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The secret life of stars: Astrophysics for everyone
(University of Waikato, 2026-06-29) Taylor, Simon; Jenkins, Rachel
Public lecture at The University of Waikato, Tauranga campus
The campus as canvas: Behind the paint
(University of Waikato, 2026) White, Iain; McLaren, Sasha
‘The Campus as Canvas’ explores the legacy of temporary murals across the University of Waikato’s Hamilton campus through artist stories, archival material, video, and live mural-making. Featuring past Boon on Campus artists, the exhibition uncovers the stories, creative processes, and lived experiences that lie beneath the surface of some of the University's most recognisable murals. The exhibition explores six murals created for the Hamilton campus, offering insight into the stories behind these much-loved works. Behind-the-scenes photographs, video, and artist reflections sit alongside striking large-scale images of each completed mural, revealing the ideas, inspirations, processes, and people behind these vibrant public artworks. A major feature of the exhibition is a live mural created by Pounamu Wharekawa and Ahsin Ahsin, a collaborative piece inspired by this time of year around Matariki. Beginning just before the exhibition opening, the work will unfold on the gallery wall as an interactive temporary installation, inviting visitors to observe the artists in action and experience mural-making as a dynamic public practice. The mural will remain partially completed for the duration of the exhibition, drawing attention to process, impermanence, and the evolving nature of street art. This exhibition offers a chance to rediscover familiar campus murals through the stories, creative processes, and experiences that brought them to life.
Quantifying offense and defense workloads in professional rugby union
(Human Kinetics, 2024) Stevens, Luke J.; Hopkins, Will G.; Chittenden, Jessica A.; Koper, Bianca Z.; Smith, Tiaki Brett
Purpose: Rugby union is a contact team sport demanding high levels of physical capacity, and understanding the match workloads can be useful to inform training. In this study, the factors influencing locomotion and contact workloads for offensive and defensive ball-in-play periods are quantified. Methods: Locomotion and contact metrics were collected from global positioning system units and videos for 31 professional players of a Super Rugby team across 14 games in the 2021 season. Data were analyzed with a generalized mixed-model procedure that included effects for type of play, playing position, match outcome, and ball-in-play time. Magnitudes were assessed with standardization, and evidence for substantial magnitudes was derived from sampling uncertainty. Results: When offense was compared to defense, most metrics showed decisively substantial increases (small to moderate) for forwards and backs. There was decisive evidence that locomotion metrics were substantially lower (large differences) and contact metrics were higher (very large differences) when comparing forwards to backs on offense and defense. When winning was compared to losing, there was good evidence that forwards experienced small increases in overall workload on defense, and backs experienced a small increase in high-speed running and a moderate decrease in contacts on offense. Match-to-match changes associated with ball-in-play time, attributed to fatigue, were decisive (moderate to very large) across most metrics for forwards and backs in offense and defense. Conclusions: The increased locomotion and contact workloads in offensive periods and the differing physical requirements between positions and match outcomes for both types of play are novel findings that should aid practitioners in designing effective training.
Taonga governance & ethical innovation: Building a kaitiaki-led access & benefit-sharing system for taonga from Aotearoa New Zealand
(Te Kotahi Research Institute, University of Waikato, 2026-06) Caddie, Manu
This project began as an investigation into the implications of the Nagoya Protocol and related international frameworks for Māori ownership, access and benefit-sharing (ABS) in relation to indigenous organisms in Aotearoa New Zealand. It evolved into a broader exploration of Indigenous governance, taonga species coordination, ethical commercialisation systems, mechanisms for exercising shared rangatiratanga rights and responsibilities, and the practical infrastructure required to support Treaty-consistent biodiscovery in Aotearoa. This report identifies two fundamental gaps in Aotearoa’s emerging biodiscovery system. The first is the absence of practical mechanisms through which kaitiaki can exercise shared rights and responsibilities in relation to taonga species, ecosystems, mātauranga Māori and innovation. The second is the absence of institutions capable of representing the interests of taonga themselves within research, investment, commercialisation and governance arrangements. The work occurred during a period of major national transition. During the life of the project, the Government committed NZ$42.8 million toward the Biodiscovery Platform led by the Bioeconomy Science Institute (BSI). Project participants contributed actively to the Platform’s development, and to Te Puni Kōkiri’s options for a biodiscovery framework and ABS policy work as part of the Government’s response to WAI 262. That policy process, which reached the stage of a discussion document ready for public consultation, appears