freelance science journalist and author
Science reporting
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 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 Nature, 17 October 2022: In an attempt to achieve gender equity, Australia’s leading health and medical research funding organization plans to award half of its research grants for its largest funding programme to women and non-binary applicants, starting next year. The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) announced the move last week. It … Continue reading ‘Game-changing’ gender quotas introduced by Australian research agency
From Nature, 30 August 2022: The United States Marine Corps could hardly be described as ‘cowards’. Yet that’s exactly the accusation that was levelled at the force last year, when its training facility in San Diego, California, announced on Twitter that it was accepting its first cohort of women — and then immediately switched off … Continue reading Online harassment: a toolkit for protecting yourself from abuse
From The Saturday Paper, 17 December 2022: “I’ve always thought astronaut would be the coolest job in the world.” Dr Meganne Christian looks pretty relaxed for someone who has just achieved that childhood dream. But speaking via Zoom from Paris, barely 48 hours after she was announced as one of the European Space Agency’s new … Continue reading The woman who could represent Australia in space
With Dr Karl Kruszelnicki gallivanting around the wilds of Tasmania, I stepped in to answer Australia’s science questions. And, as always, there was a question about bodily functions; this time, it was about asparagus wee.
From Nature News, 10 March 2022: Researchers in Australia have endorsed a proposal to remove government ministers’ power to veto grant-funding decisions made by expert science committees. They say this veto ability is just one example of Australia’s political overreach in research, and is a threat to academic freedom. Legislators in Australia are considering whether … Continue reading Australian researchers push to end politicians’ power to veto grants
From Nature Middle East, 17 March 2022: A new genome sequencing method has enabled the rapid sequencing of a highly disease-resistant wheat variety, which could guide the breeding of cultivars that have long-lasting immunity to the devastating fungal stripe rust disease.The wheat genome is difficult to sequence because it is around five times larger than … Continue reading Rapid wheat genome sequencing offers hope for disease resistance
From The Scientist, 28 December 2021: When the pandemic struck in the US last year, a group of researchers from the University of Chicago was in the process of analyzing the results of a 2019 survey about the job satisfaction and career plans of more than 6,000 postdocs. “We realized that we needed to do … Continue reading Pandemic amplifies postdoc struggles
From The Scientist, 4 March 2022: Australia’s east coast has been drenched with record-breaking rainfall, causing floods that have submerged major cities including the Queensland state capital Brisbane, killed at least 16 people, and wreaked major devastation across both Queensland and New South Wales. Around 90 centimeters of rain fell in the space of one week on some areas … Continue reading Flooding and storms wreak havoc for Australian scientists
Bianca Nogrady 