Posted by Samia Madwar on Sunday, February 19, 2012
You may recall Troy Hurtubise, the man behind the full-body armour suit designed to withstand grizzly bear attacks. The Ontario native figures in TV shows and a National Film Board documentary, and is the author of Bear Man, The Troy Hurtubise Saga. He won an Ig Nobel prize for Safety Engineering (that’s him in the video) in 1998. Then there's Steve Penfold, the York University graduate student — now a professor at the University of Toronto — who won an Ig Nobel the following year for his research ...
Posted by Samia Madwar on Saturday, February 18, 2012
Climate scientists need to pay more attention to what indigenous peoples have to say on climate change, said Betsy Weatherhead, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Colorado.
At the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Vancouver on Saturday, Weatherhead said indigenous peoples in the Arctic have been documenting changes in not only temperature, but also weather patterns and changes in the ice around them for generations.
Posted by Samia Madwar on Friday, February 17, 2012
The oceans offer a wealth of genetic resources that can be cultured to produce anything from anticancer drugs and painkillers to chemicals used in cosmetics. But who owns those resources, and how they can be equally distributed among countries, remains vague. The question of governing waters that do not fall under any national jurisdiction makes capitalizing on marine genetic resources difficult, said Marjo Vierros of the United Nations University's Institute of Advanced Studies at a symposium ...
Posted by James Raffan on Monday, February 13, 2012
Credit: James Raffan
I’m jammed in a middle seat on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Ottawa, looking for creative things to occupy my mind to avoid assaulting the large passengers on either side of me who insist on occupying the middle arm rests. One possible way to improve the shining hour would be to draft a Middle Seat Manifesto (MSM) that would outline for my oafish starboard and port colleagues on this flight the fact that the window seat passenger has the window to lean on and the aisle seat passenger has ...
Posted by Rob Stimpson on Monday, February 13, 2012
A view of Ushuaia, Argentina. Credit: Jerzy Strzelecki
Photographer Rob Stimpson blogs from Ushuaia, en route to Antarctica. I am writing from Ushuaia, the southernmost city on the planet. Flying up the Beagle Channel to get here was spectacular, with the mountains shrouded in clouds and mist and sunlight peeking through. We landed in the early evening, surrounded by these huge pieces of rock on three sides and a window looking out to the Beagle Channel. Credit: Rob StimpsonThis is the jumping off spot for expeditions to the Antarctic Peninsula. ...
