The first in a series of science videos for kids that I am making with my daughter Ivy. She wanted to know what whales ate, so we asked the experts at the Huntsman Fundy Discovery Aquarium. See more on the Ivy Asks YouTube channel.
science
A scientist elected to Canada’s Parliament shares his hopes as Trudeau prepares to take power
One scientist will be among the new faces in the 338-member House of Commons: Richard Cannings, a bird biologist, author, and former curator of the vertebrate museum at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Cannings, a member of Canada’s left-of-center New Democratic Party (NDP), will represent British Columbia’s (BC’s) South Okanagan—West Kootenay riding, or […]
Academia gets social
Brian Owens examines the rise of academic social networking websites, such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, and asks researchers how these sites are shaping their careers. A few years ago, Jorge Castillo-Quan, a post-doc studying the biology of ageing at University College London, UK, wrote a report about how insulin and cortisol interact to affect brain […]
Scientists are citizens, too
One of the common themes at last week’s Canadian Science Policy Conference in Halifax was the role of scientific evidence in policymaking, and specifically how scientists should go about providing it. I was disappointed to hear several of the politicians and policymakers – and no small number of scientists – repeat the same tired mantra that researchers […]
Canadian government accused of destroying environmental archives
Researchers fear that valuable documents will disappear as libraries close and merge. Scientists in Canada are up in arms over the recent closure of more than a dozen federal science libraries run by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and Environment Canada. The closures were mostly completed by last autumn, but hit the headlines last week […]
A Grab Bag of Surprises in General Science
Welcome to the General Science category on Science Borealis. This is the place where we put all of the blogs that defy categorization – or whose authors just can’t stick to one subject. In this category you’ll find a dose of every scientific subject, from astronomy to zoology, with big helpings of policy, politics, science […]
Does parliament need a science watchdog?
The NDP is making a play for the science vote. At last week’s Canadian Science Policy Conference the party’s science critic, Kennedy Stewart, unveiled the third plank in the opposition’s slowly developing science policy: an independent Parliamentary Science Officer (PSO). Stewart will table his proposal in the house this week as a private member’s bill – it would create […]
Pitch-drop custodian dies without witnessing a drop fall
John Mainstone, who for 52 years tended to one of the world’s longest-running laboratory experiments but never saw it bear fruit with his own eyes, died on 23 August after suffering a stroke. He was 78. Mainstone had been looking after the pitch drop experiment at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia since he arrived at the university […]
Slow science
The world’s longest-running experiments remind us that science is a marathon, not a sprint. Although science is a long-term pursuit, research is often practised over short timescales: a discrete experiment or a self-contained project constrained by the length of a funding cycle. But some investigations cannot be rushed. To study human lifespans or the roiling […]
On the record
The open science movement is just the latest development in the long history of scholarly communication. The essence of science has always been communication. Nothing gets entered into the scientific record until it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal so that it can be explained to the scientific community at large, allowing them to […]