Science Media Centre

Brian Fallow writes in the New Zealand Herald about the suggestions of the 2025 Taskforce, one of which is there should be no further increases in the amount of public funding allocated to research and development. NZ already spends less as relative to the size of our economy than many other OECD countries, and the [...]

Earlier today, Prime Minister John Key announced that the government will be spending some $321 million on Research, Science and Technology, of which $225 million will be new funding. The funding will be spent on a range of initiatives, from actively encouraging commercialisation and technology transfer, to funding additional postdocs and attracting talented overseas scientists [...]

Neal Wallace writes in the Otago Daily Times about comments by a former science leader that the current science funding system is preventing science research being passed on to farmers. He also criticised the propensity for CRIs to enter into commercial alliances, saying it, too, harmed technology transfer. An excerpt: (read in full here) “Jock [...]

The 27th Australasian Winter Conference on Brain Research (AWCBR) was held this week in Queenstown. Dr Fabiana Kubke, of the University of Auckland’s School of Medical Sciences, attended the conference, and reports on some of the highlights of the research being presented. As it does every year, the AWCBR brought together a large group of [...]

An opinion piece by the Dominion Post’s Colin James in which he examines the recent attitudes and behaviour of the New Zealand government – and various members thereof – towards research, science and technology.  He also looks at the impact being made by Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, the PM’s Chief Science Advisor. An excerpt: (read [...]