Gales of up to 100km/h are set to lash the North Island this weekend after a brief respite from this week's heavy rain and gales.

The Cook Strait Canyon isn't the only underwater chasm that scientists worry could pose a serious threat to the country.

The threat of a huge, landslide-triggered tsunami to Wellington lurks below the water only 10km off the city's coast - but the region's quakes haven't come near what it would take to trigger one.

A future where a criminal's genetic make-up affects how long they spend in jail and whether they are released was discussed at a lecture in Dunedin last night.

A Chinese man has had a new nose grown on his forehead. The man, who has only been named as Xiaolian, had the treatment to create a replacement for his original nose which was infected and deformed.

A boy, injured when acid splashed in his eye during a science class, will need up to a year to recover.

Persistent prompting by an Auckland scientist has persuaded the shipping industry to rearrange its schedules, for a whale.

Human trials of a locally developed Parkinson's disease treatment have begun in New Zealand after the first round yielded promising results.

'Next generation' DNA extraction techniques found no viable material even in samples less than a century old.

Kimberley Jane Dark has made it clear that she doesn't want to be kept alive with a feeding tube.

Scientists are preparing to test a potential therapy for Huntington's disease in sheep that have been genetically modified to carry the mutation that causes the disease.

When patients have a certain kind of brain surgery to treat epilepsy at Auckland City Hospital is sent over the road to the Auckland University for research.

Some of Britain's finest minds are drawing up a "doomsday list" of catastrophic events that could devastate the world.

The painful end of Stephen Hawking's first marriage, and the bitter acrimony of his second, have been described in detail by the Cambridge cosmologist for the first time in his autobiography.

One of the rarest dinosaur fossils could be lost to science when it is auctioned for private sale in November, scientists warned yesterday.

An 11-year-old put Fonterra's light-proof milk bottles to the test.

Just in case you were wondering what the universe is made of, whether ET exists and if something can be done about global warming, cancer and beating bacteria, here's what scientists know ...

The ozone hole over New Zealand is closing, but it may warm up Antarctica which could then affect the West Coast and Canterbury Plains, a university researcher says.

Australian doctors have achieved a world first by helping a woman become pregnant from ovarian tissue grafted into her abdomen.

Chopping wood has always been seen as one of the more "manly"' endeavours, but now researchers may be able to prove it.

A deep-sea search for giant squid has captured the world's first video footage of the mysterious creature in its habitat.

Scientists are keen to discover what effect the hustle and bustle of downtown Auckland has on those who walk its streets every day.

A sequence of quakes rattling the centre of the country appears to be shifting down the South Island and away from Wellington.

It's 1998 and science is taking big strides. The first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, has just had her first lamb; the first robotically assisted heart surgery has been completed.

There's mounting evidence that the pesticide bombardment of our crops and farms is having a devastating effect on wildlife, writes Sue Kedgley.