Month: May 2025

Building material made from recycled plastic waste. Rene Notenbomer/Shutterstock The construction industry accounts for approximately 37% of global CO₂ emissions. Traditional materials like cement, steel, and bricks contribute over 70% of its footprint, with cement production making up an especially large share. To confront this problem, researchers are developing all manner of innovative construction materials and mechanisms, ranging from walls that produce solar energy to self-repairing bacteria-based concrete. These smart materials, seemingly the stuff of science fiction, are fast becoming … Continue reading “From prototype to construction site: how innovative smart materials make it out of the lab and into our cities”

Shutterstock/Olivier Le Queinec A lack of strategy and research funding – by both the current and previous governments – has been well documented, most comprehensively in the first report by the Science System Advisory Group (SSAG), released late last year. If there is one word that sums up the current state of New Zealand’s research sector, it is scarcity. As the report summarises: We have an underfunded system by any international comparison. This parsimony has led to harmful inter-institutional competition … Continue reading “NZ Budget 2025: science investment must increase as a proportion of GDP for NZ to innovate and compete”

On a glorious afternoon recently, I had the good fortune to attend a specially themed Education and Skills Garden Party hosted at Buckingham Palace in London to celebrate the contributions of educators in the United Kingdom and beyond. As a Canadian citizen living and working in education in the United Kingdom, I was invited to attend by the High Commission of Canada in London. The occasion provided a relaxing yet exciting opportunity to reflect on my involvement embedding sustainability into … Continue reading “For a Canadian in London, King Charles’ Royal Garden Party inspires sustainability education”

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier supercomputer is one of the world's fastest. Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, CC BY High-performance computing, or HPC for short, might sound like something only scientists use in secret labs, but it’s actually one of the most important technologies in the world today. From predicting the weather to finding new medicines and even training artificial intelligence, high-performance computing systems help solve problems that are too hard or too big for regular computers. This technology has … Continue reading “Challenges to high-performance computing threaten US innovation”

Predicting whether or not companies will be successful is crucial for guiding investment decisions and designing effective economic policies. However, past research on high-growth firms – enterprises thought to be key for driving economic development – has typically shown low predictive accuracy, suggesting that growth may be largely random. Does this assumption still hold in the AI era, in which vast amounts of data and advanced analytical methods are now available? Can AI techniques overcome difficulties in predicting high-growth firms? … Continue reading “AI methods help predict the emergence of ‘gazelles’ and other high-growth firms, but challenges remain”

Summit Art Creations/Shutterstock In his victory speech, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese highlighted social policy as a major factor in Labor’s electoral success, particularly Medicare, housing and cost of living relief. He was justified in doing so. But looking forward, Treasurer Jim Chalmers named stalled productivity growth as a top priority for the next three years: The best way to think about the difference between our first term and the second term …[is] the first term was primarily inflation without forgetting … Continue reading “Labor says its second term will be about productivity reform. These ideas could help shift the dial”