In his 1984 State of the Union Address, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced that the U.S. would build a space station, a permanently inhabited base in orbit. It’s a safe bet that Reagan would have been shocked and disbelieving had you told him that it would be 14 years before the first component …
Category: Blog
Dreams
Dreams have fascinated people for millennia. Ancient people sought portents of the future in dreams. Not-so-ancient people, such as Sigmund Freud, sought information about the psyche: he felt that an examination of dreams could help a psychoanalyst guide a person in the resolution of inner conflicts. In the 20th century, the function of dreams has …
Mirror, mirror
Ever since the first caveman saw himself in a pool of water and became the first human in history to complain of a bad hair day, we’ve recognized that being able to see our reflection has its uses–and so we’ve made mirrors. A mirror is any object that reflects light rays in such a …
Extraterrestrials
On the television program The X-Files, FBI agent Fox Mulder is always searching for proof of extraterrestrials, mostly by exploring old warehouses with his trusty flashlight and cell phone. But as an article by Ron Cowen in the November 1 issue of Science News points out, the real search for non-terrestrial life is taking place in university and …
Black holes
They were talking about black holes recently at the 189th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Toronto. New evidence of their existence was presented, along with evidence of black holes at the centers of three typical galaxies. This may prompt you to ask the question, “So what’s a black hole, and why should I …
The Shroud of Turin
In medieval times, Holy Relics did boffo box-office. Saints’ finger bones–even entire saints–and pieces of the One True Cross drew the kinds of crowds most CFL teams would envy. Eventually, however, people noticed there were enough pieces of the One True Cross floating around to build a house, and holy relics fell into disrepute–all …
SETI @ Home
Alas for the good old days, when we thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Today we know our sun is only a very average star in a very average galaxy, in a universe where there are 50 billion galaxies, containing half a trillion stars each, around which, based on recent observations, planets …
Life on other planets
On the television program The X-Files, FBI agent Fox Mulder is always searching for proof of extraterrestrials, mostly by exploring old warehouses with his trusty flashlight and cell phone. But as an article by Ron Cowen in the November 1 issue of Science News points out, the real search for non-terrestrial life is taking place in university and …
Avalanches
Every year, on average, avalanches kill 10 people in Canada. In the past few days, two more people were added to this year’s tragic toll as Michel Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and Susanna Donald, a University of Calgary student from Regina, became the latest victims of these deadly snowslides, also known …
Stem cells
Imagine being able to grow any kind of human tissue in the laboratory and using it to replace the damaged cells of someone suffering from diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or muscular dystrophy. Within a decade or two that science fictional dream could be reality, thanks to a breakthrough last week that scientists have …
John Glenn’s return to space
At 9:47 a.m. on February 20, 1962, John Glenn, 41, a U.S. Marine test pilot, strapped into the tiny Mercury space capsule known as Friendship 7, hurtled into space atop an Atlas rocket. In the ensuing four hours and 56 minutes he circled the Earth three times, then splashed down in the Atlantic ocean, 880 …
Canadian Nobel laureates
This is the time of year when the Nobel Prizes for science are awarded, and while there haven’t been any Canadian winners this year, for a small country, Canada has been well represented in the awards in the past few years–and can lay claim to one of the most important discoveries in medicine earlier this …
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