In highly social species such as chimpanzees, understanding who’s in charge, who has influence, who’s in, who’s out, and shifting alliances between others, often make big differences when it comes to finding a
Estimates suggest that as many as 20 to 30 per cent of patients with COVID develop long lasting symptoms, what’s been called “long COVID.” Initially many were asymptomatic or had mild symptoms, only
In his 2021 book, “A Brief History of Earth,” Harvard geologist Andrew Knoll wrote, “What is life, anyway? What … differentiates us and dogs and oak trees and bacteria from mountains, volcanoes, and minerals?
Just when most people have happily returned to life without a mask and social distancing, a mini surge in COVID cases involving variants of Omicron is sweeping across Canada. Some of those cases
My father was born in England and, like one of his brothers, loved to work in his garden. That sometimes required selective and even aggressive pruning to bring out the best in his
Situational awareness, an ability to know precisely where you are, the terrain you’re crossing, possible landing spots in an emergency and awareness of ever-changing weather, is critical for pilots, whether they fly single-engine training
Time: Looking Back and Forward To look far out in the universe is to look far back in time. Despite the blistering speed of light (rounded out to 300,000 kilometres per second), the
In last week’s column I suggested humans were most capable of learning novel cognitive and motor skills, and were most creative, between the teenage years and late thirties. To support my hypothesis, I
One of my pet working hypotheses is that humans are at their best, cognitively speaking, between their late teens and late thirties, especially for disciplines that do not require long periods of training
In a recent column about time, I wrote about the regularity of time, and time related to the universe, geology and evolution. For all, time was assumed to be the same everywhere: that is,
Within a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, something very tiny, very dense and quantal in nature, inflated faster than the speed of light into something very much larger, jampacked with a dizzying
Five billion years ago when our solar system took form, the early sun was surrounded by a vast swirling disc of stardust left over from the collapse and explosions of earlier stars in
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Beginning in Africa several million years ago, mammoths reached much of Eurasia, and eventually 20,000 years ago, the Americas. Some mammoths developed a rich covering of fur to protect them against the cold
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Our sun was born in this region of the Milky Way, the third star in the neighbourhood. The first two long ago completed their cycles from birth to burning brightly before finally collapsing into a
No less than Charles Darwin, the father of evolution by natural selection, speculated a century and a half ago that birdsong might be among the many evolutionary precursors to human language. Turns out
The James Webb space telescope was launched with much fanfare on Christmas Eve to take up station a million miles from Earth, where the gravitational forces of the sun, Earth and moon acting
According to the brilliant Cambridge physicist and mathematician Paul Dirac, Albert Einstein was the most brilliant physicist of the 20th century, and possibly all time. But even Einstein could be stubbornly, even spectacularly
Last August as the number of COVID cases wound down in the U.S. and Canada, many felt the worst was over. After all, the numbers were falling and many were now vaccinated, especially in
Sometimes we are so busy we barely have time to think. Here’s what one very busy day looked like – then guess who and when: Breakfast at 5 a.m. with fried eggs and bacon.
In biology, structure dictates function. That’s certainly the case with protein-encoding genes: the sequence of bases in a specific gene dictates the sequence of bases in an intermediate molecule called messenger RNA, which in
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Evidence from Israel last year suggested the immunity to the COVID virus created by two shots of a mRNA vaccine might begin to wane as early as three to four months following the second shot.
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The scene was surreal on Dec. 30: just a few blocks from the Niagara Long-Term Care Residence where my wife resides, streets and stores were crowded with shoppers inside and outside lined up, most with masks
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Where SARS-Cov-2 is concerned, surprise is the operative word. As recently as last summer some experts began to imagine a world beyond COVID or at least a world where COVID was corralled well
If all goes well, the most powerful, capable, expensive and complex star-gazing satellite telescope yet – the James Webb telescope – is slated for launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket later this month. It’s been
Remember this time a year ago, all was relatively quiet several months following the opening first surge of COVID-19 in the winter and spring of 2020. That early days surge seemed to affect mostly
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