The Late Early Bird

Our 2026 conference at Tῡranga Library in Christchurch is just over 2 months away, and we have some exciting updates.

The temple's awful (I'm being polite here) history isn't enough; they've recently created their own cryptocurrency called Highden Coin. On the Highden Coin website, very few details are shared, and what is said is very wishy-washy. They say their coins will be released gradually over twenty-five years, through 49 cycles/initiations - and twice each year they will gather at Highden for six weeks. These gatherings are to do "transformative work" at the temple, and build up the community. 17 of these initiations have already occurred, so a third of the supply was released when the coin was created. You can currently (as of the 24th of March) buy a coin for 0.01607 USD, or 100 coins for ~2.75 NZD - up ~60% from 0.01 USD per coin when it was released in March this year.

I was excited to read about a bit of a home-grown science breakthrough this month. An artificial egg made of a silicone membrane lattice has been used to hatch 26 chickens.

Jason Edward Hickel (born 1982) is a Swazi economic anthropologist, academic and democratic eco-socialist. He is a professor at the Institute of Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a visiting senior fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and was the Chair of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences.

In the beginning of May, media outlets were reporting some very alarming news: more newborns were dying from bleeding, often internal. The suspected cause, however, wasn't birth trauma, Covid, infection, or a tragic uptick in infanticide. Instead, it was due to Vitamin K Deficiency Bleeding (VKDB), formerly haemorrhagic disease of the newborn. Fortunately, it is preventable via an injection of synthetic vitamin K called Phytomenadione (or by its brand name, Konakion). The injection is given soon after birth, or the medication can be administered orally with three staggered doses over three weeks. However parental refusal has been a perennial issue with the vitamin K shot since the 1990s and, for this brief piece, I will do my best to provide an overview of the issue. Rest assured, there is no evidence of an increase in VKDB deaths in New Zealand and, in fact, there may not have been any at all. Still, parental refusal of vitamin K can contribute to declining vaccinations, a trend that was studied a decade ago and is in need of an update.

Aires Tech is the latest in a line of scammy companies, going back to the 1990s, selling products that are claimed to protect you from the dangers of electromagnetism. Previous iterations, like WaveShield, SafeTShield and BluShield, have sold stickers that you apply to your digital devices, pendants that you wear, and totems that you can strategically place around the house. Aires is no different, selling “One” holographic stickers for your mobile phone, “Flex” pendants and “Go” keyrings to carry around with you, and two different types of device to cover your home - the “Zone” and “Zone Max”: