Nikki Mandow

2 weeks ago | newsroom.co.nz | Nikki Mandow

In 2022, 40 Aucklanders met over five weekends to make a huge decision – how to provide enough drinking water for our biggest city for the next 20 years. These 40 people weren’t engineers or hydrologists, planners, or even environmentalists. They were a bunch of randomly selected non-experts: young and old, different nationalities and from all walks of life. And they were there to learn and deliberate and finally make recommendations – to the experts.

1 month ago | newsroom.co.nz | Nikki Mandow

Back in the 1960s a young Nasa aerospace engineering called Donald Kessler had a worrying idea. Kessler was studying asteroids. He noticed that when these giant space rocks crashed into each other they created a whole heap of smaller rocks, which in turn crashed into each other and created more rocks – a kind of self-perpetuating domino effect. He realised it was just a matter of time before the same thing happened with satellites. Only those collisions could be more disastrous.

1 month ago | newsroom.co.nz | Nikki Mandow

Researchers and artists are discovering amazing things about the power of dance to promote collaboration and social inclusion. And it’s not just about community – there’s incredible stuff going on in your brain tooBack in the early 1990s, Nicholas Rowe was an up-and-coming dancer performing the role of a peasant with the Finnish National Ballet Company. Then one night, on stage, he had an epiphany.

1 month ago | newsroom.co.nz | Nikki Mandow

Professor David McGiffin knows his trade. A top Australian heart-lung researcher and a retired head of cardiothoracic and transplant surgery at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, McGiffin has seen huge advances in his field over a long and distinguished career. But one thing that remains unsolved involves a life-or-death decision surgeons have to make around a particular cohort of patients with a rare, but nasty lung condition: chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension.

2 months ago | newsroom.co.nz | Nikki Mandow

Listen to Ingenious now below, or on Apple or Spotify. If you were born in New Zealand, you probably grew up thinking of milk as a superfood, a view likely promoted by everyone from your mum to the advertising pumped out by New Zealand’s dairy food giants. But if you are a Kiwi of non-Pākehā heritage, you might have noticed something else – drinking milk, particularly a lot of milk, doesn’t make you feel great.