The Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall highlights the importance of investing in science to boost Aotearoa New Zealand’s economic advantage. IRANZ strongly endorses this. Budget 2023 positions the New Zealand economy for a low-emissions, high-wage future with a major investment into our science, digital, and horticultural technology sectors. It includes provision for:

• Three new multi-institution hubs to increase collaboration in research and science;

• Major investment in science and scientists; and

• Fellowships and funding to develop more than 260 future science leaders.

IRANZ commends this investment in the Future Growth of Research Science and Innovation in the budget.

In particular, we support the new Science and Innovation hubs. When they are established, we expect them to include investment in Māori research infrastructure and support Mātauranga-led research.

The Wellington-based hub focused on health and pandemic readiness already involves IRANZ member the Malaghan Institute, in addition the Gillies McIndoe Research Institute and the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand are also centrally located in the Newtown - Te Aro - Kelburn Health Research Corridor.

Independent Research Organisations involved in Environmental and Infrastructure such as Cawthron, BRANZ, Te Tira Whakamātaki, WSP Research and Innovation, and Mackie Research look forward to participating in the Climate Change and Disaster Resilience Centre.

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• Interns get chance to shine at Lincoln Agritech
• Scarlatti: Internships a win-win for interns and business
• NZBRI: Grant to investigate Parkinson's hallucinations
• $715k donation to Mātai as QET winds up
• Verum Group’s William Porter on NZOHS council
• HERA’s new 2023 Whanake Scholarship recipient: Brock Colson
• Aqualinc: Future Focused Freshwater Accounting
• Bragato Research: Hearing from New Zealand’s winemakers
• Gillies McIndoe Research Institute: New chapter

Follow the link for more details on the June 2023 news briefs from our Independent Research Organisations.

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A recent Guardian article by Tess McClure examines research by Mātai tracing signs of healing in the brains of a group of former addicts.

"Every few months, Cohen “Coey” Irwin lies on his back and lets the walls close in. Lights move overhead, scanning over the tattoos covering his cheeks. He lies suspended, his head encased by a padded helmet, ears blocked, as his body is shunted into a tunnel. The noise begins: a rhythmic crashing, loud as a jackhammer. For the next hour, an enormous magnet will produce finely detailed images of Irwin’s brain. Irwin has spent much of his adult life addicted to smoking methamphetamine – or P, as the drug is known in New Zealand.

"He knows its effects intimately: the euphoria, the paranoia, the explosive violence, the energy, the tics that run through his neck and lips."

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A ground-breaking study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, conducted by researchers from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Germany, has raised a challenging question — In the event of severe injury, would individuals want to receive a treatment which reduced their probability of dying but also increased their risk of surviving severely disabled?

The Pre-hospital Antifibrinolytics for Traumatic Coagulopathy and Haemorrhage (PATCH-Trauma) Study focused on the use of tranexamic acid (TXA), a readily available drug known for its ability to limit bleeding during surgery. The research examined TXA's effectiveness as a pre-emptive measure for patients at risk of life-threatening bleeding following trauma, an area of ongoing controversy.

The PATCH-Trauma Study, coordinated in New Zealand by the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand (MRINZ), is a large trial in which treatment was administered at the scene of an accident or injury, or in an ambulance. Over the course of eight years, 1310 severely injured patients received treatment from 15 ambulance services and 21 trauma centres across New Zealand, Australia, and Germany.

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Motu, along with Victoria University of Wellington, recently published research analysing the types of people who benefit most from freedom of speech. The research found people with more resources place greater priority on freedom of speech. However, people with fewer resources (i.e., lower incomes or education levels) benefit most from free speech. The results support the hypothesis that free speech empowers those with fewer resources than those with greater resources.

The researchers write that the two results are not incompatible: people with fewer resources may need to prioritise basic needs more than ‘luxuries’ such as free speech but, being in marginalised populations, they may still benefit most from having freedom of expression.

The researchers conclude that even though survey evidence for stated preferences indicates that free speech is a luxury good, regimes which increase freedom of speech (on average) simultaneously raise the subjective wellbeing of more marginalised members of society relative to those with greater resources.

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Slowed down by roadworks, most drivers’ first thought is ‘how annoying’. Rarely, if ever, will they stop to consider the safety of workers holding the Stop / Go sign or placing orange road cones. But they should, because new research from WSP has revealed a concerning number of speeding, near miss, and abuse incidents at roadworks sites.

Carried out as part of a project for Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency, a WSP research team surveyed 316 temporary traffic management (TTM) workers about their experiences on site.

