How long will you live?

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, May 14, 2013 at 11:11 AM - 0 Comments

Pasieka/Science Photo Library

Tomiko Kadonaga, who turned 100 on Jan. 8, will tell you she’s had an easy life. Others would say differently. Kadonaga, who was born in B.C. to Japanese-Canadian parents, was placed in an internment camp during the Second World War, housed with her husband, Saul, in buildings intended for livestock. “The stall where I was had a little blue card outside that said, ‘First Prize Cow,’ ” she says with a wry smile. “I thought, ‘At least I’m first prize.’ ” Her godmother offered Saul a job on a farm in Port Hope, Ont., and a way out; leaving all their possessions behind, they moved to the area in 1942, and had a daughter. Saul died of esophageal cancer in 1989.

Today, Kadonaga, who lives alone in a neatly kept townhouse in Toronto’s north end, is the picture of contentment. Her legs bother her a bit, she says (she gets around with a flowery purple cane), but otherwise she’s in good health. In Canada, average life expectancy is 81, yet more people than ever are living to be 100. In 2011, we had 5,825 centenarians, according to Statistics Canada, up from 3,795 10 years before. As life expectancy continues to rise, it could hit over 17,000 by 2031. Why some people outlive almost everyone else—and remain in good health, even into very old age—remains one of the grand questions of science. Researchers have credited everything from diet and exercise to genetics. A clue to the secret of Kadonaga’s longevity, one we’re only starting to understand, lies buried deep within her cells: the tiny bits of DNA that cap the ends of her chromosomes, called telomeres.

Telomeres shorten as we age, but the telomeres of centenarians are remarkably long, according to Gil Atzmon at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York—more like those of people three decades younger, or even younger than that. Often compared to the plastic ends that keep shoelaces from fraying, telomeres prevent chromosomes from unravelling and fusing to each other. Each time a cell divides, some of the telomere is lost; when it becomes too short, the cell dies. Telomeres are protected by a powerful anti-aging enzyme, one produced by our own cells: it’s called telomerase, which rebuilds telomeres and protects them from wearing down, a discovery that won scientists Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak the Nobel prize in 2009. Healthy people with longer telomeres seem to be at lower risk of age-related illness, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer—the main diseases that stop us in our tracks today.

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Chris Hadfield: Good Morning, Earth!

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, May 14, 2013 at 10:03 AM - 0 Comments

• A sneak peek at our new ebook — available through Apple, Amazon and Kobo.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield is back on Earth after five months in space.

The first Canadian ever to command the International Space Station (ISS), Hadfield has opened a window into life in space as never before, inspiring millions to closely follow his mission. Maclean’s marks his return with a new ebook that gives an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look into Hadfield’s mission.

Since launching aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on Dec. 19, and even before then, Hadfield has been an enthusiastic Twitter user (his followers number 913,000 and counting). And yet his responsibilities stretched far beyond the songs, videos, photos and messages he shared from space. He and his crew have performed more than 130 science experiments on this mission. Crewmates Tom Marshburn and Chris Cassidy completed a five-hour spacewalk to fix a dramatic ammonia leak aboard the ISS, with Hadfield as their spacewalk choreographer. In one week, the crew finished a whopping 71 hours of research, setting a new record for the Station.

In September, Maclean’s reporter Kate Lunau travelled to NASA’s Johnson Space Center to shadow Hadfield. She was the only Canadian print reporter to attend, and watched Hadfield, Marshburn, and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko as they trained for what would become the mission of a lifetime.

For the first time, Chris Hadfield: #GoodMorningEarth brings together her reporting and never-before-seen photos from NASA, as well as Hadfield’s Twitter diary, photos, and more.

Chris Hadfield: #GoodMorningEarth includes:

• A behind-the-scenes look at Hadfield’s training at NASA’s elite astronaut facilities
• A chronicle of Hadfield’s journey as told by his tweets
• Dozens of his best landscape photos of Earth
• A glimpse into some of the science experiments—which total more than 130—that Hadfield and his crew performed aboard the Space Station
• A collection of Maclean’s writings on Canada’s first space commander

“By using the technology that’s available now, we can really make this experience alive, in real time,” Hadfield told Maclean’s earlier this year, from the ISS.

“When I look out the window and see something magnificent go by, I can immediately broadcast it, and people can ride along with me.”

Chris Hadfield: #GoodMorningEarth shows just what an incredible ride it has been.

You’ll find it on Apple, Amazon and Kobo.

Why death isn’t always permanent

By Kate Lunau - Saturday, April 27, 2013 at 6:40 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Stephanie Noritz

Cardiac arrest is the only condition that will one day affect every one of us, says Dr. Sam Parnia, an intensive care physician, director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook University school of medicine in New York and author of the new book Erasing Death. The good news is that, according to Parnia, death is reversible. Parnia is director of the Aware Study, which is looking into what happens to human consciousness during and after death.

