Newsmakers of the week

By Jaime Weinman, Aaron Wherry, and Kate Lunau - Saturday, December 8, 2012 at 5:30 AM - 0 Comments

Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg/Getty Images

On the side of Angels

Ontario Judge Maureen Forestell may be the Hells Angels’ only friend on the bench. The Ontario judge ruled that a 2007 police raid had no right to seize their gold, diamonds, belt buckles and leather goods just because they had the Angels’ “death head” logo emblazoned on them. Forestell said the bling wasn’t directly related to any crime sprees or attempts to intimidate people. In fact, she added, the club has a rule requiring its members to remove their merchandise “when committing offences,” and she ordered the swag returned to the bikers.

Too random an act of kindness?

New York City cop Larry DePrimo became a seasonal hero last week when a photo of him giving a pair of boots and socks to a barefoot man on a frigid Manhattan night went viral. While the 25-year-old police officer was instantly beloved—and earned an invite to the Today show—it took New York’s media a few days to track down the man with the new boots. When they did, the story grew a lot more complicated. Jeffrey Hillman isn’t homeless, as he appeared to be. The deeply troubled Army vet has an apartment paid for by a benefit for homeless veterans. It also turns out Hillman is still barefoot. He told reporters that although he appreciated the cop’s gesture, “I could lose my life” for wearing the $100 Skechers boots on the street. Continue…

3D-printed AR-15 rifle fires six rounds

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, December 6, 2012 at 6:00 PM - 0 Comments

With 3D printers becoming cheaper and easier to procure than ever—companies like MakerBot sell desktop models for just about $2,200—there’s concern people could use them to print off deadly weapons. Now, Defense Distributed, a group that’s attempting to develop a “fully printable firearm,” has managed to successfully fire off six rounds from an AR-15 rifle, built with a lower receiver produced on a 3D printer.  (The lower receiver is regulated by the Gun Control Act.) The gun then fell apart. It isn’t their first attempt; earlier this year, supplier Stratasys seized its 3D printing unit from the same group, saying it wouldn’t allow its printers to be used for “illegal purposes.”

This highlights the promise of rapidly developing 3D printing technology—some say it’ll spur another industrial revolution—and also its potential risks, in the minds of gun control advocates and others. “How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet?” Defense Distributed asks on its website. The days of downloading a gun (or virtually anything else) off the Internet might not be so far away.

First analysis of Martian soil turns up complex chemicals

By Kate Lunau - Monday, December 3, 2012 at 3:37 PM - 0 Comments

The rover's work site called "Rocknest Wind Drift" from Oct. 2 to Nov. 16, 2012 (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

Curiosity, NASA’s one-ton robotic explorer cruising around Mars, has turned up complex chemicals in its first-ever analysis of Martian soil—finding water, sulfur, and hints of perchlorate, which some scientists think could serve as a food source for microbial life there. But the rover hasn’t yet found any carbon-containing organic compounds, a necessary ingredient for life, despite swirling rumours that such an announcement was coming.

Curiosity is the first-ever Mars rover that can scoop soil into its instruments, then analyze them. It’s equipped with tools like the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), which heats it up in a tiny oven to learn about it from the gasses it gives off; and the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument, which measures the variety and abundance of certain minerals. This soil sample came from a windblown sand drift called “Rocknest,” in Gale Crater, where Curiosity touched down Aug. 5. (Its  cameras have been capturing the site in stunning detail.) Canada’s contribution to the rover is an instrument called the APXS, about the size and shape of a Rubik’s cube, that can analyze the makeup of rock and soil samples.

Close-ups of sand scooped up by the rover in the Rocknest wind drift (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

A panel of NASA scientists delivered Monday’s news, including the University of Guelph’s Ralf Gellert, principal investigator for the APXS. And while they emphasized how exciting these results look—Curiosity’s instruments are “performing exceptionally well,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist of the Mars Exploration Program, who compared the robot to a “CSI laboratory on wheels”—some space fans couldn’t help but find it a bit underwhelming. Their announcement followed widespread speculation that a major discovery would be unveiled, sparked by a recent NPR interview with principal investigator John Grotzinger, who said: “This data is gonna be one for the history books.” Unfortunately, he was talking about the mission as a whole—not hinting at the discovery of organic molecules, or little green men. (The Curiosity rover isn’t actually designed to hunt for life, The Guardian notes. Its mission is to find out whether Mars has the necessary ingredients to support life, or once did.)

