Improving the transition from child to adult
Friday, June 4th, 2010
Originally posted Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
In recent days, New Zealand has had further episodes of tragic behaviours by young people that have
led to death or injury. These behaviours and their consequences are extremely upsetting for families
and communities alike. Unfortunately, these behaviours are also a common concern across the Western
world. This briefing paper serves to put some of the issues in scientific perspective—the underlying
causes of adolescent behaviour and the possible solutions to the problem are much more complex than
is generally appreciated. (more…)
A hidden science that protects New Zealand’s primary industries, environment and health
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
Stephen Goldson
Stephen Goldson is Co-Leader: World-leading Biosecurity Theme at the Bio-Protection Research Centre at Lincoln University; he is also Chief Scientist at AgResearch and provides strategy advice to the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor
While some areas of science get a lot of attention in the media – for example medical research and astronomy – other areas that are important to New Zealand get very little. The purpose of this, the first of a series of occasional papers, is to highlight some of our more hidden science efforts. In this paper we focus on biosecurity – an area where we have a broad and critical collaborative effort involving Crown Research Institutes and university staff working alongside national and local officials and private firms. It is a science area which people think little of when all is going well, and is only heard of in crisis situations. But as this paper points out, effective biosecurity requires an expanded and continual multidisciplinary scientific effort involving disciplines as diverse as neural network modellers and climate scientists. That we have been as prosperous as we have been in recent decades is in no small part based on our scientific approach to biosecurity and its implementation.
(more…)
Climate change and the scientific process
Friday, February 26th, 2010
The integrity of the international science system has been questioned during recent and well-publicised debates about issues such as genetic modification technologies and climate change. Bringing clarity of understanding into complex systems like biological processes and atmospheric dynamics has challenged both the scientific method and its engagement with the broader community. The explosion of information available and much wider public access to it is welcome and represents much of what is great about the modern era. But it also generates issues of its own. Science is a process based on questions leading to partial answers, in turn leading to more questions and more partial answers, and so forth. In complex systems, this rarely leads to absolute certainty, but much more often to a balance of probabilities. Science-based decisions that society has to make will always rely on weighing up the risks of acting versus those of not acting. This has long been apparent in areas of public health, such as when dealing with events such as influenza epidemics.
(more…)
Commercialisation of publicly-funded research
Friday, September 25th, 2009
The level of public investment in Research & Development (R&D) in New Zealand is relatively low by OECD standards. However, private sector investment is even more concerning — at only 0.51% of GDP, this is less than a third of the OECD average and places New Zealand around the bottom of the OECD rankings.
Private sector R&D expenditure in selected OECD countries in 2006. Plotted from data in Statistics New Zealand (2009). Research and Development in New Zealand: 2008. Wellington. New Zealand data derived from 2008 reference year.
There are some understandable underlying reasons — in other countries, the defence and pharmaceutical industries are big investors in, and users of, R&D, and those sectors are barely represented in New Zealand. Also, New Zealand has a high proportion of smaller companies which tend to spend less on R&D. (more…)
Climate change
Thursday, August 13th, 2009
The world’s climate is influenced by a number of factors interacting in very complex and not entirely understood ways. Over the last million years there have been periodic shifts in the temperature of the planet initiated by changes in the orbit of the earth around the sun and in the tilt of the earth’s axis of rotation. These changes have led to periods of global warming and global cooling – the more recent of the latter are termed the Ice Ages. There are also shorter-term fluctuations brought about by a number of factors, including linked atmosphere-ocean changes with an irregular period of several years (El Niño and La Niña events) and sporadic changes brought about by major volcanic eruptions. Global warming does not mean that every part of the globe changes temperature to the same degree or rate.
The coal-burning Huntly power station on the Waikato river is responsible for over half of New Zealand's emissions from electricity generation.
Measuring global temperatures over time is complex, but there is a general agreement that the world is experiencing an overall warming trend (with year-to-year fluctuations superimposed). The warming trend over the past 50 years is nearly twice as great as that over the previous 100 years. These escalating temperature changes have been reflected in a number of environmental and biological changes. These include rises in globally averaged sea level, shrinking of summer Arctic sea-ice extent, losses from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, retreat of mountain glaciers, poleward and upward shifts in the range of some plant and animal species, and earlier timing for some species of spring events such as leaf-unfolding, bird migration and egg-laying. That this is happening is not contentious.
This change in temperature is different in nature to past temperature changes. In particular, carbon dioxide concentrations are rising in advance of, rather than as a result of, the warming trend. (more…)
P for pure – and pseudoephedrine
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
‘100% Pure’ might be a marketing slogan for tourism in New Zealand, but it’s unfortunately also true that the purity of domestically produced methamphetamine powder in this country is particularly high – hence its street name of ‘P’ for ‘pure’. According to a recent report from the United Nations, New Zealanders are the world’s third highest users of methamphetamine (the league table was topped by the little Central American republic of El Salvador).
Scene assessment by investigating chemists. Photograph courtesy of ESR.
Why should we be so concerned about methamphetamine? Simply, it’s a particularly nasty drug. Use is associated with violent behaviour, anxiety, confusion, and insomnia, as well as paranoia, auditory hallucinations, mood disturbances, and delusions, so that people dependent on methamphetamine often need mental health treatment. Methamphetamine is toxic to brain cells, and long-term users suffer irreversible brain damage. Regular use induces tolerance (increasingly higher doses are needed to obtain the same effect), so users often commit criminal offences to obtain money to fund their dependency. Much of the methamphetamine in New Zealand is made from pseudoephedrine – a nasal decongestant that is a common ingredient in ‘cold relief’ tablets sold in pharmacies – cooked up in clandestine laboratories that are discovered in suburban houses, motel rooms and even vehicles. (more…)