Q: You suggest that death is not a moment, but a process. Can you explain?

A: For centuries, if not millennia, the way we have considered death has been when a person’s heart stops and, as a result, because there’s no blood flow, the person stops breathing and the brain stops functioning, so we become lifeless and develop into a corpse. That has been considered the moment of death. That was not a problem, because until about 50 years ago [with the advent of CPR], there was no way of reversing that. You and I have inherited a concept of death as an absolute moment from which there’s no return.

Advances in the last 10 years have started to shake our understanding of death. Contrary to what we thought, after a person dies, [brain] cells don’t necessarily die in just a few minutes. They can remain in a viable state for many hours. A point will come where the cells inside our brain are so damaged that no matter what we do, we can’t restore function. But that takes many hours. It’s now possible to manipulate those processes and prevent cells from cascading toward their own death, to fix the underlying problem that caused the person to die, and bring back a whole person. You’d still define a person as dead, but the big [shift in understanding] is that it’s not permanent until quite a bit afterwards.

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This week’s newsmakers

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Paul J. Richards/Reuters

Holy diversity, Batman

In the latest issue of Batgirl, a character named Alysia Yeoh reveals she’s transgendered, and her roommate, Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl, responds with a hug. The storyline was created by writer Gail Simone, who notes that the world of comic-book superheroes is becoming more diverse. In 2012, Green Lantern revealed he is gay, and that same year, Northstar (the first superhero to come out, in 1992) married his long-time partner, Kyle. Batwoman, who headlines her own title, is a lesbian. Diversity is “the issue for superhero comics,” Simone told Wired, noting that many of her industry’s most recognizable characters were dreamed up half a century ago, when sexuality and gender issues were treated much differently. If writers were to simply build around those characters, “then we look like an episode of The Andy Griffith Show for all eternity.”

Chávez 2.0

Nicolás Madurohas been elected president of Venezuela by a far narrower margin than his supporters had predicted, in a vote that his opponent, Henrique Capriles, says is “illegitimate.” Maduro was anointed candidate for the ruling United Socialist Party last month, following the death of his flamboyant and controversial predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Maduro promised to carry on Chávez’s “Bolívarian Revolution,” which funnelled state resources to Venezuela’s neglected poor but also wrecked the country’s economy and politicized its public service and state institutions. Maduro won 50.7 per cent of the vote against 49.1 per cent for Capriles. Maduro said they show that Chávez “continues to be invincible, that he continues to win battles.”

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Scientists are closing in on dark matter

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, April 3, 2013 at 3:32 PM - 0 Comments

(NASA/European Space Agency/AP)

The first results from a particle physics detector aboard the International Space Station are in—and show tantalizing hints of dark matter, a mysterious substance that binds the galaxies together.

New research from the $2-billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), revealed today by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, confirm an excess of positrons (the antimatter counterpart to an electron) that could very well be a sign of dark matter particles annihilating each other in space. Then again, maybe these signals are just some cosmic debris, although scientists are cautiously excited.

“Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin,” Ting said in a statement.

Since it launched to the Space Station in 2011, the AMS has recorded about 25 billion cosmic ray signals, including the largest collection of energetic antimatter particles ever measured from space. Scientists predict that collisions of dark matter particles produce positrons and electrons, which is why the ratio of these tiny particles is so interesting to dark matter hunters, Ting included. But we still don’t know for sure if the positrons AMS has found are from dark matter, or  something more mundane, like pulsars. What the AMS has found “is an indication, but by no means is it a proof” of dark matter, Ting told New Scientist earlier today from a seminar at CERN, near Geneva, from where he presented his results.

Still, an indication is exciting enough. Ting’s results had been hotly anticipated for months, and in February he teased reporters with a promise that news was coming soon. “The Cosmos is the ultimate lab,” he said then. While scientists on the ground continue the hunt for dark matter—at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, for example, and at SNOLAB, deep underground in Sudbury, Ont.—this massive orbital experiment, which continues until the Space Station is decommissioned in 2020, looks to be quickly closing in on one of the enduring mysteries of science. Dark matter makes up about a quarter of our universe, yet we know almost nothing about it; many predict we’ll have found dark matter within the next ten years. Maybe sooner.

Elise Andrew on why she loves science

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 1:35 PM - 0 Comments

Last week, science fans expressed shock at the news that the wildly popular “I F–king Love Science” Facebook page, which has over 4.3 million “likes”, is run not by a man, but a woman: Elise Andrew, a 23-year-old Brit who lives in Midland, Ont., to be precise. After Andrew posted a link to the page to promote her new Twitter profile, which included a photo of her, reader responses ranged from “F*ck me! This is a babe ?!!” to “holy hell, youre a HOTTIE!” Some had assumed IFLS was run by celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Taken aback by the reaction, Andrews tweeted: “Is this really 2013?”

