I’ve read this three times…

…and I still don’t really understand it. But apparently, light, which has previously been brought essentially to a stop in experiments, has now been given negative speed, so that the peak of a pulse of light emerges from an optical fiber in the reverse direction before the peak of the pulse has even entered the …

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Paging Captain Nemo

I honestly had no idea until just now that one (well, not this one) can now buy a luxury submarine capable of a transatlantic crossing. (Via Gizmodo.) So where are the luxury airship yachts? Surely they can’t be far behind…

Bonus Photo of Yesterday: Me as Diefenbaker

Yesterday I took a flying trip to Saskatoon for a media event promoting the Celebration of Rural History and Culture in Mossbank I’ll be a part of on June 17. Among the many events that day are several historical re-enactments–including the historic debate between T.C. Douglas and Ross Thatcher in 1955, after the latter defected …

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Belated Photo of the (Yester)Day: Saskatoon Across the River

More photos here.

More promising cancer therapy news

As the joke goes, “of course we can cure your cancer–provided you’re a mouse.” But the first component of this therapy is moving into human trials.

Photo of the Day: A Spot of Colour

More photos here.

Orson Scott Card bio cover up at Amazon

Here’s the cover art for my children’s biography of Orson Scott Card, Orson Scott Card: Architect of Alternate Worlds, which has just appeared on Amazon.com–it must have just been posted because I checked the entry just a day or two ago and it wasn’t there then. This probably means my author’s copies will be showing …

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Much more detail about those cancer-curing mouse cells…

…can be found here. Of particular interest, of course, is the section headed “What Do These Results Mean For Human Cancer Therapy?”. Here’s some of it: First, we should point out that in this mouse system the donor and recipient mice were both in the same in-bred laboratory strains of mice. Thus, except for the …

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Cutting grass down to size

If you own a home, and that home has grass out in front of (or behind) it, then summer is lawn-mowing time. Lawns as we know them date back to the 1700s, when British estates began to feature lawns that flowed away from the house into the surrounding woods. The custom carried over to North …

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Yeah, but can you play Half Life 2 in it?

Indiana State University will soon have the most realistic virtual-reality room in the world, featuring 100 million pixels that display on all six surfaces–walls, ceiling and floor.

Photo of the Day: Massive Mask

I made my biweekly appearance as a science columnist on CBC Radio One’s Afternoon Edition today. I walk under this giant artwork in Regina’s CBC Broadcast Centre to get to the studio. Created for the 1998 National Aboriginal Awards broadcast, this reproduction of a mask by Victoria artist Phil Ashbee is made of styrofoam on …

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North Dakota another planet?

Sounds about right. (He should try Saskatchewan.) But that just makes it ideal for testing a new Mars suit prototype, developed for a paltry $100,000 in that great state just to the south of us.