It’s no secret that working on or near roads is a high-risk activity. Safe flow of traffic through roadworks involves measures like signage, barriers, and reduced speed limits. At times, those on the frontline are exposed to the risk of passing traffic.

Over half of survey respondents experienced aggression or abuse from drivers. And the consensus view from TTM workers is that drivers aren’t following temporary speed limits.

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Ever wonder exactly how the environment in Central Otago makes Pinot Noir taste different to that grown in Martinborough, even though the vines are the same before they’re planted? If all cells in a plant have the same DNA, how do some form leaves, some roots, and others berries? A big part of the answer is ‘epigenetics’: signals from within the plant, and from the environment, change which of the tens of thousands of genes in a cell are turned on at any time.

"Tuned Vines" is a two-year research project run by Bragato Research Institute’s Grapevine Improvement team. The project aims to demonstrate ways to manage grapevines by turning specific genes ‘on or off’.

The potential outcomes from this project could help vineyards adapt to the changing climate. Some of the hypothetical ways that this knowledge could be used include, priming grapevines to increase their hardiness ahead of a drought, or delaying sugar ripening of the grapes if temperatures were sweltering.

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HERA reports that it has received $150K funding from BRANZ, funded by the building research levy, to support the $772K project titled “Circular design for a changing environment: a design framework to reduce construction waste, lifecycle embodied carbon, and to enhance the circular economy for construction materials, with a pilot for low-rise buildings”.

HERA reports that there is significant confusion in the market about the embodied carbon at the different stages of a building’s life. "Carbon calculators are emerging prolifically, but they only tell a one-dimensional story about CO₂ equivalent emissions per mass of particular products, with a focus on either the Cradle to Gate or Cradle to Practical Completion

This is in spite of MBIE’s commitments to consider and target opportunities to realise the whole of life carbon reductions and announcements that relate to the Building Act being modified for better reporting. By having a better understanding of the source and contribution of the embodied carbon from each Module and consideration of how design influences choice of material and vice-versa, it may be possible to design a truly carbon efficient sustainable building.

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BRANZ Principal Social Scientist Casimir Macgregor writes about the first National Adaptation Plan (NAP) in the latest edition of build magazine. The plan sets a path forward as to how to develop resilience to climate change, but he says it could be more inclusive of the construction industry and consider the impact of climate change on human behaviour.

New Zealand has recently experienced the impact of a changing climate with the devastation caused by Cyclone Gabrielle and the associated flooding and storm damage in Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne, Coromandel Peninsula and Auckland.

"The IPCC’s 2023 report highlighted that rising greenhouse gas emissions due to human actions have created a rise in global surface temperature that was 1.09°C [0.95°–1.20°C] higher in 2011–2020 than 1850–1900.

"While changing the way we do things to emit less greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming is a critical step, we must also accept that there are uncertainties that come from our changing climate that must be addressed."

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In the May issue of Canterbury Farming Newspaper, Aqualinc's Director Dr John Bright explains "it's time to talk about water storage development."

The variability of water supply from week to week, month to month, and year to year means that many parts of New Zealand have a mismatch between supply and demand in most summer months.

For most parts of Canterbury this hasn't been an issue for the past two irrigation seasons, but we know well from past drought years that it will be a challenge we will face in the future. Climate change projections show the challenge becoming even greater due to increasing water demand, lower river flows in summer months, and increasing month-to-month variability.

Strategic water studies over the past 20 years consistently show that water storage is a key strategy to address this water supply reliability problem. Improvements in irrigation efficiency, alone, will not solve it.

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Dragonfly Data Science's work with the Social Wellbeing Agency produced an interactive map of cyclone impacts overlaid with infrastructure and demographic data.

The map demonstrates the crucial role that data has played in identifying the land and community characteristics of areas impacted by adverse weather in early 2023. It’s the first time these two approaches have been combined for New Zealand. The map is also supporting planning for the response and recovery.

Aphra Green, Deputy Chief Executive, Policy, Data and Insights of the Social Wellbeing Agency (SWA) Toi Hau Tāngata says the agency had built a demographic explorer with community information, but being able to combine this with geospatial data was a big advantage.

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Aqualinc Hydrologist Dr Helen Rutter writes about the rules for small drinking water suppliers in the June issue of Canterbury Farming Newspaper.

"If you own or operate a water supply that is being used as drinking water by people outside your home (for example, a farm property with multiple dwellings supplied by a single source), you are a drinking water supplier and will have responsibilities to meet the Drinking Water Quality Assurance rules.

"These create new responsibilities for huge numbers of small suppliers who have previously not had any formal rules to follow.