Andrew works for LabX Media Group as social media content manager. A self-taught social media mogul, she launched IFSL in March 2012, and runs the site in her free time.

Q: Tell me about how you launched IFLS. What was the idea behind it? 

A: I started IFLS while I was in my last year of university [studying biology at the University of Sheffield]. I was three months away from graduation, so I really should have been focusing on other things, but I got addicted to this very quickly. I promoted it to my friends, and it just gained traction so quickly and it didn’t stop. We got thousands of subscribers in the first day. I keep expecting it to level off at some point, and it doesn’t. [When the page reached 100,000 "likes"], it scared me a little bit. At that point I was still in university, and 100,000 people just seemed a bit insane.

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Life on Mars

By Kate Lunau - Saturday, March 23, 2013 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Roman Cho/Getty Images

On March 12, John Grotzinger and a team of NASA scientists made a stunning announcement: Mars once had the right conditions for life, with flowing surface water so benign we might drink it. This finding comes courtesy of the Curiosity rover, which drilled and analyzed a rock sample from an ancient stream bed at Gale Crater on Mars. It’s the first habitable environment we know of, other than on Earth. As the first primitive forms of life were emerging here, it now seems possible life might have been taking hold on Mars, too. John Grotzinger is chief scientist on Curiosity, which has been exploring the Martian surface since Aug. 5, 2012.

Q: Scientists have found evidence of water on Mars before. What about this new finding tells you life could have existed there?

A: We’re excited because we’re getting a peek at what we call “grey Mars,” instead of red Mars. [Curiosity’s drill cuttings were green-grey in colour, not red like the surface of Mars, which is highly oxidized.] We’re seeing not just the presence of water, but water with a chemical composition that looks friendly toward microbial life. This is the kind of water that, if you drank a glass, you wouldn’t keel over and curl up, although I’m not sure I would want to plumb it into an urban district. We also see a diversity of minerals, which vary in their oxidation state. We think of these minerals at Gale Crater as though they were little batteries [which can give energy to microbes].

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Netflix offers cash prize to improve its open-source code

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, March 21, 2013 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

When a company wants to improve its product, the normal path might be to hire some new talent and spend a fortune on research and development. Or, it could hold a contest. On March 14, movie streaming service Netflix announced the Netflix Cloud Prize. It’s giving away $100,000 (10 prizes at $10,000 each) to developers who voluntarily build on its open-source code and improve the services it offers over the Internet. Programmers have until Sept. 15 to come up with “something cool,” as the official contest website says.

Today over 33 million people around the world rely on Netflix’s cloud technology; the company based in Los Gatos, Calif., obviously has a lot to gain from improving its services. Holding a contest casts a wide net for talent and attracts attention. And if Netflix, which had a profit of $8 million in its last quarter, achieves everything it’s after—award categories include “best new feature” and “best portability enhancement”—$100,000 seems like a small price to pay.

As more employers turn to clean technology, most jobs could soon be green-collar

By Kate Lunau - Monday, March 18, 2013 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

Jeff Tribe/Bullfrog Power

For Chris Rogers, owner of Corporate Chemicals and Equipment in St. Catharines, Ont., the wake-up call came when his father Cecil was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 2000. Cecil, who owned the business before Chris took over, had worked in the industry since he was 18. “He opened my eyes to what he thought was the cause,” Rogers says: the vats of chemicals that surrounded Cecil through his working life. “I started to rethink things.” The company, which makes and sells sanitation supplies, started going green—a philosophy that’s affected everything from products to marketing and, of course, its employees. “The green chemistry of today is the everyday chemistry of tomorrow,” he says. The same could be true of green jobs.

Canada’s green economy is growing fast. Our clean-technology sector, made up of more than 700 companies, saw an 11 per cent jump in employment between 2008 and 2010, according to a January report from the Pembina Institute, a non-profit environmental think tank. Once considered a niche, the green-jobs sector is now comparable to the booming oil and gas extraction sector, and has exceeded the aerospace industry, says a 2012 report from Analytica Advisors, an Ottawa-based consulting firm that specializes in clean energy.

• The future of jobs
• College-corporate partnerships
• After the oil boom
• Colby Cosh on the state and education

Canada’s “green-collar jobs” aren’t just found at clean-technology firms. More than 12 per cent of the Canadian workforce “has some sort of environmental initiatives within its work,” says Grant Trump, CEO of the non-profit ECO Canada. Another four per cent of the workforce spends more than 50 per cent of its time on environmental activities, he says. And 17 per cent of Canadian companies—318,000 in total—employ one or more environmental professional.

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Chris Hadfield ready to take command of the International Space Station

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 9:23 PM - 0 Comments

It’s official: Canada will soon have its first-ever commander of the International Space Station. On March 13, after spending decades preparing, astronaut Chris Hadfield takes control of the ISS.

