Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

On This Programme

Musical Robots

Seven years ago, Ajay Kapur walked into his professor's office and saw something that changed his life. With an engineering and musical background, he came to the blinding realisation that his two passions could be combined.

Ajay Kapur is not your usual scientist. He is the director of Musical Technology at the California Institute of Arts and also lectures in Sonic Arts at the New Zealand School of Music. His work revolves around one question: "How do you make a computer improvise with a human?".

Using microchips and sensors, he has built robotic instruments which can be programmed to perform along with human musicians.

Ruth Beran went to meet Ajay Kapur and one of his robots, a 12-armed solenoid-based drummer called MahaDeviBot.

Ruth Beran also met with Jordan Hochenbaum (right) and Owen Vallis (left) who are both completing PhDs in Sonic Arts at the University of Victoria, Wellington under the guidance of Ajay Kapur.

Musical Robots - Audio Bonus

In this extended story, they show her one of the digital instruments they have created. (duration: 19′54″)

Cawthron Institute Oyster Hatchery

Olin Pilcher at the new commercial oyster facility; two different families of Pacific oyster; and the algae ponds (images: A. Ballance)

Tucked in behind the Nelson boulder bank, where it can take full advantage of an easy supply of clean seawater from Tasman Bay, and plentiful Nelson sunshine, the Cawthron Institute hatchery has been breeding Pacific oysters for many years. But now the oyster hatchery is going big time, scaling up from research scale to commercial production. By the time they hit full capacity they hope to be producing 50 million healthy baby oysters a year for the aquaculture industry. The Pacific oyster industry currently produces about 45 million oysters a year, and a year-round supply of commercially bred spat could see production rise to about 120 million oysters.

Olin Pilcher takes Alison Ballance on a tour of the hatchery, and introduces her to the process of producing oyster spat. Our Changing World has previously featured the mussel breeding programme at the Cawthron Institute, and their biofuel algae breeding project.

Upweller units for growing oyster spat; gravel-sized oyster spat; Olin Pilcher with oyster spat (images: A. Ballance)

Antarctic Toothfish

It's hard enough at the best of times to study deep sea fish. And when that fish happens to live in Antarctica … well, the job becomes even harder. Luckily for fisheries biologist Stuart Hanchet, from NIWA, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, Antarctic toothfish are part of a quota management fishery, and that fishery has been very co-operative in helping with research that in turn helps determine the sustainability of the industry.

Antarctic toothfish is also known as Antarctic cod, and in 2005 the legal Antarctic toothfish fishery in New Zealand Antarctic waters was worth $20 million. Patagonian toothfish, often marketed as Chilean seabass, is the target of a large illegal fishery.

NIWA is also carrying out ecosystem modelling research on the Ross Sea, and that works includes modelling what effect the toothfish fishery is having on other parts of the ecosystem.

Cancer Vaccine

Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia is the most common leukaemia in New Zealand. Currently, the only treatment is chemotherapy, which is often ineffective, or a bone marrow transplant.

Robert Weinkove is a haematologist working at Wellington Hospital and the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research. He is trying to develop a new therapy which would stimulate the patient's own immune system to fight the leukaemia cells.

Often called a cancer vaccine, Ruth Beran went to meet him in the lab to find out more about this type of immunotherapy.

Next Week

Finding out what astronauts and the elderly have in common, genetically screening plants, the ecology of honeydew, and sampling marine larvae in Antarctica.