Articles from ‘elocal magazine’

While specific traditions vary, nearly every country observes a day to honor mothers. · Millions of NZ families honor their mothers every year with cards, flowers, special meals and other gifts on the second Sunday in May thanks to the work of Anna Jarvis, the founder of this country’s Mother’s Day. A single woman without children, Jarvis relentlessly lobbied for the holiday in honor of her own mother’s death, which took place on the second…

Short-term exposure to high levels of air pollution kills more than one million people every year. And while Asia and Africa are particularly at-risk, Australia isn't immune to the danger. · With climate change making smog and bushfires more common, it's likely more people will die from air pollution in coming years — especially in densely populated cities. · Those are some of the key findings from  recent research, published in Lancet…

Economics has good news for workers fearing joblessness due to the rise of AI - only labour consumes, and the value of consuming populations is growing. · The question is one of increasing urgency: What will workers do when technology does most of the work? · In April, tech titans Google, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and SAP, employment website Indeed, along with professional services major Accenture, among others, formed a consortium to explore the…

Timing physical activity to optimise health outcomes could be a powerful tool against obesity, so is it a new frontier or a passing fad? · It's a perennial dilemma for exercisers: Is it better to hit the gym at first light or wait until the evening? · Obviously it's important we engage in some form of physical activity to ensure we give our bodies the best opportunity to fight disease and live a full and healthy life. · However, it is not just…

If we criminalise, dismiss, or sideline journalism that tells inconvenient truths, we will destroy our capacity for sensible public debate. · As I write, the grim count of journalists killed in Gaza since last October has reached 97. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) puts the number slightly higher at 108. · In the first 50 days of the conflict, journalists were being killed at a rate of roughly one per day, making Gaza indisputably the most…

For over three centuries, a Spanish galleon known as the “holy grail” of shipwrecks for its cache of spectacular treasure rested untraced at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. Then in 2014, the Colombian government announced it had found the San José under roughly 2,000 feet of water with assistance from British experts and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). By March 2024, the government announced a plan to begin lifting the…

I’m a hostile spy from, ohhh, let’s say China. No, Israel. Or Russia. Whatever: the most important thing is that I’m a spy. · I’m wanting to know where all of New Zealand’s defences are located, who is manning them, when these defences are most vulnerable, and how many soldiers and weapons New Zealand has. I could do a Google search, comb through Wikileaks, or look for an informant, a leak, a modern-day Bill Sutch… · Actually, there’s no…

In June 1914, when a rebellious student shot a member of the Austrian royal family on the other side of the world, most people in New Zealand would barely have heard of Serbia, the scene of the assassination. · Even less would New Zealanders have imagined that within weeks their young men would be volunteering in droves to lay down their lives for king and country as a result of this act. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the…

Construction is the world’s largest industry, employing seven percent of the planet's working-age adults, contributing 13 percent of the world’s GDP and completing floor space equivalent to the city of Paris every seven days. · The construction industry is also the most inefficient, least digitised and most polluting industry (37% of ALL emissions), so change is imperative from macro economic necessity alone. For the builders of the world faced…

Over the first half of the 20th century the world saw growing rates of heart disease mortality. From the 1920s to the 1960s more and more people were dying from heart attacks. It was described as an epidemic of heart disease. But in the mid-1960s heart disease mortality suddenly plateaued. · In the United States, for example, around 35% of overall deaths could be attributed to cardiac causes in 1966. From that point on heart attack mortality…