Nau mai haere mai - welcome to your New Zealand newsletter.

This week, we launch Climate Explained, a collaboration with Stuff and the Science Media Centre, to answer your questions about our changing climate. As parliament considers zero carbon legislation, polls show that four in five New Zealanders think that climate change is an important issue, but many feel they don’t have all the information they need. In the first in this series, University of Otago environmental health lecturer Alex McMillan responds to a reader’s query about whether climate change will make us less healthy.

Today, the world also learned about Heracles inexpectatus, an extinct parrot that stood nearly a metre tall. Fossil bone fragments sat undiscovered on a museum shelf for more than a decade. They were part of a collection of 20 million-year-old fossils from St Bathans in Central Otago - a site that has already revealed much about New Zealand’s prehistoric fauna. Here, Trevor Worthy, at Flinders University, tells the story of the giant parrot's discovery and how it fits into the family of New Zealand’s many unusal birds.

Almond milk or almond juice? That’s a question University of Waikato philosophers Dan Weijers and Nick Munn ponder in this response to the dairy industry’s call to restrict the use of the term “milk” to animal products. And the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, Juliet Gerrard, and her team take a close look at two major reports on artificial intelligence, published by the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi and the Australian Council of Learned Academies.

There’s a lot more in this week’s newsletter and on the New Zealand page. Feel free to pass this on to anybody you think might enjoy it - they can subscribe to this newsletter here. As always, many thanks for reading. He mihi kia a koutou katoa.