Veronika Meduna

Wellington

Science, Environment and Health Editor at The Conversation

Sci/env editor @ConversationEDU | writer @NZGeographic @AGU_Eos | Books about climate change and Antarctica | you can find me on Bluesky

Articles

New Zealand, betting on innovation and economic growth, cuts existing science funds

1 week ago | science.org | Veronika Meduna

New Zealand’s research sector was again left empty-handed in this year’s budget, which largely reallocated existing funding to pay for the center-right government’s plans to boost the economy and entice international investment in science and innovation. Many researchers described the budget as unsurprising, but nevertheless disappointing.
Pacific Rally sailors turn citizen scientists to help save the sea

1 week ago | nzherald.co.nz | Veronika Meduna

Sailor Bill Hay deploys an eDNA kit as part of one of the world's largest-scale ocean surveys. Photo / Supplied This month, a fleet of sailing boats left the Bay of Islands to compete in the Island Cruising Pacific Rally. But 20 yachts will do more than race across the vast ocean passages between island nations.
Vaccine Nation: How anti-vax myths are threatening decades of progress

1 week ago | nzherald.co.nz | Veronika Meduna

Suspicious minds: Elvis Presley gets the polio jab in 1956. Photo / Getty ImagesVaccine Nation couldn’t be more timely. The latest book by internationally acclaimed Australian epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre traces the widespread post-pandemic drop in support for public health measures and vaccination.
Protecting indigenous knowledge

3 weeks ago | plantandfood.com | Veronika Meduna
The reality behind the gene-edited dire wolf

1 month ago | nzherald.co.nz | Veronika Meduna

One of de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences' "dire wolf" pups at three months. Photo / ColossalWhen a snow-white wolf appeared on a recent cover of Time magazine, billed as the resurrection of the fabled and long-extinct dire wolf, the response was swift. Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based US$10 billion (NZ$17.03b) de-extinction company, had succeeded in reconstructing a genome of the dire wolf using ancient DNA from two fossils: a 13,000-year-old tooth and an even older inner ear bone.
Our Changing World: Helping New Zealand’s understated orchids

1 month ago | radionz.co.nz | Veronika Meduna

Follow Our Changing World on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts A tiny population of rare native orchids has received a boost with the first-ever reintroduction of lab-grown seedlings into the wild. Cooper's orchid - New Zealand's rarest and most elusive native orchid species - spends years growing underground, before emerging as a leafless stick with brown flowers.
Our Changing World: Helping New Zealand’s understated orchids

1 month ago | rnz.co.nz | Veronika Meduna

Follow Our Changing World on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts A tiny population of rare native orchids has received a boost with the first-ever reintroduction of lab-grown seedlings into the wild. Cooper's orchid - New Zealand's rarest and most elusive native orchid species - spends years growing underground, before emerging as a leafless stick with brown flowers.
First Global Comparison of Glacier Mass Change: They’re All Melting, and Fast

1 month ago | eos.org | Veronika Meduna

Each year in early March, when summer turns to fall in the Southern Hemisphere, New Zealand glaciologists gather at an airfield in Queenstown to embark on a predawn flight along the spine of the Southern Alps. For hours, they twist in the Cessna’s narrow seats to train cameras on glaciers clinging to mountaintops. The images capture the glaciers’ vanishing contours and the shifting snowline—the demarcation between the remains of the winter snowpack and exposed glacial ice.
NZ’s glaciers shrink and retreat at alarming rate

2 months ago | nzherald.co.nz | Veronika Meduna

Lauren Vargo against an aerial view of Hooker Glacier near Aoraki/Mt Cook. Photos / NIWA / Rebekah Parsons-King; Veronika MedunaNearly a third. That’s the amount of ice lost from New Zealand’s glaciers since 2000. Almost 300. That’s the number of individual glaciers that have vanished forever since we started monitoring them regularly about half a century ago.
Remains of carved canoe may be most significant discovery of its kind, NZ archaeologist says

Mar 4, 2025 | msn.com | Veronika Meduna

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