A study shows most Kiwis are unconcerned about the risk of robots taking their jobs. Photo / 123rf
From decades-old toilet paper to a hidden magma chamber between a Bay of Plenty town, there's been plenty quirk among this year's science headlines. Jamie Morton picked 10 of 2016's most fascinating - and strangest - science stories.
Old-fashioned Kiwi humility is still alive and well, even in a world that's thrust Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump upon us.
That was according to the first study to take an in-depth look at the relationship between self-esteem and narcissism in New Zealand.
After crunching numbers drawn from a representative sample of more than 6500 people, Auckland University psychology researcher Samantha Stronge found that around one in 10 Kiwis hold traits that could be considered narcissistic.
Around 9 per cent had high entitlement and high self-esteem - a rate Stronge did not see as concerningly high - and the other groups showed low levels of entitlement, but differing levels of self-esteem.
Of the five distinct groups that emerged from the data, the largest, making up 38 per cent of respondents, had an "optimal self-esteem" characterised by high self-worth but low levels of entitlement.
"These are people that do have a very good opinion about themselves, but not one that is damaging to other people. You like yourself, but you don't think you are better than people."
However the data also suggested around 2.4 per cent of Kiwis had both low self-esteem and low entitlement, which warranted closer analysis.
Ms Stronge was also keen to find whether levels of narcissism were growing over time.
Of all the reasons the residents of Matata, population 642, might have guessed for the thousands of tremors that had shaken their town, few would have sounded as weird or terrifying as a giant, undiscovered chamber of magma below ground.
But that was the explanation scientists finally gave for the spate of small quakes, detected around the seaside Bay of Plenty settlement at depths between 2km and 8km.
A study led by GNS Science showed how a 20km-square area of land around the town had been pushed up by about 40cm since 1950.
Over this period, molten or semi-molten rock was being pushed up from below, causing land around Matata to uplift by about a centimetre each year.
As the magma moved in the sub-surface, it caused the surrounding rock to deform and break, resulting in small earthquakes.
Using a model based on modern GPS and satellite radar data, along with decades of survey records, scientists have concluded a magma body lies about 9km below the surface - and since 1950 its volume had grown by the equivalent of 80,000 Olympic swimming pools.
However, they assured residents the presence of the magma did not mean an eruption could be imminent, nor had it changed the volcanic hazard of the Bay of Plenty region.
"Our modelling points to the presence of a magma chamber in an area where there has been no active volcanism for about 400,000 years," said lead author Dr Ian Hamling.
Bodies of magma were reasonably common under large areas of the central North Island, and identifying another magma accumulation was not a huge surprise, he said.
When Kiwi artist Billy Apple unveiled his work Body Activities - consisting of tissues and cotton buds stained with excrement and other bodily fluids - at London's Serpentine Gallery in 1974, authorities immediately ordered it be taken down.
But he kept all the original tissues and, more than 45 years later, researchers have found a new purpose for them, in an intriguing collaboration between the 80-year-old and top New Zealand scientists.
"Billy has provided us with fecal samples that are 46 years apart, and by looking at the bacteria from these, we can understand how Billy's gut bacteria have changed," explained Dr Justin O'Sullivan, of the Auckland University-based Liggins Institute.
"These types of samples are extremely rare."
In the study, researchers were using a method called "16S amplicon sequencing" which effectively takes copies and sequences regions of the bacterial DNA.
These are then used to search a database and identify the bacteria.
"It has a lot of similarity to the toll gate on the northern expressway - cars pass through, number plates are photographed, and then the numbers are used to identify the individual cars from the database."
O'Sullivan and his colleagues have been offering senior high school students an opportunity to perform this type of analysis on soil bacteria for the past six years.
"More studies like this will help us understand how bacteria change us and contribute to non-communicable diseases."
Apple was amused at the renewed interest in the work.
"Who the hell keeps their tissues for 46 years unless it's an artwork?" he said.
"But for them, it's a pretty special project, and I'm just thrilled to be able to work with them."
There have been countless media stories about the threat of losing your job to a robot, but a Massey University survey found most Kiwis don't see machines as a workplace worry.
It found 87.5 per cent of respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement "smart technology, artificial intelligence, robotics or algorithms could take my job".
"Despite experts like Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking warning about mass unemployment in the future, it seems very few New Zealanders are making any plans to change out of jobs that might disappear over the next five to 10 years," said study leader Dr David Brougham, of Massey's School of Management.
"It was interesting that those who most strongly denied the possibility of a machine doing their job were often from the sectors most at risk, like checkout operators, drivers and analysts. These are all areas where we can already see technology having an impact."
