News

Shaun Hendy, Bridget Williams Books, $39.99 Shaun Hendy specialises in complexity: understanding it, modelling what might emerge from it, and translating all that for the layperson. During the acute ...
Richard Robinson and Bill Morris threw themselves into reporting their cover story on eels: icy streams, extreme slime, gear that still smells of smoked eel. The big lesson? “Never wear rings while ...
Daniel B Thomas, Jeffrey H Robinson, Daphne E Lee, The University of Otago The Geology Museum at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka—University of Otago smells of old wood and older rocks. The walls are lined with ...
In New Zealand’s national parks and remote areas, conservation managers cull feral cats to save many bird, reptile and invertebrate lives. That’s not possible in urban nature reserves, where there’s a ...
Look at the centre of the image above. Now slightly to the right. That’s a New Zealand jumping spider—one of a whole new genus discovered by Lincoln University master’s student Robin Long. Her ...
Jack Kirifi, Mila’s Books, $30 Soot. Charred coconut. Water. Turtle bone, sharpened into teeth and tied to a stick. These, as far as we can tell, were the Tokelauan tools of tā tatau, the sacred art ...
Dangerous fungal spores can survive stratospheric travel, Swiss scientists have found—which may explain how devastating fungal diseases such as myrtle rust skip between continents. The stratosphere ...
Seagrass is excellent habitat for fish, birds and invertebrates; it helps keep water clean by holding sediment in place; and it’s a superlative carbon sink. But all over the world, precious meadows of ...
In 2023, a team of University of Auckland researchers organised workshops across Northland and Auckland—19 of them, involving a demographically diverse group of 176 people, aged from 16 to 25. The ...
For centuries, the Taiari River has woven a shining tangle across its floodplain, pushing water across soil and gravel in an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of bends, oxbows and dry water-scars. Once, ...
For years Ebony Lamb has been the go-to portrait photographer for Wellington artists—writers in particular, notoriously hard to shoot well. A standout is Elizabeth Knox in garden-witch mode: apron, ...
And so there were two construction sites, each tunnelling towards the other. One crew lived in an encampment of huts at the lake’s West Arm, and the other on a ship in Doubtful Sound’s Deep Cove.