innovation in India
Tait Electronics is launching in India an innovative two-way radio communication service using using cutting edge technology. The ‘Mega Cab’ service, using a satellite based global positioning system is set to revolutionise the business of catching…
Manimal Farm: Science’s Brave New World
New Zealand government researchers have developed a herd of super-producing cattle.
You Can’t Grow Money on Trees … but Cabbages?
Extracting gold from plants sounds like modern day alchemy, but 26 yr-old Massey University of New Zealand scientist Chris Anderson has managed to do it in the laboratory – extracting gold from cabbages.
From the Z-files: Kiwi Squeezes Gold from Cabbages
26 yr-old PHD student Chris Anderson has developed a way of extracting gold from cabbages grown on old mine tailings – and he is confident that the method will be commercially viable.
Travelling with Cruise Control
If Kiwi Jonathan Kruse has his way, road-tripping tourists will never have to fumble with the map or guide-book again. Using global positioning systems, information about your location and relevant tourist attractions, meshed with evocative music and…
Kiwi Innovation Helps Blind See the Future
A Christchurch company has taken computers for braille users from the age of the typewriter to the age of the super-computer, with Braillenote, the first notebook computer for the blind. Asiaweek (CNN) profiles the innovation in its…
Ernest Rutherford a Particle in Twentieth Century’s Great Scientific Debate
Without Quantum mechanics most of the Twentieth Century’s science and technology would not exist, yet our understanding remains vague and the debate between Einstein and Bohr over first principles was vigorous and unresolved. Bohr’s theory developed when…
Dolly Schwarzenegger – Muscle-bound Merinos the Future of Food?
Undertaking controversial research, New Zealand scientists are seeking government permission to take a naturally occurring mutant gene isolated from double-muscled Belgian blue cattle, which makes them grow exceptionally large, and insert it into sheep.