You’ll be able to watch a livestream of handover of the ISS here around 5 p.m. ET.

Even for an astronaut, Hadfield’s career has been remarkable. On previous missions, he became first Canadian to operate the Canadarm in orbit; the first Canadian to float freely in space; the only Canadian ever to visit the Russian space station Mir. None of those milestones captured the public’s attention—and not just in Canada, but around the world—as much as his commandership of the ISS.

Hadfield, who arrived on the Space Station Dec. 21, has been using Twitter and other social media to share his experience with millions at home. And while other astronauts have used Twitter (the first live tweet from space was sent in 2010), none have been as prolific, or as enthusiastic, as Hadfield. “Chris is putting a lot of effort into this,” Jeremy Hansen, one of Canada’s newest astronaut recruits, recently told Maclean’s. “He’s a busy guy on orbit, and tweeting isn’t factored into the daily plan.” Marc Garneau, the first Canadian to fly in space, agrees that Twitter has made space more accessible than ever. ”It’s incredible,” says Garneau, who was campaigning for Liberal leadership, and is a tweeter himself. “I wish it had existed on my last flight.”

Hadfield finds any spare moment (and there isn’t much free time for astronauts on the ISS) to share snippets of his life—an observation about what he had for breakfast, or a photo of Dublin from space, or Havana, or Vancouver. With the help of his son Evan, who’s become his unofficial PR person on the ground, Hadfield recently did an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. He’s released a song from low Earth orbit. He’s participated in countless interviews and chats with schoolkids and the press. Kathy Bolt of NASA’s Johnson Space Center was the Chief Training Officer on Hadfield’s mission, and has spent years working closely with him to help him prepare. “Chris has got a gift for public speaking,” she tells Maclean’s. “He’s been doing it for so many years in his role with the astronaut office here, representing Canada.” And he’s expected to keep it up at least until he returns to Earth, in mid-May.

Hadfield decided he wanted to be an astronaut at age 9, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Since then, he’s worked to be in a position to command what he calls “the world’s spaceship.” As he takes over the ISS, millions will be watching.

• Inside NASA with Chris Hadfield
• Our man in space

Canada’s man in space gets a little help from home

By Kate Lunau - Monday, March 11, 2013 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Space Twitter

Half a billion people watched Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, in grainy black and white, in 1969. Today, millions are connecting with Chris Hadfield through images, too—the stunning, high-resolution photographs of Earth he beams back from the International Space Station (ISS), where he’s lived since Dec. 21. Hadfield takes command on March 13, its first Canadian commander. Using social media to share his life in space, he’s become the most famous astronaut since Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Of course, they never had access to Twitter. The first live tweet from space came in 2010, but no astronaut has used it as prolifically as Hadfield, who’ll often post several times a day, answering questions or retweeting enthusiastic commenters—maybe a school teacher, a fellow astronaut, or William Shatner—and sharing photos and observations. (Recently, on breakfast: “granola with dried blueberries, dehydrated vegetable quiche, instant pineapple juice, instant black coffee. Suit you too?”) His Twitter following has grown from 20,000 at the time of the launch to over 456,300 today, although tweeting isn’t one of Hadfield’s official duties.

At first, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) bosses were nervous it might cut into his packed work schedule. “For my own peace of mind, I wanted to know how long [each tweet] takes,” says Ed Tabarah of the Canadian astronaut office, who managed Hadfield’s training. Hadfield, who returns to Earth on May 13, squeezes tweeting in between other tasks: science experiments, ISS maintenance, exercise to ward off effects of zero gravity, or live chats with public schools. And, of course, time spent resting or talking to his family.

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Big news on dark matter? Soon, scientists promise. Real soon.

By Kate Lunau - Monday, February 18, 2013 at 12:45 PM - 0 Comments

NASA

Kate Lunau is in Boston covering the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science meet to mix, mingle, and share their latest and greatest ideas. On Feb. 14-18, she’ll give you a sneak peak into the current research—everything from dinosaurs to neutrinos, from stem cells to extreme weather, and all sorts of sorts of stuff in between. Follow her on Twitter: @katelunau, #AAASmtg

The International Space Station isn’t just home to astronauts like Canadian Chris Hadfield, who’ll assume command in a few weeks’ time. It’s also an orbiting laboratory: hundreds of experiments are done there, looking into everything from human health to colloids. The ISS holds a $2-billion particle physics detector, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is searching for signs of exotic stuff that makes up our universe, like dark matter. Big news might be coming soon. At the AAAS Meeting, Nobel laureate and AMS principal investigator Dr. Samuel Ting promised that the first results from the AMS detector should be published in two or three weeks’ time. “It will not be a minor paper,” he told a crowded room of reporters.

