by Raymond NakamuraI am a lapsed scientist. I have not been part of an official system for cranking out new scientific knowledge. But I still like to think about science-y things when I can.A little while ago, I was watching The Sisters Brothers movie a little while ago (not for children) and wondered about various details in the story, which might have a real life answer, such as the tooth powder, or might be made…

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 There's a lot of action happening around Mars right now.  In February 2021, three new space probes arrived at Mars. The first was Hope Probe, sent by United Arab Emirates, which will orbit Mars and study the planet's atmosphere for an entire Martian year (that's 867 days for scientists back on Earth!) The UAE space agency has an interactive website at this link which updates Hope Probe in real time. The second probe to arrive…

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 by Yolanda RidgeSci Why Post: March 5, 2021 The Science behind Conspiracy Theories It’s been almost one year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. We know a lot more about the coronavirus than we did then but there’s still lots of conspiracy theories about it and many people who believe them. What is a conspiracy theory? It’s an attempt to explain tragic events by the actions of a small, powerful group of…

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Winter offers endless delights: sledding and snow forts, animal tracks criss-crossing the snowy forest floor, and countless excuses for hot chocolate. But the delights often come with biting wind and painfully cold fingers. Winter can become too much of a good thing, and many of us are eager for spring far before it arrives.Some animals, like groundhogs, bats or bumblebee queens, skip the season altogether by hibernating. They nestle down in the fall and get…

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 What Happened to Vera Vixen?by Nina Munteanu  It’s late December in the old-growth riparian forest of Jackson Creek, Ontario. A light snow is falling on the cedars and pines. My footfalls crunch over a frozen sponge of litter and loam as I maneuver around large boulder erratics and tall cedars trees that creak and sway in the brisk winter wind. I head down the slope to the creek which gurgles and chortles. Occasionally, the ice…

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 What Happened to Vera Vixen?by Nina Munteanu  It’s late December in the old-growth riparian forest of Jackson Creek, Ontario. A light snow is falling on the cedars and pines. My footfalls crunch over a frozen sponge of litter and loam as I maneuver around large boulder erratics and tall cedars trees that creak and sway in the brisk winter wind. I head down the slope to the creek which gurgles and chortles. Occasionally, the ice…

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 Quantum Mechanics is weird. In a quantum world of photons and sub-atomic particles, things behave very differently from the world that we can observe and know. It’s extremely difficult to understand that light is botha photon particle and a wave. It’s very hard to believe that a particle doesn’t have a specific property until you measure it. And until then it has all the possible properties you might measure. Famously, Einstein himself didn’t believe this,…

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When you look at an iceberg floating on the ocean, you see just the top bit. Tucked beneath the water lies the other 90% of it—the hidden behemoth. Would you believe that looking at a plant could be the same? It's hard to imagine that when looking at house plants. Their pots are so tiny! But out in the wild, the root system of a plant can extend for metres and metres—as tall as you…

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by Joan Marie Galat  I wasn’t looking for a new hobby when I discovered how fun it is to play with stop motion animation. Inspired by a friend’s video of a jigsaw puzzle completing itself, I decided to learn more about the technique of moving static objects in small increments and photographing each change. Playing back a series of frames makes objects appear to move, and you have animation.Stop motion is a useful STEAM (science, technology,…

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 Comets have always mystified people looking up into the night sky. When Comet Hyakutake was blazing across the night sky in 1996, I was lucky enough to be living on a farm an hour's drive north of Edmonton. For my family, the sky above our farm was PLENTY dark for comet-watching. We didn't need to be told where to look. The comet was big, and plenty bright enough to see.image by E. Kolmhofer, H. Raab;…

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