Ryan Marciniak, Astronomy and Physics Co-Editor Science fiction has captured humanity’s dreams of travelling to distant stars, colonizing new worlds, accessing new dimensions, encountering hostile aliens, and surviving a galaxy far, far away. Yet with all our real-world technological prowess, why haven’t any of these dreams become reality? The short answer is that flying into […]
astronomy
Method to the madness: Validating spooky action using starlight
By Kaitlin Williams, for the second season of the New Science Communicator series. Two quantum particles in an initial entangled state fly hundreds of thousands of meters apart. A measurement is taken on the first particle, and immediately, the knowledge of the first particle’s measurement has influenced the value of the second particle. This surreal […]
Fly Me to the (Super) Moon
by Emmanuel Fonseca Physics & Astronomy subject editor The Internet has been buzzing for the past few weeks about several major events involving the moon. Some of my non-astronomy friends were pretty confused after being inundated with conflicting online posts about both a lunar eclipse and a “super moon” happening this weekend. So which one […]
Canada isn’t immune to the Thirty Meter Telescope controversy
Stephanne Taylor, Physics & Astronomy co-editor The Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) project is exactly what it says on the box: a telescope with a staggering 30 metre segmented lens, housed in an 18-storey observatory in the very early stages of construction on Mauna Kea, Hawai’i. If built, the TMT will be the largest telescope in […]
Celebrating women in science
Susan Vickers and Lisa Willemse, Communication, Education & Outreach co-editors Popular books, conferences, and the Internet (from websites to “most influential on Twitter” lists) make a compelling argument that, until very recently, science was an activity reserved for men. Were our great grandmothers uninterested in science? Were they prevented from conducting scientific research because […]