“Canadians Drafting Plans to Build the World’s Largest Telescope” says the headline to this story. In Hawaii, possibly. Or Mexico. Or other warm climes. Definitely not in Saskatchewan. Because Canadians aren’t, you know, like, stupid.
Category: Blog
Making Star Trek’s Universal Translator a reality?
Well, not exactly. But pretty darn close for human languages. From the press release: An increasingly globalized world became even smaller on Thursday when Carnegie Mellon University and German scientists unveiled technology that makes it possible to speak one language, yet be understood in another. Wow.
Serenading wins mates
At least, if you’re a male mouse. It works for humans, too, you know.
I’m back!
Why, yes, now that you mention it, this blog has been silent for the last week or so. Thanks for noticing! The reason: a fabulous few days at the Banff Springs Hotel, centred around the International Wine and Food Festival. More later (there’ll be an extensive report at some point over at Willetts on Wine), …
People began wearing shoes around 30,000 years ago
That’s what a new analysis of toe bones suggests. Since the oldest extant shoes are only 9,000 years old, that pushes the history of footwear back quite a bit.
"I didn’t like that sensation"
Here’s a fascinating first-person account on what it feels like to be a remote-controlled human.
In with the CO2, out with the oil
A well is a hole in the ground. Sometimes it has water in it. Sometimes it has oil in it. But increasingly, in southeastern Saskatchewan, it has carbon dioxide (CO2) in it. Apache Canada Ltd. recently began injecting CO2 into its oilfield in the Midale area. EnCana has been injecting CO2 into the Weyburn oilfield …
A car that makes its own fuel?
An Israeli company called Engineuity says it has developed a unique system to make hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as magnesium and aluminum–and that within a few years it can be commercialized in emission-free cars cars that will cost about the same as existing conventional cars to run. It sound promising–here’s hoping …
Roger L. Simon has the perfect headline…
…and accompanying image for a blog post on the new study from the University of Michigan’s Addiction Research Center that says smoking can lessen your IQ and harm your ability to think: “ No Wonder Existentialism Never Made Sense.”
University of Saskatchewan team sets space elevator record
No one won either of the $50,000 prizes in a NASA competition designed to lay the groundwork for space elevators–but a team from our very own University of Saskatchewan built a robot that managed to climb the highest, 12 metres, up a 61-metre cable using photoelectric cells to convert radiation from an industrial searchlight into …
Curing high blood pressure with the flick of a switch
This is interesting: researchers at Oxford University and Imperial College London have identified the exact area of the brain that controls blood pressure–and discoverd that they can increase or decrease patients’ blood pressure by stimulating specific regions with electrodes. Right now that requires brain surgery, but once we perfect methods for stimulating specific parts of …
Stronger than steel, harder than diamonds
It’s buckypaper: “10 times lighter than steel — but 250 times stronger.” Practically able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Fascinating stuff.
My latest live walk and vlog
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