There’s been a lot of talk this year about how much easier the home computer has made Christmas shopping, and I agree–but not because I’m doing a lot of shopping on-line. I find computers have made Christmas shopping easier by opening up a whole new range of gift ideas. Any kid with a computer is …
Category: Blog
Chernobyl
This week, Ukrainian authorities restarted the last working reactor at the Chernobyl power plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster 13 years ago. Officials say the reactor is completely safe and free of any potential Y2K bugs. Considering that everybody living in the northern hemisphere 13 years ago was the unwilling recipient of at …
Have yourself a genetically modified little Christmas
Searching for the perfect Christmas tree can be a hassle, and even a tree that looks great on the lot can turn out to have weird branches, flat spots or gaps once it opens up. But someday soon, every Christmas tree may be perfect, thanks to science. Around 40 million Christmas trees are harvested every …
Football physics
This Sunday in Vancouver, thousands of people will gather to watch an impressive demonstration of momentum, mass, drag and other basic physics provided by highly trained specialists from Hamilton and Calgary. This scientific exposition is called “the Grey Cup.” One interesting demonstration will be the forward pass. A football moving through the air has inertia–the universal tendency …
Best of Popular Science’s “What’s New,” 1999
In 1899, Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the U.S. patent office, proclaimed, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” He was wrong, as Popular Science‘s recent awards for “the best of what’s new” from 1999 reveals. These inventions and breakthroughs give us a glimpse of what’s in store for us in the 21st century, …
Umami
My wife and I recently returned from the annual International Festival of Wine and Food at the Banff Springs hotel, where the master of ceremonies, Tim Hanni, presented a fascinating (and very funny) seminar on matching wine with food. Much of Hanni’s talk was devoted to exactly how the sense of taste works. It’s …
Level Four labs
The images are familiar from TV and movies: scientists in plastic space suits in a high-tech laboratory, desperately trying to identify some mysterious germ threatening to wipe out humanity. Usually, such scenes are set at the Centers for Disease Control laboratories in Atlanta, Georgia, but in the future, they could be set in Winnipeg, where …
The Ig Nobel Prizes of 1999
Some people think scientists are a dour, serious lot. For proof they are nothing of the sort, look no further than the scientific awards ceremony held last week at Harvard University. The most famous scientific awards are, of course, the Nobel Prizes. These were not those. These were the Ig Nobel Prizes, which annually honors …
Science fiction
My interest in science owes a lot to a form of literature my brothers introduced me to at a very early age, and which quickly became my favorite: science fiction (SF for short). Before science fiction was called that there were two writers who nevertheless get included in the genre: France’s Jules Verne and England’s …
Crop circles
Last week, Ken and Linda Mann found two mysterious circles in the wheat on their farm, about 75 kilometres south of Saskatoon. Three kilometres to the west, Hutterites from the Brethren of Dinsmore colony found five more. As crop circles go, these were relatively mundane. The most complex designs appear in England, like the one …
“Is real science killing science fiction?”
We live in a science fiction world. Desktop computers, the World Wide Web, genetic engineering, cloning, space stations–they were all the stuff of science fiction not very many years ago. This poses a problem for today’s science fiction writers. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to write “hard” science fiction, based on real, plausible scientific thought …
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