Stories by Alison Ballance

A hunt for urban lizards in New Zealand involves more than a thousand buckets as well as citizen scientists.

An atlas containing hundreds of coronary arteries mapped using MRI scans will help improve heart health.

The Queen Elizabeth II National Trust is celebrating 40 years of helping landowners protect 4,400 pieces of land with high conservation values

The 1769 Garden commemorates the first encounter between Maori and the crew of the Endeavour, under the command of Captain James Cook, at Gisborne in October 1769.

A flexible tool to measure electrical signals in our gut could detect serious medical conditions.

In the last few years there's been a revolution in our understanding of New Zealand's ancient animals - there were once crocodiles as well as small land mammals.

The 2017 Marsden Medal is awarded to Carolyn Burns for her internationally renowned research into New Zealand's deep southern lakes.

The winner of the 2017 Hill Tinsley Medal is developing anti-cancer drugs based on noble metals such as platinum and iridium.

Engineer Mark Jermy has been helping forensics investigators understand the science behind blood spatter evidence at crime scenes.

Anna Pilbrow says that a complex interaction of genetic factors underpin our risk of getting heart disease - and leading a healhy lifestyle lowers the risk.

Bruce Beutler received the 2011 Nobel Prize for discoveries about the innate immune system in mammals.

Science writer Ed Yong investigates the complex world of microbes in his book "I Contain Multitudes."

Lake swimmers, the local primary school and neighbouring farmers have joined together to look after water quality in Lake Wanaka.

The 2017 Rutherford Prize has been awarded to Victoria University of Wellington geologist Colin Wilson for his work on supervolcanoes such as Taupo.

An $8-million research programme to better understand the Taupo supervolcano and prepare the community for an eruption has just begun.

The 2017 MacDiarmid Medal has been awarded to chemist Peter Tyler, for his work designing and creating new drugs to treat diseases such as cancer.

After twenty years of puzzling, geologist Bruce Hayward reckons he has identified some mysterious patterns in a west Auckland roadside cutting as moa footprints.

Arlene McDowell is designing nanoparticles that will hold medication and deliver it exactly to its intended destination in the body.

NASA's SOFIA observatory is a 2.5m telescope mounted in the back of a plane. It observes the birth and death of stars and the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

The arms race between the immune systems of bacteria and the viruses - bacteriophages - that attack them, was a feature of this year's Queenstown Research Week.

Kohurangi, or Kirk's tree daisy, is rare in the Wellington region, but botanists are taking on the challenge of bringing it back to the city.

Mysterious bubbles and warm water, known as Hope Springs, which appeared after the Kaikōura earthquake, appear to be coming from deep in the earth's crust.

Flip the Fleet is a citizen science project looking at the performance of electric vehicles under New Zealand conditions.