Trains have been on my mind lately, partly because I just completed a two-day trip from San Francisco by train, but also because trains have been in the news lately: Montreal’s Bombardier was in hot water over cracks in the suspensions of Amtrak’s high-speed Acela trains, McLean’s magazine recently ran a front-page story on …
Humans will return to the moon next year, more than 30 years after the last Apollo astronauts left. Unfortunately, the new lunar visitors will have a large handicap that will hinder their exploration efforts: they’ll all be dead. The humans in questions will arrive in the form of small amounts of ashes from cremated remains, …
It’s time again to announce the winners of some of the most prestigious prizes in science. No, not THOSE. I’m not talking about the IgNobel Prizes, awarded annually by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research to those who have done something that first makes people laugh, then makes them think; or, to put …
I’m a child of the Space Age, born a year and a half after Sputnik. Apollo 11 landed on the moon on my 10th birthday; Viking landed on Mars on my 17th. There is no doubt in my mind that if the human race is to survive, we must move out into space, to make …
Imagine a tree taller than the tallest building in Regina–by several stories; a tree as tall as a 30-story building. Imagine a tree trunk so massive you could easily live inside its hollowed trunk. Now imagine a whole stand of such trees, a valley filled with them. That’s the amazing reality of the Coast Redwoods. …
Every Labour Day weekend, somewhere in the world, thousands of peopld gather for the World Science Fiction Convention. This year they gathered in San Jose, California, for the 60th WorldCon, as fans call it, and I was there. WorldCon covers the whole world of science fiction and fantasy, with particular emphasis, not on TV and …
Canada Geese are among the most identifiable birds on the prairies, but we tend to have a love-hate relationship with them. We love to see and hear them honking overhead on a quiet autumn evening–but we hate what they do to our parks, lawns and golf courses. But if you think today’s geese are a …
One of the prototypical science fiction novels is H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which invaders from the Red Planet successfully conquer the Earth, only to succumb in the end, not to humanity’s feeble efforts, but to the attacks of Earth’s microbes, against which they have no defense. Wells may have been the first SF …
If you were fortunate enough to be able to spend last week in a climate-controlled environment, give thanks to Willis Haviland Carrier, whose new-fangled invention, air conditioning, first went into service 100 years ago, on July 17, 1902. Modern air conditioning is an offshoot of an earlier invention, mechanical refrigeration, which is based on the …
One of the great joys of childhood is making sandcastles on the beach; and oddly enough, part of the fun is also watching a wave wash them away. It’s a little startling to find out, then, that something instinctively understood by children–that damp sand sticks together–was only recently explained scientifically in 1997. Dr. Peter Schaffer, …
Saskatchewan has elected to call itself “Land of Living Skies.” One good reason appeared in the sky on Canada Day following an afternoon thunderstorm: a rainbow. In space, the sky is black and the sun appears white, and that’s all there is to it. But before the light of the sun reaches us down here …
Picture this: it’s World Cup 2050. The preliminaries are over and the two finalists are facing each other in the first-place game. Onto the field trot two teams–but only one of them is human. The other is made up of robots. Today we’re accustomed to robots that do everything from build cars to defuse …
