Better know a prokaryote
Escherichia coli, or E. coli, as its friends know it, has gotten a pretty bad rap lately. From tainting water supplies in Walkerton, Ontario to…
science
Human versus machine
In the boardrooms, laboratories and command centres of space agencies around the world a war is coming — a war, which will pit burley astronauts,…
Ask a scientist
What causes brain freeze? Since, according to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), it is the most common cause of headache, odds are most of you…
The Ultimate Downer
On the morning of April 5, 1994, Jarrod woke up wide-eyed. Believing that he could fly, the teenager convinced his father to drive him and…
The need to continue our journey into space
Though I’m not the first one to come to the conclusion that, at the end of the day, we’re screwed if we stick with Earth,…
Thinking critically about pigs
Last March, I wrote a piece on pigs for the Manitoban, following the dispute in the campus center between the Winnipeg Humane Society’s “Quit-Stalling” campaigners…
Visions of neuroscience
“Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?” Leonardo da Vinci once asked. While this is an…
Better know a prokaryote
The virus formerly known as “swine flu,” or the H1N1 strain of the common influenza virus, has gotten all the press lately, so I thought…
Carbon, we hardly know ye
You are mostly water and carbon. Oh, sure, there is some nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen, along with a host of other elements thrown in there,…
Alan Turing
“The allied invasion of occupied France was the beginning of the end.” “The Nazis spreading themselves over too many fronts lead to their own defeat.”…