Just because no Martian organics have turned up yet, doesn’t mean they’re not coming. Curiosity is only a few months into its two-year prime mission, and given the history of NASA’s last Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity—who kept exploring well beyond their mission’s expiry date—Curiosity still has a while to go. It’s slowly making its way to Mount Sharp, where scientists think water once flowed, but it won’t be there until next year. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the solar system, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft has found signs of ice and organics on sun-scorched Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, reminding us how little we still know about our planetary neighbourhood.

Mensa babies

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

photograph by Chris Bolin

When Anthony Popa-Urria was born, his family noticed he was an especially alert, curious child. By six months, he could recognize colours. When he was eight months old, “I showed him flash cards, like ‘1,2,3,’ or ‘A,B,C,’ and he picked up what I requested,” his grandmother Felicia Popa proudly says, and at 10 months, he could recite the alphabet. Around his first birthday, Anthony surprised his family by reading numbers off the calendar in their family doctor’s office, shouting them out as he went. A pediatrician in Calgary, where his family lives, later concluded he was gifted.

Curious to find out more about this precocious toddler’s intellect, Felicia and Anthony’s mom, Laura Popa, took him to London, England, to see psychologist Joan Freeman, who specializes in kids with high intellect. She gave Anthony—then two years and eight months old—a full examination including an IQ test, and pinned his score at an incredible 154.

Anthony, who turned three in June, can speak English and Spanish, and understands Romanian (his father, Juan Carlos Urria, is Cuban; Laura and her parents are from Romania). He knows 60 countries and their capitals, Felicia says, “and what he doesn’t know, he looks up himself.” He’s been able to read “almost any word” since he was 18 months old, and can count to 1,000. Anthony can boot up the family computer and do Internet searches on his own. What’s a family to do with such a bright child, who isn’t even old enough for kindergarten? “There are limited resources for kids this young,” Laura says. “We thought, ‘Mensa caters to a high IQ.’ ” Continue…

Review: The Dead of Winter

By Kate Lunau - Friday, November 23, 2012 at 11:24 AM - 0 Comments

A homeless woman lies freezing near the entrance of a Montreal parking garage, warmed by crumpled-up newspapers and a Salvation Army sleeping bag. A man dressed in black like a priest approaches, offering a warm drink and a place to rest. She is never seen alive again.

So begins The Dead of Winter, the first novel from Peter Kirby, an Irish-born Montreal lawyer. Shortlisted by Crime Writers of Canada for its Unhanged Arthur Award, celebrating the best unpublished first crime novel, Kirby’s book follows detective inspector Luc Vanier as he relentlessly pursues a serial killer targeting Montreal’s homeless. Everyone seems implicated in the investigation, from high-ranking clergy in Quebec’s Catholic Church and powerful business interests to the staff at a soup kitchen.

One of the pleasures of Kirby’s novel is the setting. In The Dead of Winter, Montreal is colourful and gritty. Thugs and lowlifes rub shoulders with the elite, while the city is pummelled by an endless succession of vicious snowstorms. Unsurprisingly, Kirby is especially adept at describing the inner workings of a law firm that may be involved in a corrupt land deal, and the tricks and loopholes Vanier uses to get his police work done—like convincing a judge to give him a search warrant in “world-record” speed. Continue…

Rogue planet spotted floating in space

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

A team of French and Canadian astronomers has spotted what looks to be a “rogue planet,” free-floating through space unhitched to a parent star—and it’s just 100 light years away from our own solar system.

While such objects have been spotted in the past, scientists had trouble determining whether they were actual planets or “failed stars” called brown dwarfs. The proximity of this planet makes it easier for astronomers to study it in more detail.

Given the clunky name CFBDSIR2149, this planet was spotted with the Canada France Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea, and the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope, in Chile.

Scientists believe it’s relatively young — 50 million to 120 million years old. The object seems to be part of a collection of about 30 young stars called the AB Doradus Moving Group, which drift together through space. We still don’t know how this planet came to be homeless.

“If this little object is a planet that has been ejected from its native system, it conjures up the striking image of orphaned worlds, drifting in the emptiness of space,” co-author Étienne Artigau of the Université de Montréal told the BBC.

