Science Media Centre

In the hubbub following the Government’s call for a predator-free New Zealand, one point has been missing, writes Dr Wayne Linklater in the Dominion Post: NZ isn’t people-free. An excerpt (read in full here): Wayne Linklater: It’s a people problem, not a pest problem Increasingly, as recent efforts to make Stewart Island predator-free or neighbourhoods […]

A new report authored by researchers at AUT and the University of Waikato has revealed that New Zealand’s appearances are deceiving when it comes to human rights. The report, titled Fault lines: Human Rights in New Zealand, looks at the country’s commitment to six different international human rights treaties and includes interviews with politicians and both domestic and international experts. […]

Rob Burton explains why New Zealand’s current attitude towards social science, particularly in agriculture, may be far from optimal. While current practices are to use social scientists in an ‘expansionist’ way, to spread new technologies out to farmers, he argues that social scientists should instead be used to help facilitate dialogue between scientists and farmers, […]

ONLINE BRIEFING: Tuesday 9 March 2010, 10.30 am NZT Climate scientists have been warning since the 2007 publication of the landmark IPCC 4th Assessment Report that the world’s nations need to cut carbon emissions to avoid the devastating impacts of climate change. But the Copenhagen climate conference failed to produce a legally binding agreement to […]

New Scientist‘s cover story this week looks at some fascinating social research under way that suggests moods, attitudes, behaviours can spread through social networks influencing people you may not even know directly but through other friends. Some groundbreaking research has been done in this area by Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School […]