A storeroom assistant told him he believed machines wouldn't "affect my career at all" while a business support employee said: "We work in the service industry, robots are irrelevant."
"It was bizarre reading some of the interview quotes, but I guess ignorance can be bliss," he said.
"People think their jobs are harder than they actually are. Often jobs actually consist of a set of repetitive actions that can be codified and done by a robot.
"This applies to many jobs currently considered high skill, like accountants, lawyers and researchers. There is report-writing software now available that is practically flawless."
The study showed younger employees were generally more concerned about smart technology and automation than older employees.
Young people who were aware of the potential impact of technology also reported a significant drop in organisational commitment and career satisfaction.
A New Zealand-based researcher has been investigating "moonquakes" - a curious lunar phenomenon first discovered by Nasa's Apollo missions.
That the moon experienced earthquakes was first demonstrated by astronauts on five of the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972, after they placed seismometers at landing sites, recorded the information and radioed it back to Earth.
The data, recording more than 13,000 quakes up until 1977, revealed several kinds of moonquakes: deep moonquakes about 700km below the surface, probably caused by tides; vibrations from the impact of meteorites; and thermal quakes caused by the expansion of the frigid crust when first illuminated by the morning sun after two weeks of deep-freeze lunar night.
A fourth kind, shallow moonquakes striking only 20km or 30km below the surface, could register magnitudes of up to 5.5, powerful enough to move heavy furniture and crack plaster in an Earth setting.
Jesse-Lee Dimech, who is completing his PhD in geophysics at Victoria University, and who also has a postdoctoral role at Nasa, said seismic energy was useful for looking inside planets.
"Using the energy from earthquakes or, in this case, moonquakes, we can gain insight into the composition and structure of the moon."
He was working on categorising and detecting moonquakes using the Apollo seismic dataset, as well as extra datasets not previously used for this purpose.
The work was being carried out in collaboration with Dr Renee Weber, Dimech's adviser at Nasa, and Dr Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun, a scientist at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.
"It's a great opportunity to work with some of the world's top planetary seismologists," Dimech said.
"By applying new seismic analysis techniques we may be able to learn new information about the moon - even from such an old dataset."
Researchers have fitted tracker tags on queen bumble bees in a study adding to the buzz around the furry insects becoming big future pollinators in orchards around the country.
A team led by Plant and Food Research pollination expert Dr David Pattemore has pioneered a tracking system used to monitor up to 200 queen bumble bees at a time as they zoom around a Waikato blueberry patch.
The trial - part of a wider, ongoing programme investigating bumble bees' potential role as orchard pollinators - kicked off with the planting of tiny radio tags, weighing less than 1g each, on a group of queens.
The technology meant the bees could be tracked within an area of 100ha - and monitored using a smartphone.
The main goal of the study was to understand how the bees - particularly the common buff-tailed bumble bee - picked their nesting sites.
Bumble bees have an annual life cycle; only queens survive to hibernate over winter, emerging in spring to find a nest site and set up a colony.
The researchers have already built nearly 1000 nest boxes, or "bumble bee bunkers", within avocado, plum, kiwifruit and red clover sites in five regions.
The team is also using its trained "bumble bee dog", Ollie, to sniff out early-stage nests under orchards.
Pattemore believed it was entirely realistic to expect bumble bees to contribute as pollinators for New Zealand's multibillion-dollar horticulture industry.
"Our research could make a huge difference."
A Dunedin neurosurgeon has been investigating whether tiny devices implanted in the brain can stop alcoholics' cravings.
The study, led by the University of Otago's Professor Dirk De Ridder, was the first in the world to use implants to target craving processes in the brain to combat alcoholism and, if successful, could result in a new form of intervention.
De Ridder was also trialling cutting-edge neuro-stimulators specially made for the trials by US-based St Jude Medical, which allow him to study a wider range of signals sent from the implant to specific circuits in the brain that control cravings.
The technology, so far tested on a small group of Kiwi patients, is aimed at those whose health had been severely impaired by alcohol, and who had tried every other non-surgical treatment available.
Scientists have increasingly been exploring whether subtly electrically stimulating certain parts of the brain could inhibit signals that fuel cravings.
"The main problem with current stimulators is that they are derived from pacemaker technology, and the heart is a relatively simple organ to stimulate, whereas the brain is somewhat more complex.
"That's why we've had to push the technology to create the bigger versatility - or enable more languages - that might improve the result."
