Glue

Since I only wear glasses late at night when I take out my contacts, for the past couple of years I’ve been making do with an old pair of frames broken in two places: the nose piece and the right earpiece. I must have glued them back together a dozen times, but the repairs never …

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The science of love

 could be considered the worst possible person to tell anybody anything about love, being a 34-year-old single male whose only claim to romantic fame is an apparently unerring ability to be attracted to women who immediately thereafter fall head over heels for someone else, sometimes during our first (and only) date. On the other hand, …

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Galileo

One scientific anniversary stands out above all others this month: February 15, the 430th birthday of Galileo Galilei. Born near Pisa, Italy, in 1564, Galileo entered the University of Pisa as a medical student, but found that mathematics interested him more. Though he never got a degree, he was made professor of mathematics at his …

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Plastic

I vividly remember a science fiction book I read as a kid about the destruction of civilization by a new strain of bacteria. It didn’t kill people: it ate plastic. Electronic equipment disintegrated, clothes dissolved, airplanes fell apart, buildings burned–modern society ceased to function, so dependent had it become on plastic. If our ancestors lived …

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Satellites

Satellites have been much in the news recently–or, if you were trying to watch CBC Newsworld last week, in the absence of news. The failure of the Anik E-2 satellite drove home as nothing else could have just how important satellites have become to our everyday lives. (People really sit up and take note when …

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Happy 40th anniversary, USS Nautilus!

  There’s not much in the way of interesting scientific anniversaries on my list for this month, which suits me fine, because it means I can focus on the one that interests me most:  the 40th anniversary of the launch of the world’s first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, on January 21, 1954. I don’t …

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Coffee

Ask the average coffee drinker where coffee comes from and he’ll probably say “South America.”  Coffee actually originated in Ethiopia, where the coffee plant grows naturally.  Coffee has been drunk in Arabian countries for centuries, but was only introduced to Europe in the mid1600s.  Plantations established in European colonies in Indonesia, the West Indies and …

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Winter

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but…it’s winter. As I write this it’s -28 outside, huge piles of snow line the streets, and tow-truck operators are gainfully employed all over the city. Winter is on everyone’s minds, which must be why I was recently asked several winter-related questions by Colin Grewar, host …

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Dr. Tom Wenaus and the Superconducting Super Collider

A couple of years ago I wrote a column about one of the biggest scientific projects of our time, the Superconducting Super Collider, currently under construction in Texas.  I didn’t know at the time that a Regina man is one of the scientists working on it.   Dr. Torre Wenaus is a staff physicist at …

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The Superconducting Super Collider

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Human Genome Initiative, “biologists’ equivalent of the Apollo program.”  But there’s an even bigger and more expensive initiative happening down in Texas that you might call physicists’ equivalent of Apollo.   This gigantic (in every sense of the word) project is called the Superconducting Super Collider, or …

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Glass

There’s a window above my desk through I’m watching a cold wind blowing leaves down the street. It’s not blowing in my face, however, thanks to a very special material: glass. Glass is an “amorphous solid”– its molecules don’t form a strict pattern, like the molecules of steel or granite, but are jumbled together like …

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Big ideas

At this time of year it’s traditional to make resolutions concerning the new year, review the old year or preview the coming year. Well, I don’t normally make resolutions; reviewing the old year is done far better by others; and previewing the coming year would involve precognition–which I don’t believe in. There is, however, one …

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