Giving patients more control of their lives

Science in Public on 21 August, 2012

Dr Suetonia Palmer University of Otago, Christchurch, New Zealand Dr Suetonia Palmer is challenging the status quo for kidney disease treatment and helping millions of people with chronic kidney disease take back control of their lives. Working from te…

A clean, safe vaccine booster

Niall on 29 October, 2008

Most vaccines need a ‘magic’ booster or adjuvant to boost our immune response to the vaccine. But the best adjuvants are too toxic for human use.

Now NZ scientists believe they have created a powerful and safe adjuvant and are trialling it as part of a new cancer vaccine.

Counting viruses and mustering molecules

Niall on 29 October, 2008

How many viruses are there in your blood? How many dangerous nano-particles in your car exhaust?

qViro is a revolutionary New Zealand invention that offers the potential to quickly and cheaply answer these questions. It’s a feature of Ausbiotech – the national biotechnology conference – being held in Melbourne today.

The beta version is the size of a coffee grinder and can muster and count the number of viruses in a sample in minutes. This is a truly portable, desktop instrument that is powered from the USB drive of a computer.

Its competitors are the size of washing machines, may take days to get a result, or cost upwards of $50,000.

Put the Lord of the Rings supercomputer on your desktop

Niall on 27 October, 2008

From today, thousands of Australian researchers have access to the power of the computing cluster that created the Lord of the Rings and King Kong.

By using a new service called Green Button, professional scientists and students will get instant access on their desktop to a cluster of 3,000 processors based in Wellington, New Zealand, to perform fast genetic analysis. Read More about Put the Lord of the Rings supercomputer on your desktop