Boiling water and the stench of sulphur hardly seem a combination conducive to life, yet some bacteria thrive in such hostile environments. Biologists are beginning to think that the first life forms ...

Carrying a red hold-all, 22-year-old Neil Roberts strode through the darkness towards the doors of Wairere House in Wanganui—home of the ‘Wanganui Computer’. It was some 25 minutes past midnight on ...

As I write this, Easter beckons and the stores are awash with Easter eggs. Eggs have traditionally been as­sociated with new life and, in Chris­tendom, the resurrection of Christ. In some countries, ...

Zip, pip, chuck, goes the call of Aotearoa’s smallest bird. It may turn out to be one of the earliest forms of language. On the flanks of Harbour Cone, on the Otago Peninsula, riflemen nest in the ...

In the late 19th century, news of a strange antipodean bird with beautiful tail feathers, orange wattles, and a long curved beak spread around the British Empire. To Māori, it was a tapu bird—a sacred ...

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current swirls clockwise around Antarctica, protecting the ice sheets from tropical currents and regulating the exchange of heat and carbon between the ocean and the ...

Here we are—a nation of parents, grandparents and children all in the same boat, together at home. He waka eke noa. Every day of the lock-down we will post a story or video and set of activities that ...

Fearsome and fast, sharks occupy the top spot in the food chain, but are also the most vulnerable to ecosystem changes. Public attitudes to these apex predators is changing, and scientists are ...

What is a brightly coloured parakeet whose nearest ancestors live in the tropics, doing in the company of penguins in the subantarctic? Kakariki, New Zealand’s endemic parakeets, break all the rules.

The worst experience of the Second World War for New Zealand Red Cross nurse Mona Plane was caring for the survivors of Japanese POW camps. “On one stretcher there seemed to be just a skeleton,” she ...

In the South Island’s remote subalpine regions, a highly terrestrial songbird—one of two surviving species of New Zealand wren—has hopped, chirped and flown in the face of extinction. There are four ...

I couldn’t find Tony Watkins’ place at first. You’d think an architect’s house would draw attention to itself, advertising the fact that “Here lives a professional”. Not so with Watkins, 75, architect ...