Guest Work

Recreational drugs and the technology of pill testing

Guest Work • Jan 17, 2018

• drug testing,
• ecstasy,
• festivals,
• legal highs,
• LSD,
• MDMA,
• recreational drugs,
• spectrometry

by Dr Jez Weston Drug policy is slowly starting to move from ineffective moralising to the adoption of effective and evidence-based approaches. KnowYourStuffNZ provides drug-related harm reduction at events and music festivals, which in practice means a constant stream of people coming to our tent to get their drugs checked. The need is clear. This summer, for instance, … Read More

Babies can learn the value of persistence by watching grownups stick with a challenge

Guest Work • Jan 17, 2018

• academia,
• babies,
• cognition,
• frustration,
• Learning,
• music,
• Psychology,
• resilience

Julia Leonard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. You’re at home trying to make fresh tomato sauce, but can’t seem to get the tomatoes out of their plastic container from the grocery store. The bottom latch is not opening, so you pull harder. Although you’ve never … Read More

Wicked!

Jean Balchin • Jan 16, 2018

• Etymology,
• language,
• linguistics,
• provocation,
• taboo

Wandering home one evening from a particularly long day at university, I was almost run over by a pair of tousle-headed, half-washed, hoodie-wearing skateboarders, racing pell-mell down Castle St. Indignantly extracting myself from a rather thorny hedge, I caught a snippet of their conversation: “Your new board is wicked, man!” Was the skateboard in question an evil or nefarious sentient … Read More

Scientist at work: I’ve dived in hundreds of underwater caves hunting for new forms of life

Guest Work • Jan 16, 2018

• Atlantic,
• caves,
• fieldwork,
• Indian Ocean,
• remipede,
• saltwater,
• science research,
• scuba diving,
• Western Australia

Tom Iliffe, Texas A&M University. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Maybe when you picture a university professor doing research it involves test tubes and beakers, or perhaps poring over musty manuscripts in a dimly lit library, or maybe going out into the field to examine new crop-growing techniques or animal-breeding … Read More

A History of the Supermarket

Jean Balchin • Jan 16, 2018

• marketing,
• New World,
• Psychology,
• supermarket

 It’s 3:45 pm on a Tuesday afternoon when chaos erupts in the Vegetables aisle of New World as a particularly mischievous child upends a display of Wattie’s baked beans. Clutching a shopping basket to my chest and brandishing a roll of Budget toilet paper, I summon my courage and wade into the throng of trolleys and toddlers. Six minutes later, … Read More

The ‘greatest pandemic in history’ was 100 years ago – but many of us still get the basic facts wrong

Guest Work • Jan 16, 2018

• Influenza,
• military,
• Pneumonia,
• spanish flu,
• supervirus,
• urban

Richard Gunderman, Indiana University This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the great influenza pandemic of 1918. Between 50 and 100 million people are thought to have died, representing as much as 5 percent of the world’s population. Half a billion people were … Read More

Accelerated Christian Education and pseudo-scientific “education”

Jean Balchin • Jan 15, 2018

• America,
• education,
• evolution,
• fundamentalism,
• hopeful monster theory,
• racism,
• sexism,
• teaching

Picture this: grey walls rising up on three sides of you as you sit, hunched over your schoolwork – a science worksheet repudiating the theory of evolution, using the Loch Ness Monster as an example for why Darwin was horrifically, inexcusably wrong.  As you fill in the blanks, copying the answers from the pages of information in … Read More

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Quantum speed limit may put brakes on quantum computers

Guest Work • Jan 15, 2018

• computer chip,
• engineering,
• Heisenberg's uncertainty principle,
• quantum computing,
• quantum phycis,
• technology

Sebastian Deffner, University of Maryland, Baltimore County This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.  Over the past five decades, standard computer processors have gotten increasingly faster. In recent years, however, the limits to that technology have become clear: Chip components can only get so small, and be packed only … Read More

Tattoo: The Marriage of Ink and Skin

Jean Balchin • Jan 12, 2018

• counterculture,
• Polynesia,
• rebellion,
• ta moko,
• tattoo

After a particularly rebellious morning involving  blue hair dye, a brand new nose piercing and the purchase of a pair of black leather platform boots, I found myself in the parlour of rather dingy tattoo studio. Flicking through pages of garishly coloured rose and skull designs, the mix of exhilaration and shame within my stomach soon proved too overwhelming, and … Read More

Super-black feathers can absorb virtually every photon of light that hits them

Guest Work • Jan 12, 2018

• birds of paradise,
• colours,
• courtship,
• feathers,
• optics,
• plumage,
• vantablack

Dakota McCoy, Harvard University. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. What do birds and aerospace engineers have in common? Both have invented incredibly dark, “super-black” surfaces that absorb almost every last bit of light that strikes them. Of course scientists worked intentionally to devise these materials. It’s evolution that brought this amazing trait … Read More