"The new regulations have caused a great deal of concern for many people who are, understandably, worried about responsibilities and costs. Whilst there are definitely new responsibilities, complying with the new regulations is actually going to be simpler than many people realise.

"The new drinking water regulator, Taumata Arowai, has worked with many water users and suppliers, as well as with industry bodies such as Irrigation New Zealand, to come up with solutions for small suppliers that are practical to implement."

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As passengers on the Kāpiti rail line north of Wellington admire the view from their carriages, they may not be aware that the line's steep coastal cliffs are now under constant real-time monitoring for potential slips - no matter the weather.

Instrumentation experts from design and engineering firm WSP have worked with KiwiRail over the past eighteen months to install a network of geotechnical sensors. It’s all to help the notoriously slip-prone stretch of line run as smoothly and effectively as possible.

Twenty sites have been equipped with monitoring equipment along a 25-kilometre-long section of the North Island Main Trunk between Paekākāriki and Plimmerton. The system combines slope movement and debris sensors, rain gauges, soil moisture metres, and night vision cameras. It monitors ‘over-slips’, where debris from above can fall onto the track, and ‘under-slips’, which can occur below the track.

The sensors have all been set with an alert threshold. If triggered by slope or debris movement, a notification is sent to KiwiRail field engineers, train controllers, and WSP.

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New Zealand has 26,559 hectares of Sauvignon Blanc vines, and the way grapes are propagated renders the vast majority of these vines genetically the same - potentially any new pest, disease, or environmental change that affects one vine could affect them all.

Bragato Research Institute and its partners, Lincoln University and Plant & Food Research, have begun a seven-year research programme to produce diverse variants of Sauvignon Blanc to help New Zealand’s $2 billion wine industry become more resilient.

This growing season, the programme has produced 6,000 new variants.

“Plants have the natural ability to become more genetically diverse in response to environmental stress, and this knowledge was used to produce a population of vines with unique traits,” says Principal Scientist Dr Darrell Lizamore. “Since this doesn’t involve crossings with other vines, the plants are still Sauvignon Blanc, and the new variants are fully formed at the first generation.”

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Motu's Arthur Grimes appeared on a recent CNBC documentary on the origins of a 2% inflation target. If you're curious about the current economic landscape and want to stay informed, this is a must-watch.

The 2% inflation target is key to the Federal Reserve’s vision for stable prices. But, where exactly did this 2% inflation goal originate? Aotearoa New Zealand. In the late 1980s, the country faced high inflation when one economist proposed, ’Why don’t we just have an inflation target?”

U.S. declared its 2% inflation target in 2012. According to the International Monetary Fund, Canada, Australia, Japan and Israel are among the many economies that include 2% in their inflation rate targets.

In the documentary, some economists argue for changing the target, lower or higher, and predict whether it may change anytime soon.

Inflation, the rising cost of goods and services over time, is a topic that affects us all. It influences our purchasing power, savings, and even investment decisions.

WATCH HERE →

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer for men in Aotearoa and Tairāwhiti has adopted a global best-practice method to perform prostate biopsies.

A prostate biopsy is a procedure to remove samples of suspicious tissue from a man’s prostate. The tissue is then looked at under a microscope to check for cancer.

Through a new clinical partnership between Te Whatu Ora and Mātai Medical Research Institute, since November last year more than 21 Tairāwhiti men have had MRI-guided, transperineal, prostate biopsies under local anaesthesia in an outpatient setting.

Dr Daniel Cornfeld, head of radiology at Te Whatu Ora in Tairāwhiti and Mātai Clinical Lead, said Tairāwhiti was the first site in Australasia to use this specific Koelis Trinity system technology to perform the procedure in an outpatient environment.

“The new technology will provide an equitable service which will uplift prostate outcomes for our local men, especially Māori and men living rurally,” Dr Cornfeld said.

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Dr Bibek Yumnam is a Senior Research Officer working in Professor Graham Le Gros’ lab investigating the interplay between parasites and our immune system. He uses his background in conservation of endangered species to offer unique insights into parasites and what they represent to our global ecosystem and health.

The basis of Malaghan's hookworm therapy programme is the concept that having hookworms in our body may dampen down overactive immune responses typical of allergic and inflammatory diseases. Specifically, Bibek is working on the Malaghan’s hookworm clinical study to develop the methodology to produce therapeutic hookworms in a safe and standardised way.

“To really understand why we are doing this research we have to look into the life cycle of hookworms in the natural, pre-industrialised world,” says Bibek. “Their life cycle is inextricably intertwined with us humans.”

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