March 2012
17 posts
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James Cameron's Deep and Lonely Dive
The Canadian film director James Cameron has become the first solo-diver to reach the deepest seabed on Earth, the 11km deep Mariana Trench. He made the descent in a prototype submarine called “Deepsea Challenger”, taking around two hours to reach the bottom. Once he reached a depth of 10,898 metres (35,756 ft), his first words up to the surface were: “All systems OK.”
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Endowment Envy: Sizing up Canada to the US
Why are Canadian students (and those from the rest of the world) so interested in studying at schools in the United States? Beyond the stadiums, frat parties and cheerleaders, the answer probably has a lot to do with institutional resources. The annual endowment (cash in the bank) of American schools puts the rest of the world to shame.
I have put together a simple graph to show the disparity...
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Cutting the Life out of Meat
Despite its appearance (see image) raw Chicken McNugget paste is made from living creatures. In the future this may not be necessary. Scientists in the Netherlands have figured out how to grow tiny portions of lab meat without the involvement of messy livestock.
Mark Post at Maastricht University, has been developing the technology to grow meat in labs from satellite cells. His research team...
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The Grave Stone of Germania
In 1937 Adolf Hitler’s architect Albert Speer was given the task of transforming Berlin from the sprawling metropolis that it was into Germania, the gleaming new capital of a Greater German ‘World Empire’, the centrepiece of the civilised world. The vast majority of Speer’s wildly ambitious plans were never expanded beyond miniature models. Those that were built have been mostly...
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A History of the World's First Supercar
Automobili Lamborghini was founded by Ferruccio Lamborghini, the child of wine makers from the township of Renazzo di Cento, in Northern Italy. After serving as a mechanic in the Regia Aeronautica during World War II, Lamborghini went into business building tractors out of leftover military hardware from the war effort. By the mid-1950s, Lamborghini’s tractor company, Lamborghini Trattori...
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The Social Climbing Super-Computer
Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM’s DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM’s first president, Thomas J. Watson.
In 2011, as a test of its abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy!, in the show’s only...
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“The process by which red blood cells are produced is called erythropoiesis....”
– “Circular of Information for Blood and Blood Products” American Association of Blood Banks, American Red Cross, 2011
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NATO’s Mission: Installing a permanent and capable...
By: Reagan Charles Cook for Frontline Defence Magazine
November 16th 2011
Over the last decade the Canadian Forces and its allies have worked to liberate Afghanistan and destroy the country’s insurgent network. Major General (MGen) Michael D. Day was first deployed in Afghanistan in March of 2002. Since then he has been back and forth on more than 30 occasions. MGen Day was at the Canadian...
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Black History March: Mae Jemison
Mae Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an American physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first black woman to travel in space. After her medical education and a brief general practice, Jemison served in the Peace Corps in Africa from 1985 to 1987. She joined NASA in 1987, and went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992. She resigned from NASA in 1993 to form a...
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In 2010, one in six girls in the United States entered puberty by the age 8. A hundred years ago, only one in a hundred entered puberty that early.
Researchers have hypothesized that early puberty onset has been caused by an unhealthy, genetically modified diet containing high levels of estrogen and placenta, and by certain chemicals, namely phthalates, which are used in many cosmetics, toys,...
