In a country that's crazy about their cats, economist Gareth Morgan has his work cut out for him. Concerned about the threat that cats are placing on New Zealand's native bird population, he has launched a campaign to make the country free of felines. But given that New Zealanders own more cats per capita than most…

We all know the saying "One cannot simply walk into Mordor." But is it true, or was Boromir just being a pessimist? Kerry Shawcross and Chris Demarais of Rooster Teeth (the Red Vs. Blue guys) decided to find out for themselves by flying to New Zealand, and setting out from the set of Hobbiton to Mount Ngauruhoe, the…

Our planet's magnetic field is constantly changing and evolving, making it impossible to know how the field behaved at any given point in the past. The only real way to study ancient magnetism is through our ancestors' love of fire.

The world premiere of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit Part One: First Blood or whatever it's called will be held at the Embassy Theater in Jackson's native New Zealand on November 28th, and to commemorate the occasion, they've built a giant, Argonath-esque statue of Gandalf to oversee the gala, smoke pipeweed, insult Tooks, …

Visitors to the Wellington Airport can now dine beneath the hungry eyes of Gollum. In honor of the upcoming Hobbit movie, the Weta Workshop has installed a 13-meter sculpture of the Ring-obsessed creature reaching for some tasty New Zealand rainbow trout.

It's nothing as radical as Gandalf Dollars or Bilbo Bucks or Gollum Wheat Pennies, but yes, money emblazoned with actors Ian McKellen and Martin Freeman's mugs will soon be legal tender in New Zealand.

About 11,000 years ago, the final Ice Age end and humans began to spread out to all corners of the globe. Shortly thereafter, the world's megafauna went extinct. So was it climate or humanity that killed the last megafauna?

For his short film Aotearoa — a.k.a. the Māori name for New Zealand — photographer Nathan Kaso captured the Tolkienesque views of South Island. He explains of this video, "Locations include Queenstown, Arrowtown, Wanaka, Kinloch, Glenorchy, Fox Glacier, Mount Cook National Park, Twizel, Lindis Pass and Haast Pass." We're …

Because of its extreme isolation from any other major landmass, New Zealand's unique native ecosystem is literally for the birds. And these rather elegant-looking penguins briefly dominated this bird paradise, back when New Zealand was mostly underwater.

This supergiant amphipod has just been discovered in a deep sea trench near New Zealand. Its shallower cousins are one-tenth its size.