Burger, please, and a glass of Beaujolais

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Reena Newman

At a Hardee’s restaurant in Champaign, Ill., two food psychologists recently did some redecorating. Half the seating area was left as-is—the strong lights, bright colours and hard metal chairs typical of fast-food places—while the other half was transformed with white tablecloths, plants and paintings. “We softened the surfaces to make it quieter, put in nice lights, played some Miles Davis,” says Brian Wansink, director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

As the lunch rush arrived, customers were randomly selected to eat in the regular restaurant or on the made-over side. Wansink and collaborator Koert van Ittersum of the Georgia Institute of Technology thought people on the fine-dining side would linger at their tables and order more food. But even though those customers spent longer in the restaurant, they consumed less food. And they rated what they ate as more enjoyable.

Restaurants influence us in all sorts of ways—everything from lighting and music to words on the menu can cue us to indulge. The trouble is, for most of us, restaurants are no longer for special occasions; they’re an everyday thing. A new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (AJPM) says Americans spend nearly half their food budget on, and consume about one-third of their daily calories from, food outside the home. Canadians do better; according to Statistics Canada figures published in April, households spent an average of $7,443 on food in 2010, $2,066 of that in restaurants. (In 1997, we spent an average of $5,608, $1,152 of it in restaurants.) All that eating out isn’t very healthy, as the new Symptom Profiler quality-of-life survey results show: the more respondents ate out, the more negative health symptoms they reported. Continue…

Newsmakers

By Jaime Weinman, Chris Sorensen, Aaron Wherry, Kate Lunau, Patricia Treble, and Emily Senger - Wednesday, November 7, 2012 at 5:30 AM - 0 Comments

YOUTUBE

Yes, doubt

The pop music group No Doubt is in trouble for playing the old game of cowboys and Indians. The video for the band’s new song, Looking Hot, featured lead singer Gwen Stefani dressed up in Native American garb and dancing around a teepee, playing a sexy Pocahontas-like princess who gets rescued from two menacing cowboys. The video received so many complaints from Native American groups objecting to the appropriation of their culture that the band pulled the video and apologized. Their intention was “never to offend, hurt or trivialize Native American people, their culture or their history,” the band said.

An American first

Rochelle Ballantyne’s grandma taught her how to play chess when she was in the third grade. Now, the 17-year-old is on track to become the first African-American female chess master. Ballantyne, a graduate of Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn, where more than 60 per cent of students live below the poverty line, is heading into the National K-12 Championship in Florida, which opens Nov. 30. Ballantyne, who is often seen listening to her iPod while playing chess, says her grandma, now deceased, remains her motivation. “She introduced me to the idea of being the first African-American female chess master,” Ballantyne told Teen Vogue. “I really have to reach that goal for her.” Continue…

Newsmakers of the week

By Jaime Weinman, Patricia Treble, Chris Sorensen, Emily Senger, Kate Lunau, and Emma Teitel - Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 6:30 AM - 0 Comments

Petros Karadjias/AP

And she’s the published author?

John Franklin Stephens didn’t take kindly to conservative author Ann Coulter’s use of the word “retard” in an insult hurled at President Barack Obama, so he did something about it. Stephens, 30, a Special Olympics athlete with Down syndrome, wrote an eloquent open letter to Coulter. “After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me. You assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.” He added that someone described using the “R-word” is likely bullied in school, struggles “with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means [being] dumb and shallow,” and is “likely to receive bad health care, live in low-grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.” It’s not the first time Stephens has spoken up for people with intellectual disabilities. He penned an editorial for the Denver Post, speaking against the film Tropic Thunder, which repeatedly used the term “retard” as an insult. Continue…

The perfect gift for a billionaire friend: a personal submarine

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, October 31, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

South Florida Dive Journal

What do you get for the billionaire who has everything? Maybe a new toy for the mega-yacht, like a tiny submarine. For the ultra-rich, the deep sea is now the most exclusive of playgrounds.

This week Triton Submarines will show off its line of personal subs, complete with comfy seats, air conditioning and transparent acrylic hulls for that eye-popping view, at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show.

The Vero Beach, Fla., company makes four different models that can be launched from boats. The smallest is just 3.2 m long, meaning it won’t take up too much space on the deck. The battery-powered submersibles, which stay underwater for several hours, can carry two or three passengers, including a pilot, to depths from 300 to 1,000 m. “Tritons are designed to be highly intuitive to operate,” says Marc Deppe, vice-president of sales and marketing. With a few weeks of training, owners can learn to pilot the vessel themselves.