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The mystery of memory

By Kate Lunau - Sunday, February 17, 2013 at 2:07 PM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is in Boston covering the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science meet to mix, mingle, and share their latest and greatest ideas. On Feb. 14-18, she’ll give you a sneak peak into the current research—everything from dinosaurs to neutrinos, from stem cells to extreme weather, and all sorts of sorts of stuff in between. Follow her on Twitter: @katelunau, #AAASmtg

A 3D print of famous memory patient HM's brain. (photography by Kate Lunau)

In 1953, at the age of 27, the man who later became known to scientists as “HM” lost his memory. Henry Gustav Molaison had suffered acute epileptic seizures, and as part of his treatment, he had part of his brain surgically removed, including much of the hippocampus. While the procedure helped alleviate his seizures, it left him unable to remember much of anything, including who he was. Before his death in 2008, HM partcipated in countless experiments, and helped give rise to an entirely new understanding of the human brain. At the AAAS Meeting, neuropsychologist Dr. Brenda Milner of the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, who conducted pioneering studies of HM’s condition with her student Suzanne Corkin, discussed this famous case.

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Catching neutrinos

By Kate Lunau - Saturday, February 16, 2013 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is in Boston covering the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science meet to mix, mingle, and share their latest and greatest ideas. On Feb. 14-18, she’ll give you a sneak peak into the current research—everything from dinosaurs to neutrinos, from stem cells to extreme weather, and all sorts of sorts of stuff in between. Follow her on Twitter: @katelunau, #AAASmtg

Scientists distributed out buttons featuring the neutrino sign, the peace sign and hearts for the "Neutrinos for Peace" effort, which is against nuclear proliferation. (Photo by Kate Lunau)

Did you know that about 100 billion neutrinos pass through your thumb every second? Catching a single one is like trying to grab at a ghost.

We heard about this today at an AAAS Meeting talk on these mysterious little particles. Neutrinos are one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe, like a photon (light particle), an electron, or the recently discovered Higgs boson; they come from the sun, from exploding stars (supernovae) and from cosmic ray collisions. Neutrinos, which carry no electric charge, hardly interact with ordinary matter and slip right through the Earth; you’d need a wall of lead “as thick as the solar system” to stop one from the sun, said André de Gouvêa in his introduction. But perhaps most importantly, they could tell us about why we’re here.

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The downsides of human evolution

By Kate Lunau - Friday, February 15, 2013 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is in Boston covering the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science meet to mix, mingle, and share their latest and greatest ideas. On Feb. 14-18, she’ll give you a sneak peak into the current research—everything from dinosaurs to neutrinos, from stem cells to extreme weather, and all sorts of sorts of stuff in between. Follow her on Twitter: @katelunau, #AAASmtg

In a talk this morning on human evolution, I kept imagining that classic diagram of an ape transitioning to an upright human—and how it should show him hunched over in back pain, hobbling on a twisted ankle, on his way to the dentist to get his wisdom teeth removed. Evolution has put us at the top of the food chain, but “evolution doesn’t produce perfection,” anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva said today at the AAAS Meeting, where he spoke on a panel with others. Adapting to bipedal walking has left us with all sorts of aches and pains that no other animals seem to suffer, everything from hernias and flat feet, to fallen pelvic floors. He called these adaptations the “biological equivalent of duct tape and paper clips,” which affect us everyday.

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New worlds, brain machines, feathered dinosaurs and the Higgs boson

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 2:33 PM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is in Boston covering the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science meet to mix, mingle, and share their latest and greatest ideas. On Feb. 14-18, she’ll give you a sneak peak into the current research—everything from dinosaurs to neutrinos, from stem cells to extreme weather, and all sorts of sorts of stuff in between. Follow her on Twitter: @katelunau, #AAASmtg

Photo by Kate Lunau

As I landed in Boston bright and early this morning, and hopped on the subway to the Hynes Convention Center (host of this year’s meeting), I was gripped by a familiar feeling—one I remember from covering this event last year, too—the fear of missing out. The AAAS is the world’s biggest general scientific society, and their annual meeting is a scientific smorgasbord. Over the next few days, thousands of researchers, journalists, engineers, teachers and policy-makers will be here to talk about their work. The program is as thick as a paperback novel. How to attend all the sessions that have already caught my eye?

There are a few I know I’ll be attending: like one on exploring other worlds, and what they can teach us about our own; and another on brain-machine interfaces. There’s a talk on whale evolution, and another on China’s feathered dinosaurs—especially interesting given the newly discovered Yutyrannus huali, a massive feathered cousin of T. rex. (As we now know, feathered dinosaurs weren’t just in China; last year, Canadian paleontologists found them in Alberta, the first time we’ve seen such a thing in the Americas.) Another session, on science at the International Space Station, should be interesting given that Canada’s own Chris Hadfield is about to take command. And, of course, the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” makes an appearance on my list, too.

It’ll be an exciting few days in Boston, soaking up some of the biggest ideas in science. Follow me @katelunau and check back at Maclean’s for the latest.

