Science Media Centre

Wrangling over water issues
Polluted rivers, dirty dairying, greening the MacKenzie Country, dams for hydro-power and water allocation — these are just some of the big water issues that have been in the headlines in recent months.
Although freshwater is relatively abundant in New Zealand, uneven distribution of water resources and increasingly intensive use have led to [...]

Suicide coverage – does it hurt?
Suicide reporting laws were under scrutiny again this week as Chief Coroner Judge Neil MacLean called for more debate about suicide reporting after releasing new suicide statistics.
Numerous media editorials have echoed his call for debate with several commentators arguing the restrictions on reporting on suicides is [...]

Sacked drug adviser tours NZ
Professor David Nutt grabbed headlines in the UK last year when the chair of the British Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was sacked for his controversial views on recreational drugs and how they are classified.
Professor Nutt, who has gone on to form the Independent Council on Drug Harm [...]

More “undeniable evidence”
The State of the Climate 2009 report, released this week by the US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),  confirms not only that the world is warming, but that the last decade has been the warmest on record.
In the wake of the Muir Russell review’s recent exoneration of UEA [...]

Women face long wait for abortions
New Zealand women seeking an abortion can expect to wait an average of 25 days after their first visit to a doctor before the procedure is carried out, according to research published online today in Reproductive Health, an open-access, peer-reviewed publication.
The University of Auckland research team [...]

SMC Briefing: GST and healthy food
The price of fruit and veggies was in the media spotlight this week on the back of a Green Party survey that suggests produce prices are being marked up several hundred percent by the country’s supermarkets.
Researchers have been studying the best ways of tackling obesity [...]

Concerns raised about nanoparticles
Creating materials on the nanoscale is an area of science tipped to hold huge potential for everything from energy production to personalised healthcare.
But some observers argue that industry is jumping the gun on releasing products containing nanoparticles before adequate research has been done into their safety. The [...]

Soil carbon and cutting emissions
Did you know that there’s more carbon in the dirt beneath our feet than in the air above our heads?
Soils hold at least twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, and they also store more carbon than the world’s forests and other vegetation combined.
Although soil carbon has been [...]

Aussie-bound space capsule due
Scientists in the desolate South Australian outback are preparing for the touch down of a Japanese space capsule, which is scheduled to arrive on Sunday night.
The Hayabusa capsule is the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid, which it did in 2005, intercepting the Itokawa asteriod. But scientists [...]

Will the Southern Ocean carbon sink hold?
Ice core records show there was a sharp rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – a nearly 50% increase – at the end of the last ice age. Scientists have long puzzled over the origin of all the extra CO2 that appeared as the great ice sheets [...]