NZ Skeptics Articles

Articles tagged with "researchers"

Paper mills

22 July 2024

In February it was announced by researchers that non-verified cell lines and misidentified nucleotide sequences were cited in hundreds of papers. This got picked up by the media in May:

Life on Mars

24 January 2022

Amidst a global pandemic it's sometimes easy to miss science news. But this one really piqued my interest.

Hormesis, a Controversy

1 August 2019

Growing old is a bummer. At age 70, I am supposed to have gained more wisdom, but I really cannot say I have noticed. But there are certain physical attributes that are definitely not as good as when I was 20. Among them is healing. Once, cuts and abrasions would be gone in a week. No more. Sometimes it takes a month or more. Bummer!

Fighting superbugs with pheromones

1 August 2015

Pheromones. I'll admit that when I hear the word, I immediately think of sex. That's probably because the first pheromone ever discovered, in 1959, was the chemical that female silkworm moths use to attract a mate. Since then, sex pheromones have been identified in many species, from insects to fungi to birds.

What makes a scream alarming?

1 August 2015

Researchers from Switzerland and Germany have just published a paper in which they describe using brain imaging and a cool way of looking at sound, called the modulation power spectrum (MPS) to understand just why screams are so alarming. Rather than looking at the amplitude and frequency of sounds over time, the MPS plots the modulation frequency against the number of cycles per octave, shown as a kind of heat map. On this kind of spectrum, there is a clear zone that gives clues to the gender of the speaker, and another distinct zone that gives information about meaning. But there is also a zone that until now hadn't been associated with any function. In fact, it has been thought to be irrelevant to human communication. This region corresponds to a perception of sound called roughness, which is thought to be unpleasant.

Will new antibiotic Teixobactin save us all?

1 February 2015

Researchers in Germany and the USA have just published a paper in the journal Nature describing a new antibiotic they have called Teixobactin. This study is good news: the World Health Organization warned last year that cancer chemotherapy and routine surgery will soon become life-threateningly risky because of the worldwide rise in antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Newsfront

1 November 2000

Taking a leaf from the UK Skeptic, we're turning our news clippings into a column. Which means I get to read them - never used to before! Many thanks to all those who've sent in material, and please keep it coming.

Roswell Autopsy

1 November 1995

Post-mortem on the autopsy or autopsy on the post-mortem?

German Triptych

1 May 1992

There is something in the German psyche which has a peculiar fascination for the medieval...