Science Media Centre

Dr Michelle Dickinson, a Senior Lecturer at Auckland University’s Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, spoke to TV3′s Firstline this morning for their weekly ‘science news’ segment. She discussed the increased awareness of breast cancer genetics in the wake of actress Angelina Jolie’s revelation that she had a double mastectomy after learning she carried the BRAC1 [...]

New Zealand researchers are proposing a new method for identifying and recording Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars, anticipating there could be 100 billion such planets in the Milky Way alone. Dr Phil Yock from the University of Auckland and colleagues are proposing to combine data from the NASA Kepler space telescope with a technique called [...]

UK SMC: Residents of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk are recovering after a meteor broke up over the city causing hundreds of injuries and damaging buildings. Our colleagues at the UK SMC gathered the following commentary from scientists: Dr Simon Goodwin, Reader in Astrophysics from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, said: “Objects from [...]

Kiwi space scientists are playing a key role in the fist commercial space mission. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 7.44pm (NZT) last night, carrying the Dragon spacecraft destined for the International Space Station orbiting 400km above the earth. The Dragon is carrying a two and a half tone [...]

Two solar flares that occurred on the sun on 7 March have caused a large cloud of charged particles (a coronal mass ejection; CME) to hurtle towards Earth. A statement, video and images can be found on the NASA website, with the latest update noting that the CME has reached the edge of the Earth’s [...]

University of Canterbury scientists are helping their NASA counterparts to design new types of scramjets – super-fast planes which could replace the  almost-retired NASA space shuttle fleet. The UoC researchers are helping to design the craft’s heatshield – at the Mach 10 (or faster) at which it will need to fly, heat will be a [...]

New Zealand scientist Sir Ian Axford has died aged 77. He worked on space probes, and was an expert on comets and cosmic rays. An excerpt: (read in full here) “Sir Ian worked on many American and European space probes, such as Voyager and Giotto, designing robot craft and calculating orbits. “He was an expert [...]

Eloise Gibson of the NZ Herald reports that, by the end of the decade, a NASA scientists believes we may know how many Earthlike planets there are. The scientist, Jack Lissauer, is currently involved with the Kepler space telescope project, which aims to identify how many planets capable of potentially supporting life there are, allowing [...]

The New Zealand’s Herald editorial on the significance of the Apollo 11 moon landing 40 years ago today: AN excerpt: read in full here. “The Americans achieved their ambition, but at a cost. The budget for space exploration was essentially drained on a project that many scientists insisted from the start was a diversion from [...]

NASA’s attempt to launch a carbon emissions-monitoring satellite into space has failed with the US$278 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory crashing into the Indian Ocean shortly after launch. News wrap: Washington Post: NASA Satellite Crashes Before Reaching Orbit Reuters: Botched launch ends US satellite’s mission The British Science Media Centre gathered comment from UK-based scientists on [...]