freelance science journalist and author
From The Griffith Review, 3 May 2021: ‘IT’S MY HORMONES, doc. It’s my hormones, and no one’s listened to that.’ It was the late 1980s, in what was once Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital in inner-city Melbourne. A brash young registrar doing her training in psychiatry had arrived at her first hospital placement, full of ideas … Continue reading The chemical question
From The Medical Republic, 8 April 2020: “I’m one of those public health people who love silver bullets.” As editor-in-chief of BMJ Global Health, and a health systems expert at the University of Sydney, Dr Seye Abimbola is well acquainted with the damage that SARS-CoV-2 has wrought around the world. So he’s understandably excited about … Continue reading So we have vaccines. What happens now?
I was delighted to be invited on the Book Talk Today podcast, to talk with Aun Abdi about climate change, how we can get to carbon zero, and my new book with Wired UK and Penguin Random House UK.
From The Scientist, 1 October 2019: As droughts go, the one plaguing the antidepressant drug development landscape for the past few decades has been noteworthy. Since the advent of serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors in the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a dearth of new pharmacological therapies for mood disorders, says psychiatrist Samantha Meltzer-Brody, … Continue reading Antidepressant Approvals Could Herald New Era in Psychiatric Drugs
From The Guardian, 13 February 2021: La Niña has been good to the backyards and farmlands of much of eastern Australia. Cooler, wetter conditions have led to a flourishing of lush grass, trees and – unfortunately – weeds. With so many more people working from home, the joy of gazing out of the home office … Continue reading Unstoppable eating machines: why Australian farmers are renting out goats for weed control
From MIT Technology Review, 8 February 2021: While much of the world is engaged in a frantic scramble to get vaccinated against covid-19, there’s one group noticeably absent from the queues of people at vaccine clinics: children. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is still approved for use only in those aged 16 years or older, and the … Continue reading Why aren’t kids getting vaccinated?
From Nature News, 10 December 2020 Young children account for only a small percentage of COVID-19 infections — a trend that has puzzled scientists. Now, a growing body of evidence suggests why: kids’ immune systems seem better equipped to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 than are adults’. “Children are very much adapted to respond — and very well … Continue reading How kids’ immune systems can evade COVID
From Nature Outlook, 2 December 2020 *: Peter Moore woke up in the middle of the night with his throat so tight he struggled to breathe, his torso covered with huge red welts, and no idea why. Earlier that evening in June 2001, Moore — then a 25-year-old teacher living in a coastal suburb of … Continue reading Cracking the meat-allergy mystery with the tick-bite link
From The Medical Republic, 30 November 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic has so far claimed more than 1.3 million lives, and those are just the deaths we know about. Like the proverbial iceberg, the true scale of pandemic-related mortality is still hidden below the surface. It’s the elderly woman who died of a heart attack because … Continue reading How many people have died from COVID-19?
From Nature News, 18 November 2020: How many people don’t experience any symptoms after becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2? And what is their role in spreading COVID-19? These have been key questions since the beginning of the pandemic. Now, evidence suggests that about one in five infected people will experience no symptoms, and they will transmit … Continue reading What the data say about asymptomatic COVID infections