Cravings, stress and cues - such as walking past a bar or seeing alcohol in the supermarket - were the three main reasons why 80 per cent of people with alcohol addictions relapsed.
"So you have to target one of those three. You can't do anything about cues, and you can treat stress but that probably isn't so efficient, so that's why we opted to go after cravings."
Results of the study had been promising and De Ridder planned to present them at a conference in Barcelona next year.
Thousands of school children will have their breath tested as part of a study, announced this year, to reveal a little-understood role of sugar in New Zealand's childhood obesity epidemic.
The study, kicking off in 2017, will investigate how well Kiwi kids absorb fructose.
In the study, targeted at schools with high proportions of Maori and Pasifika students, researchers will use a simple breath test that measures hydrogen gas to record fructose absorption rates.
While fructose is the least understood sugar in our diet, studies show it's likely a major contributor to metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes.
The study's leader, Professor Peter Shepherd of the Auckland University-based Maurice Wilkins Centre, said there had been much recent debate around how sugar was harming the health of children, but so far there had been surprisingly little hard research on its biological effects on the body.
This was particularly true for fructose - a substance that made up half of the white stuff we know as sugar.
"We do know that there is a wide variation between individuals in the amount of fructose that can be absorbed from the gut into our bloodstream," Shepherd said.
"Those who are good at absorbing fructose are going to retain more of the calories from sugar in our diet than those who don't absorb fructose well."
While this could explain why some kids were more at risk than others, there wasn't any real data on how fructose uptake varied in school-age children - and how this related to metabolic problems like obesity.
"If our hypothesis is correct, the information will be important in identifying those most at risk from the modern food environment which will allow targeted interventions," he said.
"I think it might allow us to focus more effort on those who are at most risk rather than spreading our limited resources thinly across everyone."
It's the stuff of horror movies: a parasite brainwashes its victim, forcing it to kill itself, so the parasite can reproduce.
But this macabre manipulation isn't just science fiction; indeed, scientists have been aware for decades of how certain clever parasites can change the behaviour of their much larger hosts.
Malaria parasites can make mosquitoes more attracted to humans, increasing the chance of transmission.
In other instances, parasites use a bio-chemical effect called "toxoplasma" to make rats less afraid of cats, increasing their chance of being eaten and thus enabling the parasites to move to the cat, where they can reproduce.
There have even been some suggestions toxoplasmosis can affect humans, making us behave in riskier ways.
In a new study, supported with an $830,000 Marsden Fund grant, an Otago University team will focus on something yet more extraordinary: the potential of DNA-based brainwashing.
Two specific parasitic worms they'll investigate, found in NZ, are known to hijack hosts' central nervous systems, forcing them to seek water for the worm to reproduce in.
Once water is found, the adult worm explodes out of the host, killing it.
Although the mechanisms behind such amazing abilities are not well understood, one possibility is through alteration of the host's DNA.
"There's really two different ways the parasites could do this," explained the study's leader, Otago University geneticist Professor Neil Gemmell.
"It either could make something that mimics or interacts with a substance in the host that's responsible for some form of neurological decision-making, or it produces something that changes the pattern of expression of the genes responsible for the production of that substance, perhaps turning them on or of.
"It could even be a combination of the two."
DNA detective work found a simple explanation for a long-standing mystery surrounding New Zealand's earliest domestic chooks - where did they come from?
A study by Kiwi and Australian researchers drew on radio-carbon dating and DNA sequencing technology to clarify why chicken bones have been found in prehistoric Maori middens when there was little archaeological reason for them to be there.
Polynesian voyagers who colonised islands across the Pacific between the 11th and 13th centuries were known to have spread many foods, including taro, pigs, rats and chickens.
But the discovery of ancient chicken bones in NZ pits didn't fit the picture, as there was a conspicuous absence of prehistoric chicken remains in Polynesia's cooler, subtropic and temperate southern islands.
They'd been found on Easter Island and Hawaii, but not in New Zealand or the Chatham, Auckland, Kermadec and Norfolk Islands.
In the study, led by Dr Jamie Wood of Landcare Research, researchers focused on bones in three sites on the northern coast of the South Island, which were ideal because they also contained bones of moa and other large birds that became extinct within 200 years of initial human settlement.
DNA sequencing and radio-carbon dating analysis confirmed the bones were still New Zealand's earliest.
But they backed another, simpler theory: it may not have been Maori who brought them here.
Two of the bones predated regular European visits to New Zealand, which happened from 1803 onwards, yet overlapped with the arrival of Captain James Cook's second voyage around 1773 and 1774.