Review: Near-Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us

By Bookmarked and Kate Lunau - Friday, February 8, 2013 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Sixty-five million years ago, a 10-km-wide asteroid slammed into Earth, killing off the dinosaurs. While that’s the best-known Earth-asteroid collision, the truth is, space debris rains down on us all the time, notes Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office. He and other scientists are on a mission to track the largest asteroids that swarm around our planet, and his book is a behind-the-scenes look at how they do it—hopefully finding them before they find us.

The first asteroid, named Ceres, was discovered in 1801, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that astronomers understood just how many there were. Our planet passes through a veritable “shooting gallery” of millions of comets and asteroids on its tour around the sun, Yeomans writes. Long viewed as “the vermin of the skies,” we now understand how useful they can be. Asteroids and comets, “the leftover bits and pieces” of our solar system, can tell us a lot about how the planets formed. Asteroids can also be rich in valuable resources like platinum, which explains why mining companies are eyeing them as future destinations; maybe soon, we could send astronauts to visit one. (In 2010, President Obama said he’d like to have astronauts reach a near-Earth asteroid by 2025.)

Yeomans credits near-Earth objects with the origins of life. “The Earth formed hot without significant supplies of water and organic materials,” he writes, but after a pummelling from space, “received a veneer of water and organic carbon-based materials that allowed life to form.” If they gave life to our planet, they could also take it away. Yeomans’ book is a fascinating account of science that could literally save the world.

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

Astronomers go planet hunting

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 7:00 PM - 0 Comments

Use your cursor to scroll over the planets above.

Just 20 years ago, astronomers didn’t know if there were any planets at all outside our own solar system—whether other places like Earth, which is brimming with life, are common, exceedingly rare or even non-existent. Two years ago, NASA scientists announced that, using the powerful Kepler space telescope, they’d found well over 1,000 new planets, more than doubling the number they’d previously known about. It was a stunning revelation, but few people realized, even then, that this was just the beginning.

Astronomers now believe our galaxy alone is filled with literally billions of planets—maybe even more planets than stars. There are at least 100 billion planets in the Milky Way, and some think that estimate is conservative. Some are more bizarre than anything dreamed up in science fiction: diamond worlds and double-sunned worlds, and worlds where another planet hangs in the sky like our moon. Others are eerily similar to Earth. A few of them, like a newly found planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, just 4.3 light years away, are tantalizingly close. That planet is nearer to its host star than Mercury is to our sun, and would be blisteringly hot—far too hot for life as we know it. But where there’s one planet, there are often several, and astronomers are scouring the skies around Alpha Centauri for more worlds in our own cosmic backyard. Continue…

Chris Hadfield talks from space with school kids

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, January 17, 2013 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments

Wearing a t-shirt embroidered with the Canadian Space Agency logo, today astronaut Chris Hadfield—who launched to the International Space Station in December and will become the first Canadian to take command in March—chatted live with school kids in Milton, Ont., where he grew up, from his new home on the ISS. Hadfield showed off a few tricks in microgravity, spinning his microphone in slow arcs, floating his wristwatch in mid-air, and even turning himself upside down. He even played guitar, to bursts of applause and cheers.

“What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen in space?” one Grade 5 student asked. Hadfield appeared to give it a moment of thought, then answered that his favourite sight is the sunrise. “When the sun comes up, it’s beautiful,” he said. “We come around the world and drive into the sunshine,” the horizon glowing “every colour of the rainbow.” Hadfield has often spoken poetically about the view from space, and has been documenting it in photos; at one point, he slid open the blind on a window behind him, as students gasped and applauded. “I can look down and see the world, and look up and see the universe,” he said.

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eBay goes offline to lure new customers

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, January 16, 2013 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

More people than ever are shopping on the Internet: Canadians placed nearly 114 million orders online in 2010, worth $15 billion, says Statistics Canada, in its most recent tally. To target those who might still be wary of online shopping, eBay is turning its attention to face-to-face contact. The online marketplace is trying out new services in the U.S., according to All Things D, including a pickup service that sends eBay employees into people’s homes to collect items, which are then sold by “expert sellers” for a cut. Another encourages people to drop off clothes and electronics at mall kiosks, where they’re offered a set price for their goods. eBay is also testing a same-day delivery service so buyers can get the same kind of instant gratification as in-store shopping. Meanwhile, Amazon is expanding its locker service, which allows customers to pick up packages at stores like 7-Eleven. For online giants, future growth seems to be in the offline world.

Why sitting is a dangerous health threat

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, January 8, 2013 at 1:36 PM - 0 Comments

photo illustration by Taylor Shute

On Sept. 24, 2007, a Monday evening, Cathleen Renner sat down in her home office to tackle a project. Renner, 47, was a manager at AT&T, where she’d been for 25 years. It isn’t clear how many hours she spent at the computer that night, making a plan for a possible employee strike, but she did send an email to a colleague at 12:26 a.m. When her son got up at 7 a.m., she was at her desk. Renner took him to the bus a little later, and as she walked out the door, she clutched her leg and let out a cry of pain. Still, she returned to work. At 11:34, she called an ambulance. Renner was dead by the time she reached the hospital.

