freelance science journalist and author
From The Saturday Paper, 18 January 2025: Psychiatrist Prachi Brahmbhatt likens the current state of public mental healthcare in New South Wales to battlefield medicine. “When the clinical leader is so pushed that they don’t have time to stop and think about the decisions that they’re making… while you’re trying to do seven things at … Continue reading The crisis in the NSW mental health system
From The Saturday Paper, 7 December 2024: A soot-smeared man clutches his dog and weeps in relief. A grazier stands defeated before a field strewn with dead cattle. A woman tries desperately to grab a koala picking its way through flaming debris. A fleeing kangaroo is silhouetted against an inferno. In every disaster, some of … Continue reading Planning to protect animals during natural disasters
From the Guardian, 8 December 2024: My vegetable garden is a jungle. The grass is waist-high, the weeds have consumed my gardening tools and representatives from all classes of the animal kingdom – possibly also a jabberwocky – are enjoying a comfortable existence in there, eating my salad greens and each other. Letting things go … Continue reading ‘Let things go feral’: how to do carbon-positive gardening in your own back yard
From the BMJ, 5 December 2024: Children and young people aged under 16 will be banned from a range of social media platforms in Australia within a year, after the federal parliament passed a law to “deliver greater protections for young Australians during critical stages of their development.” The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum … Continue reading Australia bans under-16s from social media “to protect their development”
From The Saturday Paper, 2 November 2024: In 2018, the Australian government conducted a simulated pandemic stress test of how well federal departments on the frontline of a major health crisis would cope. It found they would perform well enough for shorter or “ordinary” crises but were not equipped for a significant, near-existential crisis dragging … Continue reading Covid-19 inquiry finds key failings in pandemic response
One of the great privileges of being a science journalist is getting to talk to fascinating, passionate, engaged, brilliant scientists. So when the State Library of New South Wales, Australia asked if I was interested in being the interviewer for an oral history project they were interested in establishing, focusing on women in STEM in … Continue reading Women in STEM NSW oral history project
From the Guardian, 27 August 2024: I call it “the hill of death”: a steep uphill section of dirt road towards the end of an otherwise pleasant and not-too-taxing walk in the scenic Blue Mountains. It’s challenging enough to get up it walking forwards but my friend and I both feel pretty cocky about our … Continue reading Be kind, rewind: is backwards walking any better than walking forwards?
From Nature, 25 September 2024: “Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny.” With those words, Kristin Scott Thomas’s character in the TV show Fleabag nailed a truth: that to be female is to be over-represented in statistics about pain. A study of more than 27,000 people in 19 European countries found … Continue reading How pain is misunderstood and ignored in women
From The Saturday Paper, 24 August 2024: In September 2020, the United Kingdom government commissioned the British Academy – the national academy for the humanities and social sciences – to explore the long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. What they got in March 2021 was a report titled “The Covid Decade”. Even then, in the … Continue reading Dispatch from the long Covid frontline
From ABC Science, 7 August 2024: A 700,000-year-old fragment of arm bone has shed light on the origins of the early human species known as the “hobbit”. The tiny piece of bone is from an early hobbit (Homo floresiensis) individual, which researchers estimate was just 100 centimetres tall. This was 6cm smaller than its descendants, … Continue reading Smallest adult human arm bone fossil so far discovered points to origins of ‘hobbit’
Bianca Nogrady 