The Great Pyramid at Giza recently reopened after a year of restoration, allowing visitors to Egypt to once again see where King Khufu was entombed more than 4,500 years ago. The Great Pyramid is an astonishing human achievement, on a scale that impresses even now, in the age of Superdomes and skyscrapers. Originally 145.5 metres …
Category: Science Columns
Mummies
Half a century after Boris Karloff first played the man in the bandages, The Mummy is once again drawing people in droves to movie theatres. It’s almost like The Mummy has eternal life–which, of course, is the whole idea. A mummy is any dead animal or human body in which soft tissues have been preserved …
Liberty Bell 7
On July 21, 1961, Virgil Ivan “Gus” Grissom, 33, a decorated fighter pilot, was strapped into the tiny Mercury space capsule he’d nicknamed Liberty Bell 7 and launched into space aboard a Redstone rocket. The U.S.’s first manned spaceflight, Alan Shepard 15-minute sub-orbital flight, had occurred just 2 1/2 months before. Grissom’s mission was nearly …
The spider-goat clones of Montreal
Cloned, genetically altered goats producing spider silk in their milk sounds like something out of The X-Files, but it was in all the papers last week when a company called Nexia revealed it had cloned three goats (Clint, Danny and Arnold), and explained why. The cloning of goats brings to four (sheep, mice, cows …
Arthritis
I’ve probably thought more about arthritis over the years than most guys my age, because my Mom has had rheumatoid arthritis since before I was born. This week I’ve been thinking about it more than usual, though, for two reasons: one, I’m writing a book on the subject and two, a new arthritis drug has …
A new solar system
The idea that planets orbit most of the stars in the universe has such a firm hold on our imagination, thanks to Star Trek and Star Wars, that most people are surprised to hear we only found the first planet outside our solar system in 1995. Only this past week have we confirmed the existence …
Digital cameras
My wife and I recently returned from a vacation and, naturally, forced family members to sit through a slide-show detailing our adventures. There was, however, one big difference between our slides and the family slides I remember from childhood: my “slides” were shown on a computer, and involved no film whatsoever. That’s because they were …
Rockets
I have vivid memories from when I was a kid in Texas of travelling out into the countryside to watch my oldest brother and his friends launch rockets. This wasn’t some ’60s radicals’ attempt to overthrow the government of Swisher County, but a new hobby called model rocketry. The rockets came in all sizes, from …
Air
A report this week that air pollution, particularly ground-level ozone, is a more serious problem in Canada than previously thought got me to thinking about this stuff that we breathe. What is air? It’s a question we don’t ask very often, because we generally take air for granted. Air is the mixture of gases comprising …
The solar system
Voyager 1, now in interstellar space, sent back a final present a few years ago: a “family portrait” of the solar system, showing a shrunken sun and several tiny flecks of light–the planets. One of those flecks, a tiny blue dot, is the Earth. The past 20-some years has seen an explosion in planetary knowledge …
Hearing aids
Hearing is a remarkable sense that most of us take for granted–but not everyone can. Due to physical damage or simple aging, many people have lost some or most of their hearing. Enter the hearing aid, a device for amplifying sound and directing it into the ear. The original hearing aid was the hand cupped …
Nanolithography
My roommate in university had a quirk that annoyed teachers no end: he had the smallest handwriting of anyone I’ve ever met. While I used big old Bic pens on wide-lined notebook paper, he was using fine-point mechanical drafting pencils on the narrowest-lined paper he could find, and still leaving lots of room for any …
My latest live walk and vlog
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