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Thirty-seven and counting

By Kate Lunau - Saturday, October 27, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Patrick Ledger

Brigitte Adams always wanted to have kids one day: a boy and a girl. “My mom’s a first-grade teacher, and there’s a whole library of children’s books she’s saved for me,” says Adams, 40. Two years ago, she talked to her doctor. “He said, ‘Just get pregnant now,’ ” but Adams, who divorced at 34, was single. “I’d like to have a traditional family,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to have children by myself.” Last year, she froze her eggs.

Like Adams, women in their mid- to late thirties are turning to egg freezing to slow the biological clock, putting aside a stash of eggs to gain more time to have a child. Elective egg freezing is fairly new, and not all fertility clinics offer it, but it’s about to go mainstream. On Oct. 19, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) lifted its “experimental” label on egg freezing, citing findings that younger women are about as likely to get pregnant whether using fresh eggs in a fertility treatment, or previously frozen ones. While the ASRM doesn’t set rules for fertility clinics, merely provides guidelines, more are bound to start offering the procedure—and more patients will seek it out. Women late in their reproductive years may be disappointed: not even this cutting-edge technology can halt the female fertility decline.

The ASRM’s new recommendations say egg freezing can help certain women, like cancer patients who might suffer infertility after chemotherapy, or couples using IVF, if the man can’t give a sperm sample the day his partner’s eggs are retrieved. But it stopped short of recommending egg freezing for the purpose of delaying childbearing, especially among older women. “We don’t have good data on women who are older,” says Dr. Samantha Pfeifer, head of the ASRM Practice Committee, which wrote the new recommendations; most of the studies so far have been in women under 30. Egg freezing can be a costly procedure, and takes a physical and emotional toll; there’s concern about giving patients false hope. Yet older women like Adams are the ones “most clamouring for the technology,” Pfeifer acknowledges.

Continue…

Found: Alberta’s feathered dinosaurs

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, October 25, 2012 at 2:10 PM - 0 Comments

For the first time, the fossils of feathered dinosaurs have been found in the Americas—dug up in the Alberta badlands, by a Canadian team. A new study from paleontologists Darla Zelenitsky and François Therrien describe three specimens of 75-million-year-old ornithomimids, two adults and a juvenile. These ostrich-like dinosaurs famously appeared in Jurassic Park, fleeing in a massive flock from a bloodthirsty Tyrannosaurus rex. According to new research, that famous film got it wrong: instead of scales, these dinosaurs would have been coated in down-like feathers, even flapping their wings.

Adult ornithomimids weighed 330 pounds or more, far too heavy to fly. These dinosaurs grew large feathers on their forearms as they matured; their armspan would have measured two metres across, or longer. “We know their wings weren’t used for flight; they’re much too big for that,” says Zelenitsky, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary. Because only adults had wings, they might have been used to show off for potential mates, or maybe to protectively cover their eggs while brooding, she suggests (it isn’t known whether these fossils are male or female). It’s hard to say what colours ornithomimids would have displayed, although Zelenitsky hopes to study that in the future.

Until now, most feathered dinosaurs have been found in China, like the recently discovered Yutyrannus huali, a massive T. rex cousin with plumage. There, feathered dino skeletons have been dug up from ancient lakes and lagoons, which seemed to help preserve evidence of their feathers; but these sorts of locations are rare worldwide. “No one was expecting to find feathers preserved in the types of rocks [in Alberta] because it wasn’t the right type of environment,” Zelenitsky says, but her work has proven otherwise. “Once the news of this discovery spreads, paleontologists will start looking more carefully at specimens they’ve already collected,” looking for evidence of feathers, she predicts. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Of course, not everyone’s happy about all the feathery new dinosaurs turning up. As Maclean’s reported earlier this year, some dino fans miss the old days, when dinosaurs were big, fat, slow and scaly. Our knowledge of dinosaurs is being rewritten, and Canada has a new feathery dinosaur in its past: a large, downy, ostrich-like ornithomimid.

Inside NASA with Chris Hadfield

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 10:51 AM - 0 Comments

Bill Stafford/NASA

From the outside, Building 9 at the NASA Johnson Space Center, a sprawling complex on the outskirts of Houston, is nondescript. Inside, it’s like Willy Wonka’s factory, if Willy were a rocket scientist. The hangar-like facility is filled with robots, moon buggies and spaceship mock-ups. Robonaut, a humanoid robot with a golden head, sits next to Spidernaut, a robot prototype with eight arched legs. There’s an Orion capsule, and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. But what dominates the vast room is a full-size mock-up of the International Space Station (ISS), an Earth-orbiting spaceship built by 15 countries, including Canada.

