“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man.” So began each episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, of which I was a big fan not all that many decades ago. At the time, of course, the idea of “rebuilding” a man with artificial parts was …
Category: Science Columns
Keeping comfortable
Humans are creatures of comfort; and the story of civilization is, to a certain extent, the quest to keep from being either too hot or too cold. Considering the recent swings in temperature we’ve experienced, it could be considered the story of Saskatchewan, too. The earliest form of climate control was the fire. Room temperature …
Bicycles II
It’s summertime in Saskatchewan, and that means the roads are full of joggers, walkers–and bicyclists. The first bicycle was the “celerifere,” or wooden horse, invented in France in the 1790s. It had a fixed front wheel, so it couldn’t be steered, and the rider propelled it by pushing his feet along the ground, like Fred …
Laser eye surgery
I grew up in a glasses-wearing family. My parents wore glasses, my two older brothers wore glasses and I, by the age of five, also wore glasses. In more recent years, my brother Dwight and I switched to contacts, but while contacts may be invisible to others, they’re still glasses, albeit tiny ones stuck to …
Herakleion
In Disney’s new summer animated blockbuster Atlantis, a team of intrepid explorers searches the sea-bottom for the legendary lost continent. Atlantis is only a legend, but in the non-animated world, real researchers have recently made discoveries almost as sensational, locating the fabled city of Herakleion, along with two of its suburbs, Canopus and Menouthis, underwater …
Birth order
I’m the youngest member of a family of three boys. Growing up, I always felt I benefited from seeing what kinds of trouble my older brothers got themselves into, so I could avoid it. This is no doubt why I was a perfect child. (Don’t believe me? Ask my parents and brothers…um, on second thought, …
What’s up with dinosaurs?
What would the summer be without a dinosaur film? This year it’s Jurassic Park III–testimony to the continuing fascination these ancient creatures hold for modern humans. But there’s more news in the world of dinosaurs than the latest special effects. In fact, in the past little while there have been several dynamite dino-developments. The most …
Mad science
We’ve all seen mad scientists in the movies, hair standing on end, shouting, “They laughed! They said I was crazy! But we’ll see who has the last laugh now! Hahahahahahahaha!” Havoc ensues until torch-carrying villagers burn the laboratory. The real-life counterparts to these fictional mad scientists are the scientists pursuing theories that mainstream science considers, …
Wireless wonders
Wireless telegraphy isn’t difficult to understand, Albert Einstein once said. The regular telegraph is like a very long cat; you pull its tail in New York and it meows in Los Angeles. Wireless telegraphy is just the same, only without the cat. That being the case, the world is filling with more and more non-existent …
Canadians vie for the X-Prize
Human beings have been going into space for 40 years, riding vast amounts of U.S. or Russian government money, poured into massive rockets that are mostly thrown away after one use. But many people think this is a terrible way to go into space. If we want to make space truly accessible (at a cost …
Paleoclimatology
This week an international expedition set out for Mt. Logan, Canada’s highest mountain (and yes, it’s still Mt. Logan, not Mt. Trudeau) to attempt to travel through time: to look back 10,000 years to see how climate has changed over the millennia–and how human activities are affecting climate now. Two Canadian scientists will climb to …
Hypersonic flight
Less than a hundred years ago, the Wright Brothers made the first powered airplane flight. Next month, NASA will fly a whole new type of airplane, faster than anything that has flown to date: not just supersonic (faster than the speed of sound) but hypersonic (MUCH faster than the speed of sound). Of course, NASA …
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