I can’t believe I hadn’t come across this until now (but then, the World Wide Web is a rather large place [if it’s a place at all (and how many paranthetical [like this] statements can one put in a single sentence, anyway?)]): Michael C. LaBarbera, a University of Chicago biologist, has taken a scientific look …
Category: Science Columns
The curious case of Dr. Carefoot
Bob McDonald, director of membership and legal services for the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan,, recently tipped me to the strange case of a Dr. Carefoot, disciplined by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Province of Saskatchewan in the 1920s for diagnosing and treating patients using an Abrams Machine. “A …
Unreal science
My wife and I spent the weekend at ConVersion, Calgary’s annual science fiction convention. Featured this year were David Weber as Guest of Honor, Larry Niven as Special Guest of Honor, and R. Scott Bakker as Canadian Guest of Honor and Jeremy Bulloch, who played Boba Fett in the original Star Wars trilogy, as Media …
The next X-Prize
Remember the X-Prize, the $10 million (U.S.) reward offered to any team that could create a privately funded-and-built spacecraft capable of lifting three humans to a sub-orbital altitude of 100 kilometres on two consecutive flights within two weeks? Of course you do. One of the 23 competing teams, the daVinci Project, was supposedly poised to …
Advances in apples
If “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” it’s rather surprising there’s still a need for doctors, considering Canadians consume around 11 kg of apples per person per year. They can choose from a bewildering array of apple cultivars, too (more than 7,500 are known), from the crisp and tart (Macintosh) to the soft …
Anti-fogging nanoparticles
Those of you who don’t wear glasses don’t know how lucky you are. I’ve been a contact-wearer now for many years, but from the time I was about five until I was almost thirty I wore glasses, and I the most annoying thing about them was their inclination to fog up the minute you came …
The aging brain
Despite the fact I am still an astonishingly young man, I do find that I occasionally have more trouble remembering things than I did twenty years ago (when, as a precocious six-year-old, I was news editor of the Weyburn Review). It is, alas, an indisputable fact that our brains change as we age. However, as …
The bat-bot
How often have you said to yourself, “You know, I sure wish someone would build a robotic bat head.” What? Never? In fact, you say, the whole idea sounds…well, batty? Not too surprising, I suppose. After all, bats have suffered a serious image problem throughout most of western history. (In the Orient, they are often …
The Canadian Light Source
Given that the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon produces light a million times brighter than the sun, you might well expect to be able to see it at night even from Regina. Or, upon visiting it in winter, you might think you would find thousands of sun-starved Saskatchewanians lying all around it on beach-towels in the snow, …
Cat senses
It’s said there are cat people, and there are dog people. Personally, I like both, but if I had to state a preference, I’d probably give the edge to cats. It’s not very often I have an excuse to write about them in this column, but this week I do, because by some coincidence, two …
“Musseling” in on the glue industry
Since all of my science columns are online, I frequently get questions out of the blue about past column topics. This week, for example, I received an e-mail from a mother whose nine-year-old had decided to do a third-grade science project on glue. They’d found my column on the topic from a decade ago, and …
A cure for cat allergies?
Do pets make you sneeze? Well, you’re not alone: an estimated ten percent of the population is allergic to animals. And the animal responsible for the majority of those allergies is Felis domesticus–your basic household cat. Being the cat person that I am, this strikes me as a terrible, terrible, thing, worthy of serious research. …
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