I just returned from a conference where the topics discussed ranged from the discovery of feathered dinosaurs to the Mars Sojourner mission to artificial intelligence. Presenters included Dr. Philip Currie of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Bridget Landry of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a micropaleontologist from the University of Saskatchewan, a medical doctor, a linguist and …
Tag: science
Forest fires
As a kid, I read lots of stories in the “Bambi” genre, tales of young creatures growing up in the forest. All those books seemed to feature a forest fire at some point, which terrified both their animal heroes and me. With people living in and exploiting forests more and more, forest fires have begun …
The science of summer
Ah, the lazy, hazy days of summer. Time to kick back, relax, and ponder the big questions, the ones humans have asked themselves from time immemorial. Questions such as… What causes sunburn and tanning? Red skin is inflamed skin, and inflammation is the body’s effort to speed the healing of damaged tissue by rushing …
Black smokers
Deep beneath the oceans, continental plates grind together. Sea water seeps into the ocean floor, contacts superheated rock and roars back out through hydrothermal vents. Surrounding those vents, darkness, pressure, poison gas and heavy metal, acidity and temperatures ranging from freezing to hot enough to melt lead create a zone that would instantly kill most …
Sunscreens
Considering our winters, it’s not surprising we love the summer sun. Unfortunately, too much sun isn’t good for us: the thinning ozone layer is letting in more ultraviolet radiation than it used to, and as a result, skin cancer is on the increase. That unhappy fact has made sunscreens, concoctions that keep ultraviolet radiation …
Bridges
On June 6, 4,000 people walked across the Northumberland Strait from New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island. No, it wasn’t a miracle: it was a celebration of the first anniversary of the 12.9-kilometre Confederation Bridge, one of the longest multi-span bridges in the world. Impressive though it is, Confederation Bridge is really just a modern …
Nuclear testing
With the explosion of “nuclear devices” (aka “bombs”) in the past couple of weeks, India and Pakistan have joined the “nuclear club,” and also, alas. brought nuclear weapons into the forefront of the news for the first time in years. So perhaps it’s time for a little refresher course on just how a nuclear bomb …
Wind power
Even in the years when we don’t have much in the way of crops around these parts, we always have wind–which got me thinking, isn’t it a shame there’s no way to farm the wind? (It’s not a new notion; after all, even the Bible says, in Hosea 8:7, “They sow the wind and reap …
Megaliths
As we lie on our couches and flick our TV remotes, we tend to think we are far more advanced than our distant ancestors, who mostly just struggled to stay alive. But every so often we run across something that reminds us that lack of technology does not equal stupidity. An example recently turned up …
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
People in Sudbury are used to the idea of digging hundreds of metres underground and finding all sorts of valuable things, such as nickel and copper. But scientists hope to find something even more valuable in the rock beneath Sudbury over the next few months: namely, answers to some of the most vexing questions …
Hackers and crackers
In the1983 movie WarGames, a teenager with a modem nearly triggered World War III. It was pure fiction, of course. Then, just last week, a group calling itself Masters of Downloading claimed it had stolen a suite of programs used to run classified US military networks and satellites from the Defense Information Systems Agency. Previously, most …
Crickets in space
One of my favorite sketches on the original Muppet Show as “Pigs in Space,” in which the intrepid crew of the starship Swine Trek faced danger, excitement and bad writing while exploring the final frontier. As far as I know, no real pigs have yet flown into space, but many other animals have made the …
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