freelance science journalist and author
From WIRED, 22 May 2023: Half a century ago, a small group of esteemed thinkers that called itself the Club of Rome got together to chew over a thorny question: What would happen if humanity continued to consume the world’s finite resources as if they were limitless? Their efforts generated the now-famous 1972 paper “The … Continue reading The Planet Can’t Sustain Rapid Growth Much Longer
From the Guardian, 8 April 2023: Dr Kathryn Williams has had patients cry when they go on anti-obesity drugs. “[They] say, ‘oh my God, this is the first time I haven’t felt hungry,’” says Williams, an endocrinologist at the University of Sydney, “because hunger is just something they have to live with every single day.” … Continue reading ‘Hollywood skinny jab’: what do we know about anti-obesity drugs such as Ozempic in Australia?
From the BMJ, 4 May 2023: The importation and sale of all e-cigarettes, regardless of whether they are labelled as containing nicotine or not, will soon be banned in Australia, unless they are supplied by prescription through a licensed pharmacist. The crackdown by the Australian government was announced amid concerns that a growing black market … Continue reading Australia bans all vapes except on prescription to stem use in children
From WIRED UK, 24 April 2023: In the dry, red dust of Western Australia’s vast Pilbara region, something green is growing. In October 2022, construction began on a massive solar photovoltaic and battery installation, around 40 soccer fields in size, that will soon power a 10-megawatt electrolyzer—a machine that uses electricity to convert water into … Continue reading Forget cars, green hydrogen will supercharge crops
From Nature Middle East, 22 March 2023: Deficiency of an enzyme vital for the integrity of the membranes that encase muscle fibres is behind age-related muscle wasting and an inherited genetic disorder that causes severe neurological and muscle problems, researchers have found.In humans, genetic mutations affecting the function of the enzyme phosphatidylethanolamine cytidyltransferase (PCYT2) lead … Continue reading Enzyme loss linked to age related muscle wasting
From Nature Middle East, 6 April 2023: Horses have long held a special place in the culture, spirituality and day-to-day lives of North America’s Indigenous people, such as the Lakota and Comanche of the American southwest and Great Plains.Until recently, horses were thought to have been introduced to North America by European colonisers. Now, an … Continue reading The plain truth about North America’s horse history
From WIRED UK, 23 March 2023: Alaska isn’t supposed to be an inferno—but its summers are now so warm that apocalyptic wildfires are almost inevitable. In June 2022, lightning strikes set the drought-stricken land ablaze, winds whipped up flames, and long curtains of fire soon ripped through previously untouched tundra, pushing plumes of thick smoke … Continue reading Climate freeloaders are destroying the planet
I’ve just listened to the first Longform podcast interview with legendary science journalist Ed Yong, which took place in the first weeks of the pandemic in New York, when the honks and rumbles of ordinary traffic had been replaced by the banshee wails of sirens, and temporary morgues were being set up in New York’s … Continue reading What now?
From Nature, 27 February 2023: The existence of the Higgs boson was first posited in a trio of papers in 1964. Two of those were authored solely by UK theoretical physicist Peter Higgs and the other was co-authored by his US and Belgian counterparts Robert Brout and François Englert. Nearly half a century later, the … Continue reading Hyperauthorship: the publishing challenges for ‘big team’ science
From The Saturday Paper, 18 February 2023: In historical accounts of the 1918 influenza pandemic, references can be found to people experiencing exhaustion, nervous complications, apathy and depression for weeks, even months, after they recovered from infection. And reports of persistent, chronic fatigue-like symptoms have emerged following the major respiratory disease outbreaks of the past … Continue reading Lack of data hinders long Covid response
Bianca Nogrady 