One recent Monday morning, astronaut trainer Gwenn Sandoz waited there for Chris Hadfield, who will blast off from Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz in December, and soon after will become the first Canadian to take command of the ISS. Canada has invested heavily in the station, which has been inhabited by a rotating crew since 2000, but we only get to send so many astronauts there. For 20 years, Hadfield has worked tirelessly to prove himself in an astronaut corps dominated by the U.S. and Russia. Canada has paid its dues by contributing the robotics systems that built and maintain the ISS, finally earning a spot for one of its own at the controls of what Hadfield calls “the world’s spaceship.”

• See Kate Lunau’s photos with Hadfield and his colleagues from inside NASA

Sandoz knew her time with Hadfield was limited; this was his last week of training in Houston before the launch. At 10:15 a.m., right on time, he breezed in wearing a neatly tucked-in polo shirt—the unofficial uniform at Johnson—with the crew patch of Expedition 35, which portrays a moonlit view of Earth from the ISS as the sun peeks from behind it. Assigned to Expedition 34/35 in September 2010, he’s been training intensively in the U.S., Russia and elsewhere for the mission. It isn’t his first space flight, but it will be the longest he’s spent off the ground. Hadfield will be on the ISS until May, making him only the second Canadian (after Robert Thirsk) to do a long-duration mission.

Continue…

Fat but fit

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Andy Richter/Aurora Photos/Corbis

Ragen Chastain, who carries 284 lb. on her five-foot, four-inch frame, has been an athlete since she was a kid: she was cheerleading captain, a varsity athlete and has won three national championships as a competitive country and western dancer. “I focus on my fitness as a dancer, I get my five servings of fruits and vegetables a day and make healthy choices,” says Chastain, 35, who lives in Los Angeles. She isn’t our typical picture of health. With a body mass index of 48, Chastain classifies as morbidly obese. (BMI is a measurement of body fat based on weight and height; 25 or greater qualifies as overweight, and 30 or greater is obesity.)

Obesity has been linked to all sorts of serious health problems, such as hypertension, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. But not all obese people are alike. Surprisingly, some seem to be as metabolically healthy as their normal-weight peers—maybe even more so. The notion that it’s possible to be “fit but fat” is still very controversial. “I think it can be misinterpreted to suggest that obesity doesn’t matter in many people,” says Robert Ross, an expert in exercise physiology at Queen’s University. “I’m as fat as you can get on the BMI chart,” acknowledges Chastain, author of Fat: The Owner’s Manual. She believes it says little about her overall fitness and health. On her blog, Dances With Fat, she writes: “I am not a thin woman covered in fat, I am a fat woman who is also a very fit athlete.”

A new study in the European Heart Journal, the largest one ever to examine this, suggests just how common these “fit but fat” people might be. Over 43,000 participants were given a detailed questionnaire and physical exam, including a treadmill test. Researchers concluded that 46 per cent of obese participants were metabolically healthy: they didn’t suffer from conditions like insulin resistance, diabetes, high cholesterol or high blood pressure. (To qualify as “metabolically healthy” in this study, they could have one or none of those conditions.) These people were at no greater risk of death from any cause than those who were of normal weight—in other words, their excess pounds didn’t seem to make a difference.

Continue…

You know virtual reality helmets? I tried one on.

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 at 7:32 AM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is at NASA’s Johnson Space Center with astronaut Chris Hadfield, set to become the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. Follow Kate on Twitter @katelunau and check out her photos on Tumblr for a behind-the-scenes look at how Canada’s most elite astronaut is preparing for the mission of a lifetime. Read all of Kate’s posts from the JSC here.

Kate Lunau with her VR helmet. (Photo: Kate Lunau)

In space, there’s no up or down—it’s a 360-degree world. And that can be extremely disorienting, as I learned shortly after getting suited up today at the NASA Johnson Space Center’s Virtual Reality lab, where I took a “spacewalk” with Jeremy Hansen, one of Canada’s newest astronauts. Despite feeling mildly seasick as I roamed the outside of the International Space Station, it was a thrill.

