Category: Blog

The weekend before last my wife and I attended the International Wine and Food Festival at the Banff Springs Hotel. (A dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.) At the event, top wine makers from around the world led 250 attendees through tastings of some of their offerings. Among the guests on hand was …

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Sounds science-fictional (which is why I noticed it, of course)–but they’re coming.

French diving archeologists have discovered the foundation of the ancient lighthouse of Pharos in Alexandria, the seventh wonder of the world. (Via Archaeoblog.)

…are better than men, a University of Bradford study suggests. “Women seem to realise that they are being asked to do something new much more quickly than men. Men tend to blindly carry on with the original task.” Which presumably translates into women being less likely than men to plough into things.

Gigantic Apes Coexisted with Early Humans, Study Finds.

Thanks to recent discoveries using multispectral imaging, you can now take a trip to the black hole at the center of our galaxy, courtesy of Andrew J. Hanson of the University of Indiana. It’s one of several examples of virtual astronomy on his website. (Via The Corner).

Maybe we actually have a taste sensor for fat.

This ought to be interesting: Almost four decades ago, Stanley Kubrick gathered the world’s scientific minds and asked them to predict the future. Their thoughts would then form the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, his epic about a mission to Jupiter which becomes a life or death battle between the space crew and …

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Active volcanoes have been ruled out as the source of Mars’s atmospheric methane, increasing the (still considered slight) chance that the gas comes from living organisms.

Does this snow shovel on a wheel work? I have my doubts. I do know you’ll look unbearably geeky using one. But then, in January in Saskatchewan, no one looks suave while shoveling snow. Personally, I think I’m holding out for a snowblower. (Via Gizmodo.)

The Energy & Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota claims the technical hurdles are behind us and “it is just a matter of time” before the system economically becomes reality. Great news!

I may be a prairie boy now, but I didn’t start out that way. I was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and as a small child, whenever we went back to New Mexico, I always said we were going to “my mountains.” These days, of course, the mountains I go to are typically the …

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