Exclusive: Campaigners raise alarm as regulations allowing lab-altered crops in supermarkets from next year contain no limit on genetic modifications and 'weak' safeguards
Science
The Opposition’s shadow minister for home affairs, Barnaby Joyce, has told colleagues that he will defy the Coalition and seek to introduce a private member’s bill that will repeal the net zero bonk ban. ”Australians have had a gutful of... Read More ›
Unemployed, I spent a week in April digging a small pond in our back yard. At the time, it was a distraction. Now it is… actually, a different sort of distraction. Because although it’s not a very big pond — about 3 meters by 2, maximum depth about 70 cm — it has very quickly […]
So a few days ago I posted about newts, and I mentioned that there was an American newt that was ridiculously toxic. But then (I said) there wasn’t space or time to go into why. And of course I was immediately bombarded by many* comments and e-mails asking why. *three Well, fine. The world’s most toxic […]
And then the light of an older heaven was in my eyesand when my vision cleared, I saw Titans. — Alan Moore Today’s Occasional Paper comes to us from the James Webb Space Telescope. So let’s start with some basics: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So when a telescope looks out […]
The blue-ringed octopus! An elegant little creature, native to the southwest Pacific, particularly the waters around Australia. Pretty to look at… but mostly famous for being very, very venomous. The blue-ring’s bite is deadly. A single sharp nip can kill an adult human in minutes. But why? The blue-ring is a modest little creature that […]
For those of us who would like to see a revival of the ‘techno-critical’ tradition in public debate (the tradition of Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman and Langdon Winner, inter many alia), it is a cause of some irritation that the hegemonic view of technology remains the ‘instrumental’ one.
In Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool (2023), author James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) is holidaying with his partner Em (Cleopatra Coleman) on the island of Li Tolqa, when he hits and kills a local man while driving back to his resort at night. The next day he is arrested by the authorities and told that the penalty... Continue Reading →
The warming has led to an increase in the frequency of extreme heat events [in southern Australia] … In contrast, northern Australia has been wetter than average over the last 30 years.
There is a concerted global effort to undermine the very concept of evidence-based policy and scientific progress, argues Kit Yates