What do you get if you take sixty thousand tons of steel, 260,000 cubic meters of concrete, 2000 dedicated Chinese workers and the best design brains in the business? The Shanghai World Financial Center (SWFC)....
Over the centuries China has produced some of the world’s greatest engineering feats from The Great Wall to The Forbidden City. The Deep Water Port at Yangshan is on track to becoming China’s latest record breaking construction feat as the biggest deep water port ever built....
When Beijing hosts the 2008 Olympics, the eyes of the world will be riveted on the National Swimming Centre – aka the Water Cube. We go behind the scenes to discover more about a building destined to become one of this century’s leading architectural feats....
China’s Pearl River Tower is the world’s first super-tall smart building. With its revolutionary aerodynamic shape, the Pearl River Tower sets the benchmark for building designs of the future....
On the banks of the Pearl River in Guangzhou city, an impressive new silhouette is placing China’s third largest city firmly in the limelight. The Guangzhou Sightseeing and TV Tower is a shrine to modern technology and design–and testimony to the vision of a small architectural team who dared to dream big....
Magazine
Issue 200
Jul - Aug 2026
Solar power
Horses of Huntly
Forget me not
Whaling
Red admirals
When a male South Island robin is in want of a mate, he sings. It’s not a glamorous sound, says ecologist Manaia Pearmain-Fenton. Plee plee plee / chee chee chee. Loud, plinky, like a kid picking at a keyboard. Pearmain-Fenton has whakapapa to Ngāti Hokopū, Ngāti Awa and Te Whakatōhea in the Bay of Plenty. […]...
In the world of academic publishing, there has been no more enjoyable read this year than a recent paper out of Sweden titled ‘Geologists on the silver screen—the sequel’. Published by Geology Today, the analysis covers 141 films released between 1919 and 2023 and took a group of geologists more than 10 years to compile. It […]...
Fifteen years after kakaruwai were brought to Dunedin’s Orokonui Ecosanctuary, a new study shows the tiny robins are doing so well that they have booked up every bit of real estate and are now kicking juveniles into the surrounding bush. Researchers counted at least 23 of the friendly birds living up to 1.5 kilometres outside […]...
To shoot the feature on our rarest native forget-me-not, Brennan Thomas had clambered around Hawke’s Bay mountains in the chilly pre-dawn. He’d documented a nursery in Taradale, and people tending the forget-me-nots at Napier’s Centennial Gardens. But to do this beauty justice he still needed some glamour shots—the kind that required a studio, and lights. […]...
Something strange is happening inside the Sun. In the last 40 years, the pattern of tiny sound waves produced deep beneath the surface of our star has mysteriously changed, say scientists reporting in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This solar activity fluctuates in intensity in reliable 11-year cycles, at times driving solar […]...
Derek Morrison photographs Dunedin’s most celebrated citizens: the dozens of sea lions making themselves at home in gardens, golf courses, and fish and chip shops....
We began work on our cover story thinking we were documenting the end of a species. We’d known for decades that the pukunui, southern New Zealand dotterels, were in existential strife. But early in 2025, someone working to save the birds called me: a new count, they said, showed the pukunui could have only a […]...
In first-year philosophy we chewed over the theory that humans were most interested in watching water, fire, and sky. The idea always irked me. What about a dune of tussock rippling in the wind? Seagull fights? Bumblebees in tomato flowers? Recently, I read an essay by American poet and minister Ralph Waldo Emerson, called ‘Nature’. […]...
