NZ Budget 2025: anything less than a 5% increase in health funding amounts to merely standing still

| Insights & Views

Health Minister Simeon Brown. Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images Minister of Health Simeon Brown claimed earlier this year that health funding in New Zealand has never been higher and that suggestions of underfunding are fake...

Fish driving cars and chimps doing maths: what teaching animals ‘irrelevant’ skills reveals about our own minds

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VixtorPhoto / Shutterstock Did you know goldfish can learn to drive cars? Have you heard bumblebees can learn to pull on a string? Would you believe some primates can perform calculations with Arabic numerals? These tasks...

Junk food is addictive. Drugs like Ozempic treat addiction. But when will we tackle Big Food like we did Big Tobacco?

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Polina Tankilevitch/Pexels Since Ozempic hit the public consciousness as a weight-loss medication, one in eight Americans have tried it (or a version of it) to lose weight. This is remarkable: less than five years ago,...

From the Liver King to ultramarathons, fitness influencers are glorifying extreme masculinity where ‘pain is the point’

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Netflix/Untold: The Liver King A new Netflix documentary about a shirtless supplement salesman who claimed to be natural and was exposed as a fraud might seem like a punchline. But Untold: The Liver King is more than just...

‘No pain, no gain’: why some primary students are following intense study routines

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MNStudio/ Shutterstock Every year, thousands of New South Wales students sit a test to determine places for highly sought-after selective high schools. These are academically selective public schools often associated with...

Surviving swamps on South Australia’s parched Fleurieu Peninsula are a lifeline to wildlife – and farmers

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Yundi Nature Conservancy, CC BY-NC-ND South Australia is famously the driest state on the driest inhabited continent. But even for South Australia, the current drought is extreme. Rainfall has been the lowest on record...

The federal government wants to boost productivity. Science can help

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Daniel Sone/National Cancer Institute In the wake of Labors resounding victory in Australias federal election earlier this month, there has been much talk about flailing productivity in Australia. In fact, last week, Prime...