At Johnson’s VR lab, astronauts practice for all sorts of situations they might encounter in real life on the ISS. Canadian Chris Hadfield, who’ll assume command of the ISS in March, is working a lot in VR right now to master SAFER, a propulsive backpack that can save spacewalking astronauts should they drift away, one of the lab technicians told me. In the VR lab, there’s a console filled with monitors where astronauts can operate a virtual Canadarm; and there’s another area where astronauts donning VR helmets can practice climbing all over the ISS to do a repair. That second station was where Jeremy and I went.

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What happens to an astronaut’s heart during long space travel?

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 at 7:20 AM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is at NASA’s Johnson Space Center with astronaut Chris Hadfield, set to become the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. Follow Kate on Twitter @katelunau and check out her photos on Tumblr for a behind-the-scenes look at how Canada’s most elite astronaut is preparing for the mission of a lifetime. Read all of Kate’s posts from the JSC here.

Photo: Kate Lunau

Microgravity is thought to cause muscle atrophy and the heart, of course, is a muscle; but we still don’t understand exactly how it’s affected. When Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield arrives on the International Space Station in December, he’ll be giving ultrasounds to his crewmates—and today I got to watch him practice how to do it, in a full-size mockup of the ISS.

The training session took place in Building 9 at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, a cavernous, well-lit space filled with ISS modules, where astronauts do their drills (It’s also known as the Vehicle Mock-up Facility). This area is generally restricted to the public; I gained access only after being fingerprinted and ID’ed, and after applying for entrance several weeks ago. As we explored the room today, a tour group walked by through a glass-paneled hallway above, peering down on us with curiosity.

Continue…

Coming up today at the Johnson Space Center: Why does the heart shrink in space?

By Kate Lunau - Monday, September 17, 2012 at 10:48 AM - 0 Comments

Photo: Kate Lunau

Kate Lunau is at NASA’s Johnson Space Center with astronaut Chris Hadfield, set to become the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. Follow Kate on Twitter @katelunau and check out her photos on Tumblr for a behind-the-scenes look at how Canada’s most elite astronaut is preparing for the mission of a lifetime. Read all of Kate’s posts from the JSC here.

A few weeks ago, the Canadian Space Agency offered me the chance to visit NASA’s Johnson Space Center and shadow astronaut Chris Hadfield, who will be the first Canadian to assume command of the International Space Station. So yesterday morning I hopped on a plane to Houston.

After a few hours’ flight, I landed in hot, muggy Houston. As I skimmed around downtown, passing strip malls and palm trees, I knew I was headed in the right direction when I started seeing car dealerships with names like “Space City.” My hotel, just down the road from JSC, decorates its walls with framed photos of galaxies and star clusters.

The JSC, which is home to NASA’s astronaut corps, is the lead NASA center for the 16-nation ISS. By contributing robotics like the Canadarm2 to the Space Station, Canada earns a place for its astronauts to train here. Hadfield, a highly regarded member of the space community, is  also very musical guy: last time we met, he told me about how he liked to play his guitar in space. I was happy to see he plans to do so again on this mission.

Today and tomorrow I’ll be shadowing Hadfield and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Coming up today: We visit the Neutral Buoyancy Lab and the Human Research Facility, where scientists are studying why the heart muscle seems to shrink in long-duration spaceflight. Tomorrow I’ll be seeing the Virtual Reality lab.

NASA fieldtrip with @Cmdr_Hadfield

By Kate Lunau - Sunday, September 16, 2012 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

REVIEW: Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor

By Kate Lunau - Friday, September 14, 2012 at 2:30 PM - 0 Comments

The ocean covers more than 70 per cent of our planet, yet the vast majority of it remains unexplored. We’ve mapped the moon, Venus, and Mars in greater detail than Earth, notes Felt; a large part of what we do know comes thanks to a little-known American scientist named Marie Tharp. In a new biography, Felt portrays this enigmatic woman, who along with partner Bruce Heezen, was the first to create a global map of the ocean floor.

In 1948, Tharp, then 28, presented herself at the new geophysical lab at Columbia University. With degrees in math and geology, Tharp was a catch, but this was an all-male team; she was put to work interpreting soundings (sonar pings that measure ocean depths). Using this data, she and Heezen created their map, and revealed a rift valley that runs over 64,000 km along the ocean floor. It might be the largest geologic feature on Earth, and its discovery laid the foundation for proving the then-controversial theory of plate tectonics.