Like most of us, Renner spent long hours on the job seated at her computer; in a workers’ compensation claim filed after her death, her husband argued that sitting was what killed her. (Renner died of a pulmonary embolism after a blood clot formed in her leg.) The case was not exactly straightforward; AT&T called an expert who pointed out Renner was morbidly obese, weighing 304 lb., and had recently started taking new medication, birth control pills. But in 2011 a New Jersey judge ruled in James Renner’s favour, noting his wife’s job required her to “spend unusually long hours at her computer” and awarding him workers’ compensation benefits as a result. The decision was extremely unusual, the first of its kind legal observers could recall. But if a growing number of health experts are right about the dangers of sitting, it could be a harbinger of things to come. Continue…

Newsmakers 2012: Higgs & Kisses

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, December 26, 2012 at 7:10 AM - 0 Comments

Rex Features/CP

Higgs boson

For nearly five decades, scientists have been searching for a missing piece of the universe—one that’s infinitesimally small, incredibly elusive, yet explains why everything as we know it exists. On July 4, an announcement came from Geneva, where the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is based: a team of thousands, working on a massive underground particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider, had confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson. The “God particle” had been found.

Named for theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who dreamed it up in 1964, the Higgs boson particle has long been the missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the universe’s basic building blocks. It was Higgs’s answer to a question that had scientists stumped: where does mass come from? Mass gives shape to the universe, holding protons and neutrons together to make atoms, and then molecules, and then all of us. Higgs suggested particles obtain mass by passing through an invisible force field that stretches through the universe. “The [Higgs field] fills all of space,” says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont. “It’s the medium in which we live,” and the Higgs boson particle is evidence of that field. Continue…

The biggest, craziest, gee-whizziest science stories of 2012

By Kate Lunau - Saturday, December 22, 2012 at 4:43 PM - 0 Comments

Rex Features/CP

It was a big year for science.

Chris Hadfield, Canada’s first International Space Station commander, blasted off on the mission of a lifetime.

The line between human and machine became ever finer, as a paralyzed woman ate a chocolate bar with a prosthetic arm controlled by her own mind.

There was bombastic Canadian filmmaker James Cameron’s record plunge into the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the world’s oceans; and the Curiosity rover’s nail-biter of a landing on Mars, where the one-ton robotic geologist is now seeking signs that our neighbouring planet could support life.

On the 35th anniversary of its launch, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft was set to break free of our solar system altogether, becoming humankind’s first interstellar emissary.

Stem cells were used to create eggs in mice, which gave birth to healthy offspring, hinting at human fertility treatments of the future.

And SpaceX’s Dragon capsule became the first private vehicle to dock with the Space Station, marking the start of a powerful new shift in how humans live and work in space.

The year’s most jaw-dropping moment, though, was the discovery of the Higgs boson—the so-called “God particle”—by a team of literally thousands of scientists from around the world, working for decades on one of the largest experiments ever conceived. A tiny bit of the universe, the Higgs boson particle explains why we all exist.

But as 2012 comes to a close, there’s enough lists out there. Instead of revisiting these major moments, here’s some of my other favourite science stories of 2012—stories that stuck with me —and a few things I’ll be watching in 2013.

1. A planetary bounty

Not so long ago, we didn’t know for sure if there were any planets outside of our solar system. Now we’re starting to see that other worlds might be more common than stars, and their variation is incredible. This year we learned about a massive diamond planet, a lonely rogue planet floating freely in space, and a place that resembles Star Wars‘ fictional Tatooine, but even more elaborate than anything George Lucas dreamed up: the two-sunned planet is orbited by two more stars, the only solar system of its kind ever seen.

Closer to home, the star Tau Ceti, a mere 12 light years away, might even host a planet that can support life.

Worlds in our own solar system have their own surprises, too: NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence that water once flowed on freeze-dried Mars, and on Titan—one of Saturn’s many moons—a “mini Nile river” was spotted flowing into a large sea. (Unlike our Nile, Titan’s river is probably full of liquid hydrocarbons; it’s the only place we know of, other than Earth, with liquid at the surface.)

It’s tempting to want to pay these other places a visit, but current technology could never get us as far as another solar system. That might not be true forever. In September, a scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center revealed he’s working on a real-life warp drive.

2. Dinosaurs: fast and feathery

Remember when dinosaurs were fat, slow, and scaly? That’s how we used to depict them in movies, books and museums, but our understanding of these creatures has undergone some seismic changes, and continued to shift in 2012. Today, we know that carnivorous theropod dinosaurs like T. rex were often active, agile—and, at least in some cases, feathered.

