Annual “Ig Nobel” Prizes awarded
University of Toronto researchers among this year's winners
View ArticleOldest embryos may contain dinosaur tissue
University of Toronto researcher analyzes Chinese fossils
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Where you should go this summer
Canadians don’t generally think of their own country among the world’s great vacation spots. Ask a Vancouverite or a Montrealer about an ideal place to spend some downtime, and you’ll likely hear...
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The Grizzly 1999-2009
The Rocky Mountain wilderness of Banff National Park is steely, unforgiving territory, an eruption of rock and ice so short of food that grizzlies here grow smaller than their coastal, salmon-chomping...
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Outward Bound . . . in urban ravines?
Launching deep woods expeditions from remote wilderness bases has been the core of Outward Bound Canada’s (OB) program for 40 years. But shifting demographics, busier work schedules and rising costs...
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Never say die
Barcroft Media Scientists are finding that the world’s oceans are being infested with a specific species of jellyfish—one that can potentially live forever. “We’re facing a worldwide silent invasion,”...
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The big player
Jean-Pol Grandmont The Chinese kiri tree is a miracle of nature. It grows 10 to 20 feet in a single year and up to 80 in seven, it regenerates from the roots after it’s been harvested, it’s so hearty...
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Vacation from hell
AFP Photo / Getty Images “You’re cursed now,” the Peruvian guide chided. Nakita Haining had just picked up one of dozens of skulls and bones strewn across ancient burial grounds in Peru when the guide...
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Alberta’s busiest builders
Stephen J. Krasemann / Getty Images Here’s a complete list of the equipment Jean Thie used to discover the world’s longest beaver dam: 1. Google Earth. 2. His brain. One of these he was born with; the...
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Monster season is upon us
Chris Murphy / Whitehotpix / ZUMA / KEYSTONE A few weeks ago, two nurses were strolling along the shore of Big Trout Lake, in northern Ontario, when their dog hauled something from the water. It was...
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Straight out of Hitchcock
HINRICH BAESEMANN / NEWSCOM Bloodied pedestrians and official warnings are the telltale sign that Berlin’s crows have launched their annual reign of terror. “It was like a Hitchcock horror film,” a...
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Who’s afraid of Dino the bear?
ISTOCK Dopey and starving after a long winter’s nap, Dino the bear began searching for food—and wandered into the limelight. The 385-lb. brown bear, nicknamed by the Italian media, has been frustrating...
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Caution: angry crows with long memories
Getty Images With attack-of-the-crows season finally over, city dwellers in the crow-rich Pacific Northwest can breathe a sigh of relief. Yes, spring in these parts has come to mean more than just...
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Sun surges: Yet another apocalypic theory to worry about
NASA/Getty Images In March 1989, six million Quebecers lost power for nine hours after a massive solar flare—an explosion of magnetic energy from the sun—created electric ground currents here on Earth,...
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Thankfully summer will soon be done
DAVIDE MONTELEONE/CONTRASTO/REDUX No matter how often I tell myself “everything dies,” which everything certainly does—hot water bottles, for example, and I have the scald burns to prove it, and my...
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The other long-form census
Antonina Rogacheva/Shirshov Institute/ Kevin Raskoff/Monterey Peninsula The International Census of Marine Life, which has taken 10 years and the involvement of thousands of scientists across 80...
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Now I’ve got to worry about flies, too
Shuji Kajiyama/AP “I was an exile in Manhattan” has an improbable ring, rather like the fifties radio program I Was a Communist for the FBI. All the same, it wasn’t Duluth or Thunder Bay, but glorious,...
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Building a better bee
Jon Rowley/SWNS.COM Every morning at about nine, Ron Hoskins slips into his white beekeepers outfit, pulls trays out from beneath 17 of his 50 buzzing apiaries in a conservation park in Swindon,...
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Trees falling from the sky
Getty Images Massive planes, once used to blanket the earth in land mines, could soon be dropping a very different kind of bomb—pointed containers with saplings inside. “There is renewed interest in...
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On a deadly trail
Valerie Courtois/Canadian Boreal For years, First Nations groups and scientists have been warning about the decline of caribou. Now, with some herds wiped out completely and others suffering declines...
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When the sea goes silent
45 dolphins beached themselves in shallow water off the coast of Australia | Reuters When weakened by disease, starvation or injury, dolphins succumb to an instinctual fear of drowning. Seized with...
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Trashing the island
Jonathan Alcorn/Keystone Press The sea, as any poet will tell you, invites metaphor, and scientists are as susceptible to its powers as those who deal in tropes. Having surveyed the stew of shattered...
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Madagascar: Island of earthly delights
Harald Schuetz/WWF Madagascar Madagascar is one of Earth’s last great tropical wildernesses and, in the past decade, scientists have found an incredible 615 new species there, according to a new report...
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In the company of whales
Eric Cheng/Barcroft Media/Getty Images Tourist brochures refer to Dominica, a tiny Caribbean island between Guadeloupe and Martinique, as “the Nature Island” for its lush vegetation, its...
View ArticleThe quiet cuts
Among various cuts at Environment Canada, the government is apparently about to eliminate an ozone monitoring program. The British journal Nature says scientists and research institutes around the...
View ArticleKyoto might be finished, but what next?
The policy Stephen Harper’s government on climate change has been so weak that anyone interested in the issue could be forgiven for assuming that the official Canadian stance going into this month’s...
View ArticleIPCC plus 20: a world warming but not frying
The CBC provided us with an interesting case study in science reporting on Monday as its “community team” blog trumpeted “UN climate change projections made in 1990 ‘coming true.’” Climate change...
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‘Nature Wars’ author Jim Sterba on Bambi and wildlife overpopulation
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE NORITZ Jim Sterba is a veteran foreign reporter at the Wall Street Journal and one-time war correspondent, but his latest book, Nature Wars, is about insurgency of a different...
View ArticleNature journal urges approval for Keystone, says oilsands not that dirty
WASHINGTON – A prestigious science journal has gone to bat for TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, urging the White House to greenlight the controversial project and arguing that Alberta’s oilsands...
View ArticleFeral: Why George Monbiot is eating lots of raw meat
Feral: Rewilding The Land, The Sea, And Human Life By George Monbiot In the first paragraph of his latest book, George Monbiot eats a plump and juicy bug. Specifically: a beetle larva that tasted...
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We are all Neanderthal
AFP/Getty Images On the Tibetan plateau, where altitudes reach 4,000 m and up, most people would get sick from lack of oxygen. But, because of a unique adaptation, Tibetans produce less oxygen-carrying...
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Nova Scotia is racing to protect its fragile ‘Moose Sex Corridor’
A camera trap captures a bull mose, Alces alces, as it descends to a forest clearing, New Brunswick, Canada. (Nick Hawkins) The Chignecto Isthmus—the corridor connecting New Brunswick to Nova Scotia...
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A new weapon in the war on Canada Geese: baseball bats
Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) defending its nest with eggs. (John Cancalosi/Getty Images) It was a scene like the denouement of a young-adult novel: as the school day ended, a University of Manitoba...
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Why animals should be given the same legal rights as humans
(Trevor Paterson/Unsplash) In 2014, the Supreme Court of India, issued a precedent-setting decision. It extended the mantle of Article 21 of the nation’s constitution, which protects human life and...
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