When Tharp began to map the rift valley, Heezen was dismissive. He eventually came around, and went on to earn far more credit for their work than she did. As a woman, Tharp was prevented early on from going out on research expeditions; later in life, she railed against those who implied she’d stumbled upon the rift valley, or found it by accident. This biography feels like the author giving credit where credit is due.

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Professional at a steep price

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 7:40 PM - 0 Comments

Last fall, when Kristen Pennington started at the University of Toronto faculty of law, she was surprised to learn of “an assumption” that students wouldn’t work during the school year. “I’d never been in school and not worked,” the 22-year-old says. “It wasn’t a question.” During her first year in law school, Pennington held down three part-time jobs: she worked as an after-hours receptionist at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, as an executive assistant for a lawyer, and as manager of the undergraduate residence at Glendon Campus, part of York University, where she also lived rent-free. “I worked for my room,” she says. “It was a great expense to cross off the list.” The commute from Glendon to U of T’s downtown campus, on public transit, was “45 minutes on a good day.”

Even with this income, Pennington took out loans from the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) to pay her $26,000 tuition, plus another $500 for books. She secured a $100,000 line of credit without needing her parents to co-sign—even though she had no credit score—and got her first credit card. Because of her financial situation, U of T knocked a few thousand off her tuition for the year. “I have two siblings doing their undergrad,” says Pennington, who comes from Windsor, Ont. “There was quite a lot of strain on my parents, who made it clear upfront they’d help me with a lot of incidentals, but I wouldn’t be getting a lump sum from them.”

A professional degree—like law, medicine, business or engineering—is seen as a ticket to a high-paying job, but it is a costly undertaking. In today’s economy, holding a professional degree is no guarantee, although many students see it as a worthwhile investment. They’re finding creative (and sometimes desperate) ways to fund their education, cobbling together part-time work, paid internships or co-op placements, grants and scholarships, but also taking out bank loans, borrowing money from their parents, putting their rent on credit cards or taking out cash advances. Tuition is increasingly expensive, keeping pace with the rate of inflation—and in some cases exceeding it. Today, incoming students at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business pay $76,700 for the 12-month M.B.A. At U of T’s faculty of law, where earning a degree usually takes three years, first-year tuition for 2012-13 is $27,420. The first year of engineering at Queen’s University costs $10,344, compared with $5,706 for an arts or science degree.

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Campus crisis: the broken generation

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, September 5, 2012 at 11:27 AM - 0 Comments

Sándor Fizli

In late August, as the first leaves changed from green to red and gold, university ghost towns were coming back to life. Residences were dusted out. Classrooms were readied. Textbooks were purchased—and new outfits, new computers, new posters to decorate dorm room walls. Amid this bustle, construction workers at Cornell University began installing steel mesh nets under seven bridges around campus. They overlook the scenic gorges for which Ithaca, N.Y., is known; in early 2010, they were the sites of three Cornell student suicides of a total of six that year. Students cross the bridges daily on their way to class.

Cornell’s bridge nets are the latest and most visible sign that the best and brightest are struggling. In an editorial in the Cornell Daily Sun following the 2010 suicides, president David J. Skorton acknowledged these deaths are just “the tip of the iceberg, indicative of a much larger spectrum of mental health challenges faced by many on our campus and on campuses everywhere.”

Last year, Ryerson University’s centre for student development and counselling in Toronto saw a 200 per cent increase in demand from students in crisis situations: “homeless, suicidal, really sick,” says Dr. Su-Ting Teo, director of student health and wellness. Colleagues at other schools noticed the same. “I’ve met with different key people. They’re saying last year was the worst they’ve ever seen,” says psychologist Gail Hutchinson, director of Western University’s student development centre in London. “The past few years, it’s been growing exponentially.” Fully a quarter of university-age Canadians will experience a mental health problem, most often stress, anxiety or depression.

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Can’t go topless in Paris — even at the beach

By Kate Lunau - Monday, August 13, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Ana Arevalo/AFP/Getty Images

For the past decade, Parisians have flocked each summer to Paris Plages, which transforms the banks of the Seine River to a series of urban beaches. All the necessities are there: white sand, parasols, roving ice cream vendors, even free concerts. One site currently has a giant screen allowing loungers to catch the Olympics.

But some appear to have been taking the beach theme a little too far. While topless sunbathing is welcome on beaches outside the city, Paris police are warning sunbathers to dress “in accordance with good morals and public order,” or face a fine of at least $46. Anyone who bares all and shows their “genital area or breasts” could face a much higher penalty—a year in prison.

