In 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, at the suggestion of mutual friends, presented their studies of evolution to the Linnean Society in London, England. By independent, thoroughly documented observations of variation
For much of history an end to breathing and a beating heart, marked death. This all changed in the last half of the 20th century when cardiopulmonary resuscitation, mechanical ventilation and, more recently,
Working on the longest time scale, 13 billion years ago and beyond, the James Webb Space Telescope is set to explore the roles of dark matter and giant black holes in creating stars
By the mid-20th century, quantum physics was a mature major success story. Fifty years earlier, some scientists including Max Planck, questioned whether the atom even existed. Yet within half a century, the particle
Dedicated NOTL care workers find ways to engage residents with fun and dignity It can’t be easy caring for residents in long-term care facilities, especially for those who have major cognitive
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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