Some very very promising news on the cancer-fighting front.

I love stories like this, about mysterious happenings in the outer solar system…mainly because I’ve read so many science fiction stories where just such a seemingly innocuous astronomical event proves to be Earth-shattering in its implications (sometimes literally).

Advertisements sometimes refer to “Our patented solution to…” or “Patented protection from…”. The implication is that if something has been patented, it must be good. As the song from Porgy and Bess puts it (in an admittedly different context), “It ain’t necessarily so.” But first, a word or two about patents. A patent is “a …

Continue reading

Lor grunted and set off through the darkness of the park toward the yellow glow of the fog-shrouded city.

The control room of the CBC Saskatchewan radio studio from which The Afternoon Edition issues, just minutes before I went on today for my biweekly appearance with Colin Grewar to talk about science. (What I talked about will, of course, appear as my weekly science column on this blog tomorrow.)

Here I am singing “Just A Closer Walk” with the alumni chorus at Western Christian College‘s 2006 Homecoming over the weekend. As I mentioned earlier, it was my 30th reunion; most of the people (though not all) you see behind me in this picture were my classmates. An alumni chorus, made up of any current …

Continue reading

This could be big, even though it’s aimed at the very, very tiny: a portable device for filtering viruses out of the blood–smallpox, Ebola, avian flu, you name it. (Via Transterrestrial Musings.)

From New Scientist’s Latest Headlines site: The silence of a frigid, perpetually dark crater at the Moon’s South Pole will soon be shattered. A new mission, announced by NASA on Monday, aims to smash an SUV-sized impactor straight into the crater in late 2008. No, no it won’t. No matter how big the impactor or …

Continue reading

Have you ever wished you could pick up the fossils in a museum and turn them this way and that to get a better look? Now you can.

No, that’s not a typo; this new Dutch invention amplifies sounds for wearers coming from the direction they are looking, while suppressing other background sounds, allowing people with hearing difficulties to single out the voice of another person in a crowd, for example. An excellent idea! (Via Medgadget.)

“But the Lesser Barrier goes deep underground, as well as making a complete dome,” Karl said, remembering lessons with Tagaza. Bonus SF&F writing note: the above is a small example of an infodump. For completeness’s sake, here is the first sentence I wrote Saturday (no writing Sunday, thanks to high school reunioning and Candide rehearsing): …

Continue reading

More photos here.