Guest Author • Jan 05, 2017 •
Would you like to be car crash-proof? Well, take a look at Graham the crash-proof human and you may change your mind. We were introduced to Graham, and a face that only a mother could love, back in July, as part of a road safety campaign by the Victorian Government. The Transport Accident Commission … Read More
Guest Author • Dec 31, 2016 •
If we learned one thing in 2016, it’s that you can never trust the public to make a sound decision, and that’s exactly what happened when the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) held a vote to choose the name of its brand new $340m research ship. The winner, by a very wide margin, was Royal Research Ship … Read More
Guest Author • Dec 30, 2016 •
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of…beer? It might not be the first thing you’d expect to find in a 220-year-old shipwreck, but that’s what divers pulled from the wreck of the Sydney Cove, one of the first merchant ships to journey to the newly formed colony of Sydney in 1797. For nearly two centuries, bottles of the ancient ale lay buried … Read More
Guest Author • Dec 26, 2016 •
Who’d have thought a frog could teach us a thing or two about sexual acrobatics, apart from Miss Piggy that is? On the whole, frogs and toads are sexual conservatives – 7,000 species around the world indulge in just six different mating positions – but in June we were introduced to an entirely new one. The Bombay night … Read More
Guest Author • Dec 24, 2016 •
Meerkats – delightful, lovable fluffballs, right? Wrong – they’re actually stone-cold killers, the mammalian world’s most prolific murderers in fact, according to a study that came out in September. The scientists looked at murder rates in 1,000 mammal species, compared the meerkat (sorry) with the others, and found that one-in-five of these cuddly critters is killed in cold … Read More
Guest Author • Dec 23, 2016 •
When is a chili pepper too hot? When it leaves you hospitalised for 23 days with a hole in your oesophagus, that’s when. October brought us the gory story of a 47-year-old American who took part in an eating challenge and came off second best after he ate a puree of one of the world’s hottest chillies, Bhut … Read More
Peter Griffin • Dec 18, 2013 •
You may have seen our list of what we thought were the top 10 international and New Zealand science stories of 2013. Well, my colleagues at the Australian Science Media Centre also came up with a list of what they considered to be the weirdest science stories of the year. Yep, some research published in New Zealand makes the … Read More