This year, scientists unveiled the incredible Yutyrannus huali, or “beautiful feathered tyrant,” a massive cousin of T. rex covered in plumage, and by far the biggest feathered dinosaur we’ve found. And a Canadian team announced specimens of ornithomimids, 75 million years old, that also show evidence of feathers, making them the first feathered dinos ever seen in the Americas. (Until now, most have come from China.) Some palaeontologists now wonder if all dinosaurs had feathers—a striking idea. But traditionalists can rest easy for now, at least at the movies: next year, Jurassic Park is scheduled for re-release in 3D, and while its special effects look better than ever, the preview shows charging ornithomimids still scaly and featherless.

3.  A personal factory, at home

Imagine being able to download whatever you like off the Internet, or even design it yourself—an electric guitar, maybe a full-size house—then print it off, in your own personal factory. That’s the promise of 3D printers, and this year, it seemed they were everywhere.

MakerBot, which sells a desktop 3D printer model for about $2,200, opened its first retail store in New York. Author Chris Anderson’s new book, Makers, spoke of a “new industrial revolution” as the DIY movement takes off, partly thanks to these devices. Beyond just metal and plastic, 3D printers are being dreamed up that could print everything from food, to human cells (maybe one day capable of turning out out a transplantable kidney) and body parts, too.

DNA pioneer Craig Venter talked about emailing downloadable vaccines around the world that could be produced on 3D biological printers. Washington State University scientists practised printing artificial lunar dust into various shapes, suggesting we could use 3D printers on the moon one day to make tools and other supplies instead of launching them from Earth. Of course, putting such a limitless technology in the hands of everyone, makes some people nervous. Defense Distributed, a Texas non-profit, wants to create a fully downloadable and printable gun, and this year they got very close to doing it, firing six rounds from a partially printed rifle before the gun broke apart.

4. Waking up to climate change (again and again and again)

This year, more than 62 per cent of the U.S. was plagued by widespread drought,  decimating crops and causing food prices to soar. Arctic sea ice was reported shrinking to record-low levels yet again, reaching the smallest ever recorded, and covering less than half of the area that would have been typical just four decades ago.

Off the West Coast of Canada, a a massive geoengineering experiment came to light, igniting debate on a controversial idea—that we could deliberately tinker with the climate through manmade means, to slow global warming—which some say could save the planet, and others insist could doom us for good. After the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in October, global warming briefly made an appearance in the U.S. presidential election: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent, publicly backed President Barack Obama’s bid for re-election, saying he was a better choice to tackle the issue. Unfortunately, until then, climate change hadn’t come up once in the presidential debates.

5. Do animals qualify as non-human people?

In February I attended the annual meeting of the AAAS, the world’s biggest general scientific society, and got to hear talks on all sorts of fascinating stuff, like bizarre underwater creatures, and the science of superheroes.

One of the most well-attended was about “cetacean rights”—whether whales and dolphins should qualify as “non-human people.” By this point, we know that dolphins seem to understand numbers and abstract concepts. They’ve been observed using sponges as tools to find food. Whale species are said to have their own culture; I’ve previously written about the complexities of sperm whale language, and traditions passed down between generations.

As the movement to give cetaceans legal rights rolls on, we saw more news this year showing just how remarkably “humanlike” many animals can be: like an Asian male elephant, named Koshik, which can apparently speak in Korean. (Like dolphins and some other species, elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror.) Or a beluga whale that mimics human sounds, and orangutans and gorillas that love playing with iPads. We increasingly understand animals as intelligent, even moral, creatures. It could have all sorts of implications, maybe first and foremost for the meat industry. How’s that test-tube hamburger coming along?

Thanks to everybody who submitted suggestions for this list over Twitter @katelunau and @MacleansMag.

A “mini Nile river” spotted on Saturn’s moon

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 3:22 PM - 0 Comments

Scientists have spotted a “mini Nile river” on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, flowing over 400 km from its headwaters to a large sea. High resolution images snapped by the international Cassini mission, which is exploring Saturn and its moons, let us glimpse a river system flowing on another planet for the first time.

Titan is a fascinating place, and the only other world we know of with liquid at its surface. Its freezing cold—surface temperatures are about -178 C—but remarkably Earth-like, with a hazy atmosphere, hills, mud flats, even rivers and rain. Instead of water, though, the liquid on Titan is ethane, methane and propane; scientists think this newly photographed river, at the moon’s north pole, is filled with liquid hydrocarbons.

“Titan is the only place we’ve found besides Earth that has a liquid in continuous movement on its surface,” Steve Wall, the radar deputy team lead, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a release. “This picture gives us a snapshot of a world in motion. Rain falls, and rivers move that rain to lakes and seas, where evaporation starts the cycle all over again. On Earth, the liquid is water; on Titan, it’s methane; but on both it affects most everything that happens.”