You’ve probably heard of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” More than a decade ago, there was a lot of hoopla about something else coming in out of the cold: superconductivity. Newsmagazines did cover stories on the new high-temperature superconductors, and promised they would soon change our lives. After that…nothing. A new technological …
Tag: science
Farewell to Pioneer 10
This week, we bid farewell to a true pioneer: Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to leave our solar system. NASA last received a signal from Pioneer 10 on January 22. A February attempt failed, and last week NASA announced there would be no more attempts. That final faint signal traveled more than 12 billion kilometers—a …
Happiness
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are inalienable rights, according to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, but pursuing happiness isn’t the same thing as actually catching it, alas. However, new research is indicating ways we can increase our happiness quotient scientifically. Until recently the only way to measure an emotion scientifically was to focus …
Happy birthday, HAL
Last month a very important celebrity marked his birthday. He wasn’t an actor, though he was in a movie; he wasn’t an author, though he appeared in a book. And strangest of all, he died almost 30 years before he was born. He was HAL, the artificial intelligence that guided the spacecraft Discovery to its rendezvous with …
A new way to paint cars
We bought a new car a little over a year ago, and while choosing what make of car to purchase naturally took weeks of research and consideration, it took us almost as long again just to decide on what colour of car we wanted. (We settled on “platinum green.”) Painting an automobile involves many …
The tick of the biological clock
Before I had a baby daughter to keep me sleep-deprived, I almost always woke up a few minutes before the alarm went off. It’s a common phenomenon, and it’s only possible because we each have an additional clock, not on our bedside tables, but in our heads. These clocks regulate a number of bodily functions, …
Bitterness blocking
Taste is highly subjective. You may like rhubarb, which I regard as mutated celery. I, on the other hand, like haggis, whereas organ meats ground up with oatmeal and boiled in a sheep’s stomach may not appeal to you. And so on. And yet soon we may all be able to agree on what we …
Are bananas doomed?
Canadians eat approximately three billion bananas a year; it’s our favorite fruit. But a recent news story suggests the bananas we enjoy so much could be extinct within 10 years. The villain is a fungus by the ominous name of Black Sigatoka that’s spreading out of control through the banana-growing countries of the world, threatening …
Ice
Ice is an inescapable fact of life in Canada every winter. It makes roads and sidewalks slippery, bursts pipes, cracks pavements, heaves ground. It can bring down trees and power lines and even airplanes. And yet, if ice didn’t have the special properties that make it sometimes destructive and almost always a nuisance, two vitally …
Synthespians: artificial actors
In the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, one of the best performances is turned in by an actor who isn’t entirely real. Gollum, the hobbit-like creature who once possessed the One Ring and would do anything to possess it again is the latest and most-impressive-to-date example of a “synthespian”–a computer-generated actor. …
Making miksates…um, mistakes
The holidays are supposed to be a time of rest and relaxation, but if you’re like me, after several nights of parties, you feel pretty much as sleep-deprived as you did before the holidays, if not more so. Also if you’re like me, when you get tired you begin to make more miksates–er, mistakes, ranging …
Robot dogs and the people who love them
Dogs have been man’s best friend in the animal kingdom for thousands of years. They’re loyal companions and can even perform useful tasks like herding sheep and fetching slippers. They are easily attainable, cheap, and come in a variety of colors, shapes, sizes and temperaments. But in the past few years, a new breed of …
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