Guest Work

Summer in the mountains – return of the kea gangs

Laura Young • Jan 31, 2020

• conservation,
• kea,
• Southern Alps

Peak summertime can feel like a wonderful place in the South Island mountains. This year it feels alive, almost burgeoning with young kea fledglings in some places. Twin Stream valley (near Glentanner), for instance, has had a group of at least 12 young kea through January 2020. Some of them are shown in this incredible photo (above), captured by Peter … Read More

Marketing, not medicine: Gwyneth Paltrow’s The Goop Lab whitewashes traditional health therapies for profit

Guest Author • Jan 29, 2020

• altenative health,
• Goop,
• Gwyneth Paltrow,
• indigenous health

Nadia Zainuddin, University of Wollongong In Gwyneth Paltrow’s new Netflix series, The Goop Lab, Paltrow explores a variety of wellness management approaches, from “energy healing” to psychedelic psychotherapy. Goop has long been criticised for making unsubstantiated health claims and advancing pseudoscience, but the brand is incredibly popular. It was valued at over US$250 million (A$370 million) in 2019. Read More

From 9/11 to Christchurch earthquakes: how unis have supported students after a crisis

Guest Author • Jan 23, 2020

• bushfires,
• christchurch earthquakes,
• disaster,
• lecturers,
• university

Prue Gonzalez, Charles Sturt University Universities across Australia – including in Canberra, Wollongong and Newcastle – have had to close their campuses in the past few months as a result of bushfires. But the deep and long-lasting impacts of the crisis are set to pose a challenge for Australian universities beyond just the immediate response. Of … Read More

How New Zealand media reports chronic pain

Guest Author • Jan 17, 2020

• chronic pain,
• journalism,
• media,
• pain

Hemakumar Devan Around three million New Zealanders access news media (both paper and online) every week. Yes, you heard that right! So, the potential for news media to shape public health beliefs is common sense. As chronic pain affects one in five New Zealanders, we wanted to find out how New Zealand’s news media have reported chronic pain by … Read More

In Outrage Over Its Bunk Science, Goop Finds Fuel for Growth

Guest Author • Jan 16, 2020

• Goop,
• Gwyneth Paltrow

Michael Schulson For years, experts have said that Goop, the wellness and lifestyle brand founded by the actor and entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow, markets pseudoscience and overblown cures. And for years, despite the criticism, Goop has just kept growing. Now the company, which was valued at $250 million in 2018, seems poised to reach an even larger audience. Last … Read More

Tales of wombat ‘heroes’ have gone viral. Unfortunately, they’re not true

Guest Author • Jan 16, 2020

• Australian bushfires,
• burrows,
• wombats

Dale Nimmo, Charles Sturt University If you’ve been following the bushfire crisis on social media and elsewhere, you may have seen reports of benevolent wombats herding other animals to shelter into their fire-proof burrows. These stories went quickly viral – probably reflecting the appetite for good news after the horrors of the bushfire crisis. However, the accounts are not … Read More

Mystery China pneumonia outbreak likely caused by new human coronavirus

Guest Author • Jan 14, 2020

• China,
• coronavirus,
• MERS,
• Pneumonia,
• SARS

Connor Bamford, Queen’s University Belfast Since December 2019, there has been a cluster of 59 cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, eastern China. The pneumonia is associated with a previously unidentified coronavirus related to the deadly SARS virus. Seven of those cases are thought to be serious, and one person – with serious pre-existing health problems – has died. The … Read More

Animal response to a bushfire is astounding. These are the tricks they use to survive

Guest Author • Jan 09, 2020

• Australian bushfires,
• bushfires,
• wildlife

Dale Nimmo, Charles Sturt University Have you ever wondered how our native wildlife manage to stay alive when an inferno is ripping through their homes, and afterwards when there is little to eat and nowhere to hide? The answer is adaptation and old-fashioned ingenuity. Australia’s bushfire season is far from over, and the cost to wildlife has been epic. A … Read More

The climate crisis is also a biodiversity crisis

Guest Author • Jan 08, 2020

• Australian bushfires,
• Biodiversity,
• biodiversity crisis,
• bushfire,
• climate change,
• ecology

Dr Andrea Byrom Like many of us, the summer break has seen me transfixed with horror at the scale and magnitude of the bushfire crisis in Australia. As an ecologist, I can’t help but be appalled at the loss of some of Australia’s most beautiful ecosystems and landscapes. And as someone who experienced all 20,000 (and counting) Christchurch earthquakes, … Read More

6

15 years of editing Wikipedia

Guest Author • Dec 20, 2019

• biographies,
• Wikipedia

Stuart Yeates Today is my 15th-anniversary editing Wikipedia under my own name. I was recruited to join Wikipedia from the Everything2 community, one of several predecessors to Wikipedia, where I’d been editing since 2000. Everything2 was fun to write, editors voted on each other’s articles and humour was an important factor in getting good ratings, but it clearly wasn’t … Read More