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 …
Tag: science
Air conditioning
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 …
Sandcastle science
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, …
Rainbows
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 …
Robocup
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 …
Extrasolar planets
The idea that planets orbit most of the stars in the universe has such a firm hold on our imagination, thanks to Star Trek and Star Wars, that most people are surprised to hear we only found the first planet outside our solar system in 1995, and proof of other solar systems (stars with more than one planet …
Dreams: new research
The other night I dreamed I went into a Montreal restaurant with TV chef Emeril, where he annoyed the restaurant’s chef by taking over the cooking of a two-metre-long fish filet, which, when split open, contained a trilobite. “Monster darts!” exclaimed the restaurant’s chef, then demonstrated how to pull the legs off trilobites and throw …
Soccer
Watch me explain the science of soccer on CBC Newsworld, July 22, 2007: Hundreds of millions of soccer fans are now tuning in to the World Cup, where they’ll see, not just exciting games, but a fascinating display of scientific principles. Let’s start with the ball. The basic physics haven’t changed: when a ball is …
Space propulsion
It’s been more than 40 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, and, in the process, traveled faster than any human before. Today, we continue to send humans into orbit…where they travel at pretty much the same speed. Oh, sure, unmanned spacecraft have traveled much faster, and so did …
Stupid movie physics
The season of the movie blockbuster is upon us, and that means it’s time once again to ask the question: what planet do the people in movies live on? Judging by the physics displayed, it’s not this one. In our world, for example, you cannot outrun the fireball of an exploding bomb down the …
Ratbots
Picture this: there’s been an earthquake and you’re trapped in the rubble. In the dark you hear a scrabbling sound…and feel the long, naked tail of a rat slither across your cheek… Sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? But if recent research bears fruit, it may be a dream come true–because that rat could …
Taikonauts
On April 1, a spacecraft capable of carrying three people into orbit returned safely to Earth. That may not sound like news after 40 years of manned spaceflights, but this was a very special spacecraft: it was Chinese. Shenzhou (Heavenly Vessel) 3 carried instrumented mannequins instead of humans, but its success makes it more …
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