Our Changing World
Starts at 9:06 pm on Thursday, 2 August 2012
During Nights with Bryan Crump
Children spend the second largest proportion of their time at school, but most New Zealand classrooms have inadequate ventilation, relying mostly on open windows. Mikael Boulic, at Massey University, explains to Veronika Meduna that he hopes to change that when he tests a low-cost ventilation system this winter to see if it turns classrooms into healthier places.
The Bay of Plenty’s Mark Dean was awarded the 2011 Loder Cup, for his contributions to the conservation of native plants, and Alison Ballance catches up with Mark and fellow trustee Harley Spence, at Lyall Bay in Wellington, to hear about their work with the Dune Restoration Trust.
When David Pattemore, who now works in pollination research at Plant and Food Research, was carrying out his PhD he made the remarkable discovery that native short-tailed bats are important and successful pollinators of native trees, including pohutukawa, as he tells Alison Ballance.
Ruth Beran finds out how Robert Keyzers from Victoria University is developing a better method to measure thiols, the sulphur-containing molecules that give sauvignon blanc its gooseberry, tropical and passionfruit aromas at low concentrations, and unpleasant cat pee aroma at higher concentrations.
