
Redmer Yska meets polar adventurer and scientist Grant Redvers.

While most of us were on holiday, a team of Massey University education researchers ran an ambitious project aimed at halting the ‘summer slide’ usually suffered by struggling readers. Promising early results suggest they’ve made an important breakthrough. Bevan Rapson writes.

A digital microscope imaging, identification and pollen counting system going under the name of the Classifynder is going to spare scientists having to tally pollen grains by hand. Katherine Holt, who spent four years of her life investigating past patterns of vegetation on the Chatham Island, won’t miss this particular chore.

Tired of spending too much time in front of the television? Fancy developing your own cult? Heather Kavan, who has published a number of research papers about religions and cults, has some useful tips. She talks to Redmer Yska.

It’s fair to say nurse Andrew Cameron relishes a challenge, whether it’s confounding the gender stereotypes of his profession or working with victims of war and addiction. The Florence Nightingale Medal winner talks to Andrea O’Neil.

A pair of Longburn freezing workers’ singlets at the Te Manawa museum helped reawaken historian Kerry Taylor’s interest in labour history. He now plans to tell the story of the radical meatworks that employed Manawatu people for nearly a century. Redmer Yska reports.

Photographs from Torbay tī Kōuka: A New Zealand Tree in the English Riviera by Wayne Barrar