15 March 2021
Rebecca Booth, from Fairlie in the South Island, recently found a seven leaf clover. The Stuff article about this find mentioned that this is not the first clover-related find Rebecca has had. Apparently earlier this year, in January, she found both four and five leaf clovers.
1 November 2018
New Zealand has a nuclear free policy. In relation to weapons, I totally agree with that. A nuclear bomb is an obscene and horrible device and the sooner the world can see its way to eliminating all of them, the better. But what of nuclear energy? Should that share the same horror? Lots of people think it does, but why?
1 February 2014
Alison Campbell learns some interesting facts about water chemistry
1 May 2012
Pictures don't lie, right? Of course they do. And they were deceiving us long before Photoshop made the manipulation of images almost child's play.
1 November 2010
Alison Campbell finds some claims about raw foods hard to swallow.
1 November 2001
Scientific studies suggest "organic" foods are neither healthier nor safer than genetically modified products or those grown conventionally.
1 February 2000
The Swedish chemist Berzelius coined the term "organic" for substances that could only be made by living organisms and not synthesised by humans. His German friend Wöhler synthesised urea in 1828 proving Berzelius wrong: there was no such distinction. Another brilliant German chemist, Liebig, then used "organic" to mean carbon-compound chemistry, extending this to include the chemistry of living organisms and so beginning biochemistry.