Boiling water and the stench of sulphur hardly seem a combination conducive to life, yet some bacteria thrive in such hostile environments. Biologists are beginning to think that the first life forms ...

Carrying a red hold-all, 22-year-old Neil Roberts strode through the darkness towards the doors of Wairere House in Wanganui—home of the ‘Wanganui Computer’. It was some 25 minutes past midnight on ...

Gardeners with a keen sense of history can now forge a botanical link with a plant which hasn’t been seen on these shores for millions of years. A species of Ecuadorian coconut has been success­fully ...

In the late 19th century, news of a strange antipodean bird with beautiful tail feathers, orange wattles, and a long curved beak spread around the British Empire. To Māori, it was a tapu bird—a sacred ...

On the edge of the Pacific Asia rim, south east of Australia, lies the nation of New Zealand. A small isolated country of great natural beauty, New Zealand is famed for its wide variety of spectacular ...

Sometime in the mid-1950s a young boy asked “Would you like to come for a ride in my boat?”, and the world has been saying yes ever since. The jet boat’s unrivalled performance in the shallowest of ...

This summer will be remembered by many for the large numbers of stinging bluebottles (Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish) that appeared in the surf and on the shores of many New Zealand beaches. At the ...

In the South Island’s remote subalpine regions, a highly terrestrial songbird—one of two surviving species of New Zealand wren—has hopped, chirped and flown in the face of extinction. There are four ...

On Monday 26 February, 1844, solicitor Hugh Ross stood in Wellington’s Sydney St gully, near a brick kiln, facing fellow lawyer William Brewer. Both gripped loaded pistols. They were there to put an ...

As I look out on the contours of Makara peak from my home in Karori, at the western edge of Wellington, the springtime bloom is gathering weight and colour. The blustery winds of the equinox create a ...

I couldn’t find Tony Watkins’ place at first. You’d think an architect’s house would draw attention to itself, advertising the fact that “Here lives a professional”. Not so with Watkins, 75, architect ...

I can’t fully recall how the affair started, it was so long ago. I was in Pat Bergquist’s invertebrate zoology class, at the University of Auckland, in 1975. She was talking about sponges. Bergquist ...