If you’re looking for an unpopulated spot to vacation in this winter, Mars isn’t it. In interplanetary terms, the Mars neighborhood is going to be rather crowded, as spacecraft from Europe and the United States descend on it in a kind of Martian land rush. It’s not a coincidence: the orbital mechanics involved have produced …
Category: Columns
Rise of the aircar
It’s almost summer, that time of year when millions of vacationers develop whole new vocabularies as they curse the slow-moving RVs behind which they’re stuck. What they need is a car that can fly, a.k.a. an aircar, a staple of science fiction stories since at least the 1930s, but something that hasn’t gotten off the …
Turning anything to oil
Imagine a process that can turn any kind of organic waste into high-grade oil. It sounds too good to be true. But that’s the promise of the thermal depolymerization process (TDP), outlined in the May issue of the respected popular science magazine Discover (from which most of the following information is drawn). Naturally occurring oil …
Cyberfarming
City dwellers tend to think of the high-tech revolution as primarily an urban phenomenon–hip office workers thumb-typing messages to each other on their pagers while standing in line for lattes, for example. But the countryside is well on its way to becoming as high-tech as the city, as new technologies relentlessly transform agriculture into something …
Orchids
Over the weekend, the Regina Orchid Society held its annual show and sale. I know this, even though I was out of town, because when I got home we had orchids in our living room. The Regina Orchid Society, which has about 40 members and has been around for 15 years, and countless societies like …
The colossal squid
I don’t know how you feel about calamari, but it’s always been a little too rubber-band-like to be one of my favorites. However you feel about it, though, I’m pretty sure you can agree with me that it’s far better to eat calamari than to have the calamari eating you. That unsettling prospect was raised …
SETI @ Home, revisited
Every day, I help search for extraterrestrial intelligence…or, at least, my computer does. It’s one of more than 4,287,000 computers worldwide called SETI@Home (SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) which constantly examine data collected by the huge Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico for signals that could have come from extraterrestrial civilizations. Any signals …
Neanderthals revisited
If I were to call you a Neanderthal, you’d think I was calling you brutish, primitive, and stupid. Allow me to set the record straight: Neanderthals were none of the above. Neanderthals were a type of human that lived between 350,000 and 27,000 years ago, mostly in Europe. They get their name from the Neander …
From tennis elbow to hot-tub lung
Once upon a time, most of the injuries people suffered were the result of the hard physical labor they had to perform day-in and day-out to survive. Today we have a whole new set of injuries and ailments that are the result, not of hard work, but of recreation. Take hot-tub long, for instance. This …
Trading places
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to trade places with another family, living a completely different life from yours in some completely different part of the country? If you have, you should get in touch with Heather Kaisler at Partners in Motion, a Regina-based television production company. She’s the producer of their …
High-temperature superconductors
You’ve probably heard of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” More than a decade ago, there was a lot of hoopla about something else coming in out of the cold: superconductivity. Newsmagazines did cover stories on the new high-temperature superconductors, and promised they would soon change our lives. After that…nothing. A new technological …
Farewell to Pioneer 10
This week, we bid farewell to a true pioneer: Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to leave our solar system. NASA last received a signal from Pioneer 10 on January 22. A February attempt failed, and last week NASA announced there would be no more attempts. That final faint signal traveled more than 12 billion kilometers—a …
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