Look at the centre of the image above. Now slightly to the right. That’s a New Zealand jumping spider—one of a whole new genus discovered by Lincoln University master’s student Robin Long. Her ...

Richard Robinson and Bill Morris threw themselves into reporting their cover story on eels: icy streams, extreme slime, gear that still smells of smoked eel. The big lesson? “Never wear rings while ...

The Geology Museum at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka—University of Otago smells of old wood and older rocks. The walls are lined with geological maps and paintings of extinct creatures—giant penguins, strange ...

Dangerous fungal spores can survive stratospheric travel, Swiss scientists have found—which may explain how devastating fungal diseases such as myrtle rust skip between continents. The stratosphere ...

Soot. Charred coconut. Water. Turtle bone, sharpened into teeth and tied to a stick. These, as far as we can tell, were the Tokelauan tools of tā tatau, the sacred art of tattooing. Women were marked ...

In 2023, a team of University of Auckland researchers organised workshops across Northland and Auckland—19 of them, involving a demographically diverse group of 176 people, aged from 16 to 25. The ...

In New Zealand’s national parks and remote areas, conservation managers cull feral cats to save many bird, reptile and invertebrate lives. That’s not possible in urban nature reserves, where there’s a ...

Willows can stop a river flooding a farm. Or they can turn a river dark and mean. Trying to control them, we’re realising, has always been a fool’s game. But we can’t stop now.

ChatGPT can certainly spit out an essay in time for a deadline—but, reassuringly for those of us who write for a living, the results lack a crucial human quality. Researchers at the University of East ...

For years Ebony Lamb has been the go-to portrait photographer for Wellington artists—writers in particular, notoriously hard to shoot well. A standout is Elizabeth Knox in garden-witch mode: apron, ...

Picture a map of New Zealand. Now delete the land. What you’re left with is a vascular system pumping fresh water: swampy hearts, lakes, rivers, thousands of trickling capillaries. This is the ...

It was dark, loud and wet. You could be blown up, run over, or drowned. Or you could succumb to drunken misadventure. Some people took one look at the place and quit on the spot. Others stuck it out ...