to have been placed on hold at the end of 2025. This combination of significant investment in biodiscovery infrastructure alongside a stalled regulatory framework creates a policy contradiction and defines the challenge addressed by this report. The project identified persistent weaknesses across Aotearoa’s biodiscovery ecosystem, including fragmented governance, weak institutional coordination, inconsistent engagement with kaitiaki, limited practical ABS mechanisms, severe capability shortages, and the absence of coherent infrastructure for coordinating Indigenous governance interests. These findings were independently reinforced through Biodiscovery Platform design work and by the Indigenous Biodiscovery Wānanga held in March 2026, which brought together researchers, kaitiaki, entrepreneurs and policymakers to explore the future of Indigenous-led biodiscovery. A central finding of the project is that existing governance arrangements provide no consistent mechanism through which multiple kaitiaki groups with overlapping interests can exercise shared rights and responsibilities. The emerging taonga trust network and Te Pūnaha Taonga, an online platform designed to facilitate engagement by all groups associated with a taonga, provide the foundation for a system capable of coordinating shared authority, managing overlapping interests, supporting responsible research and commercialisation, and ensuring that rights, responsibilities and benefits remain connected to the communities from which taonga and mātauranga originate. An independent Māori-led Competent National Authority operating within a sphere-of-authority framework could provide the national architecture within which these mechanisms operate. The project also highlights the emergence of taonga governance entities as a potentially significant institutional innovation. Entities established to act in the interests of taonga species and their ecosystems provide a practical mechanism through which the interests of taonga can participate directly within research, investment, commercialisation and benefitsharing arrangements. Rather than remaining external stakeholders, these entities can become enduring participants in the biodiscovery system itself. The emerging kānuka industry provides a practical case study of this approach. The Hikurangi Bioactives Limited Partnership royalty model – allocating almost equal profit shares to investors, communities of origin, and activities intended to benefit the taonga itself – demonstrates a practical expression of commercial benefit-sharing in Aotearoa. The Kānuka Charitable Trust’s work on certification, industry standards and landowner engagement illustrates the kind of collective infrastructure that could be supported at scale through the Biodiscovery Platform for other taonga-derived products and sectors. Aotearoa is at a genuine inflection point. While the absence of a legislated ABS regime remains a critical gap, the larger opportunity identified in this report is the creation of practical mechanisms through which Indigenous communities can exercise shared rights and responsibilities, and through which the interests of taonga can be represented within innovation systems. The emergence of taonga governance entities, Te Pūnaha Taonga, and the Biodiscovery Platform collectively create a unique opportunity to build governance arrangements unlike any currently operating elsewhere in the world. Whether the outcome is a coherent, Treaty-consistent biodiscovery system that provides for the interests of both people and taonga, or a fragmented and partial one, will depend on decisions made now about governance architecture, legislative foundations, the exercise of kaitiaki authority, commercial structures, capability investment and accountability.
Evolution of a pickup ion ring-beam population in large-scale interstellar turbulence and small-scale self-generated waves: Implications for the IBEX ribbon
(American Astronomical Society, 2026) Huang, Y; Guo, F; Sun, X; Noh, SJ; Zirnstein, EJ; Reisenfeld, DB; Li, H; Florinski, V; Heerikhuisen, Jacob
The secondary energetic neutral atom (ENA) mechanism proposed to explain the ribbon-like enhancement of ENA emission observed by Interplanetary Boundary Explorer (IBEX) involves a pickup ion (PUI) ring-beam population beyond the heliopause. The stability of this highly anisotropic PUI distribution is crucial for determining the physical process responsible for the ribbon formation. It has been proposed that PUIs with pitch angles near 90° can become trapped via the magnetic mirroring process in the turbulent magnetic field of the local interstellar medium. However, the turbulent mirroring scenario typically neglects self-generated waves excited by the kinetic instabilities of the ring-beam PUIs, which can efficiently scatter PUIs in pitch angle. Using a magnetohydrodynamics-particle-in-cell approach implemented in ATHENA++, we simulate the evolution of the ring-beam PUIs, incorporating both large-scale interstellar magnetic fluctuations and microscale self-excited instabilities. We examine the competition between turbulent mirroring and pitch-angle scattering by the self-generated waves. Our results show that the PUIs can be rapidly scattered toward a nearly isotropic distribution on the order of one day, much shorter than their characteristic lifetime of a couple of years. This suggests that theoretical difficulties remain for maintaining an anisotropic PUI distribution in physical models of the IBEX ribbon.