Research lab
New Zealand's oldest university, based in Dunedin, with broad research activity spanning health sciences, biology, environmental science, and social sciences.
Otago-led researchers found five themes in how Indigenous peoples define health across Aotearoa, Australia, Canada and the US. Lead author Laura Gemmell-Sinnott says the WHO's definition of health, unchanged in 80 years, does not reflect them.
Reality
Otago researchers found children in New Zealand's Healthy Homes Initiative were 30% less likely to be hospitalised within five years. That supports public spending on home heating and insulation, though how much of the drop the repairs caused rests on modelling.
Reality
Antarctica's ozone hole reached 27.4 million square kilometres in September, a size topped only in 2000 and 2015. Its forecasters blame a cold, strong polar vortex, so the size says little about the Montreal Protocol until the weather's share is measured.
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Otago-led surveys of 583 people in Auckland and Boston link Māori and Black Americans' lower police trust to doubts that police care or share their values. That gives police in both cities a common target, found by association in surveys that tested no intervention.
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University of Otago researchers built a CRISPR method that disrupts genes across whole phage genomes to tell the essential from the dispensable. Reported in Nature Microbiology, the same transposon can also carry new genes in, so it maps function and engineers it in one step.
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Researchers at Otago, UBC and Brown report 673 earwig genes and 2,672 worm genes growing more active as a parasitic worm drives its host toward water. The RNA data give experimenters candidate genes in both species, though the paper stops short of showing which ones make the earwig seek water.
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A University of Otago team screened rivers, tap, bottled, tank and rainwater with a bioassay for the combined effect of estrogenic chemicals. Some samples showed strong activity and three showed none at all.
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