Paris Plages, now in its eleventh year, was created by Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë to provide a beachside holiday to those who couldn’t afford to leave the city. Some criticized it as an expensive frivolity, but it’s expanded several times, a testament to its popularity, even without full-frontal nudity.

Names in the news

By Nicholas Köhler, Chris Sorensen, Aaron Wherry, and Kate Lunau - Thursday, August 9, 2012 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Alexander Otarola/Reuters

Britain’s lucky charms

Prince William and Kate, in matching team Great Britain T-shirts, took a gold for enthusiasm with this rare PDA while cheering another U.K. gold medal at the Velodrome. The royal couple and Prince Harry, Britain’s biggest ambassadors throughout the Games, have been taking in as many as four events a day.

Farewell, Snoop Dogg

Snoop Dogg’s new reggae album is entitled Reincarnated, and apparently the legendary rapper has been reborn as something else entirely: the MC born Calvin Broadus, Jr. is now Snoop Lion. While in Jamaica to record his new record, Snoop turned toward Rastafarianism. “I wanted to bury Snoop Dogg and become Snoop Lion, but I didn’t know that until I went to the temple and received the name Snoop Lion from the Nyabinghi priest,” he explained. “From that moment on, I started to understand why I was there and was able to create something magical in this project.” He is now interested in making music that “kids and grandparents” can listen to. A documentary about his time in the West Indies will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Long may she run

Top U.S. researchers are on the hunt for a 113-year-old Regina woman. If the unnamed woman is indeed still alive—as Saskatchewan government records show—she will be one of the world’s oldest living people. And California researchers want to interview her, looking into her lifestyle and genetic history—for clues to the “secret” of her long life, says Stephen Coles, of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group. Saskatchewan has an uncommonly high number of centenarians, twice the national average, a rate much closer to Japan’s.

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Our Chinese oil sands

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, August 8, 2012 at 9:53 AM - 0 Comments

Xinhua News Agency/Eyevine

In June, the Alberta government launched a website publicly outing employers who haven’t paid their workers—an online hall of shame. Among these “deadbeat bosses,” as the media quickly dubbed them, the worst offender was a subsidiary of China Petrochemical Corp. (Sinopec), a Chinese state-owned oil giant. That same subsidiary, along with others, is facing charges after the deaths of two Chinese workers flown in to work on a site near Fort McMurray, Alta., in 2007. After much delay, the trial begins this fall.

It’s the kind of bad press Chinese firms can’t afford as they seek to buy up swaths of Alberta’s oil patch and attempt to win over Canadian regulators and a wary populace. Last week, Chinese state interests went after two Calgary-based companies. China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) Ltd.’s $15.1-billion bid for Nexen Inc. got the most attention by far: it’s the biggest-ever takeover of a Canadian company by a state-owned entity. On the same day, Talisman Energy Inc. said it would sell a 49 per cent stake in its U.K. North Sea outfit to Sinopec for $1.5 billion. “Virtually overnight, Chinese investment in the energy sector has doubled to over $30 billion,” says Wenran Jiang, director of the Canada-China Energy & Environment Forum. Although the deals have yet to be approved, it’s a sign of things to come.

The proposed Nexen deal would be the latest—and by far the largest—in a string of acquisitions. Last fall, Sinopec bought Calgary-based Daylight Energy Ltd. for $2.1 billion, the first time a Chinese state-run company made a successful bid for a North American energy firm. Earlier this year, PetroChina bought Athabasca Oil Sands Corp., giving China its first full ownership of an oil sands project. The Nexen deal takes things to another level. It’s worth more than all of China’s direct investment in Africa in 2011 ($14.7 billion), according to Gordon Houlden, director of the University of Alberta’s China Institute. Jiang says China’s interest in Canada is ramping up partly because we’ve become more welcoming. Prime Minister Stephen Harper once vowed not to sell Canadian values to the highest bidder and bestowed honorary Canadian citizenship on the Dalai Lama, to China’s chagrin; lately he’s softened his stance. In January, after the U.S. rejected the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline from the oil sands to the U.S. Gulf, Harper courted the Chinese more aggressively, visiting Beijing to discuss oil sales as part of a trade mission. (With the vast majority of Canada’s crude oil going to the U.S., he’s said he’s keen to diversify.) The controversial Northern Gateway pipeline, if approved, will tap into the surging demand in Asia.

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