Month: April 2012

Amorphophallus-Apr282012 worlds tallest flower
Environment Lighter News Science

World’s Largest (And Stinkiest) Plant About To Bloom Near Niagara Falls

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It’s stinky and it’s huge—and it’s about to bloom.

The world’s tallest flower is set to bloom this week.

Its scientific name is The Amorphophallus titanium (Titan Arum for short).

The extremely rare flower is at the Niagara Parks’ Floral Showhouse, near the Canadian Horseshoe Falls in Ontario. When it blooms, it will be the 22nd of its kind to bloom in a botanical garden.

Titan Arum is also known as the corpse flower. That’s because of the stinky odour it gives off. It smells like rotting meat.

Its horrible smell helps the flower attract insects that it needs for pollination. (Lots of insects are attracted to rotting meat.)

Titan arum normally grows in the rainforests of Sumatra.

However, this one—and another one that is also growing and will bloom after the first one—was donated by a man who lives in New Hampshire, U.S.

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News Sports

Team Losing? Bring On The Rally Monkey!

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When the Los Angeles Angels baseball team is losing, they’ve got a strange and funny way of rallying the team.

A rally, in this case, means when the fans and players on the losing team get themselves all fired up so they can try even harder to win the game.

For some baseball teams, fans use “rally towels” to try to help them rally. A rally towel is a white towel that fans bring out when their team is losing; they twirl the towels over their heads. The team sees all the white towels and realizes that the fans are behind them and want them to win.

For other baseball teams, fans wear “rally caps.” A rally cap is simply a baseball cap worn inside-out and backwards. It’s the fans’ way of saying, “Let’s go, team! We can win it!”

But the Los Angeles Angels may have the strangest way of rallying the team. They have a rally monkey.

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Health News

Raising Awareness About Prader-Willi Syndrome

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Dante’s dad wants people to know about Prader-Willi Syndrome.

People with Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) feel hungry all the time. That’s hard for most of us to imagine. We’re used to eating a meal and then feeling full for about two hours.

But kids with Prader-Willi don’t feel full. After they’ve eaten, they want to eat again. But of course if they do that, they’ll eat too much—not just three meals a day. That can lead to obesity—being overweight—which can lead to health problems.

Dante, who is now seven-and-a-half, was born with PWS. His dad, Keegan Johnson, wants to make people aware of the condition in order to raise money for research and, eventually, a cure.

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News Politics

Dramatic PC Win In Alberta Confounds The Pollsters

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“They” had predicted that this election would make history in Alberta.

“They” had predicted that the new Wildrose Party would win, and take over from the Progressive Conservatives (PCs), who have held power there since 1971.

“They” were wrong.

“They,” are the pollsters; the people who take polls. They ask people, prior to an election, how they intend to vote and make an educated guess as to who will win an election.

Most of the polls predicted not just a win for the Wildrose Party, but that the Wildrose Party might get a majority as well.

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Entertainment News

Director James Cameron Goes To Earth’s Deepest Point

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Canadian movie director James Cameron is known for doing some amazing things, in a big way.

He has directed some of the biggest movie blockbusters ever including Avatar, The Terminator and Aliens.

In 1997 he directed the film he is perhaps best known for, Titanic.

This year–100 years after the original Titanic ship sank to the bottom of the ocean–Cameron has gone down to the ocean floor himself, to the deepest point on Earth.

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News Science Technology

Students’ Experiments To Be Conducted In Space

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Three students have won the chance to have science experiments they created carried out by astronauts in space.

The students won an international competition called the YouTube Space Lab Contest. Last October, students around the world aged 14 to 18 were invited to come up with ideas for experiments that could be performed on the International Space Station.

The space station is a satellite that orbits the Earth. It includes a research laboratory where astronauts from the United States, Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada conduct experiments. Because there is no gravity on the space station, they are able to do experiments they could not do on Earth.

For the contest, students had to make a video explaining their hypothesis – the idea they wanted to test – and the method for doing the experiment. Then they posted the videos on YouTube.

Winners were chosen by people voting on YouTube, and by a panel of judges that included scientists, teachers, astronauts and journalists.

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Breaking News News Sports

Canadian Sets World Record At Boston Marathon

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April 16 was a very hot day in Boston, Mass. It was a record-setting 27 degrees Celsius.

It was the day of the 116th Boston Marathon.

A marathon is a long-distance race, covering just over 42 kilometres. On this day, many runners (16 per cent of them, in fact) decided to pass on the event because it was too hot. Many other racers posted slower than usual race times.

Except for one participant. Canadian Josh Cassidy, 27, set a world record.

Cassidy won the men’s wheelchair division. He raced in a three-wheel, high-tech wheelchair; he uses his arms to power it.

Cassidy finished with a record time of 1:18:25 (one hour, 18 minutes and 25 seconds). His time was two seconds faster than the previous best time, set by South Africa’s Ernst Van Dyk in 2004.

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News Politics Technology

How Much Did Fighter Jets Really Cost?

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In 2010, new F-35 Fighter Jets were ordered by Canada’s Defence Department (the department that oversees the country’s military).The new jets were supposed to cost around $15-billion.

Now, however, the Auditor General of Canada has said that the 65 planes will actually cost $25-billion, $10-billion more than expected. The Auditor General’s office watches over Government spending.

NDP and Liberal MPs (Members of Parliament) have accused the Defence Department (part of the Conservative government in power) of “hiding” the extra $10-billion in their financial reports when the 2011 election was coming up. Some are saying that the Conservatives wanted to keep it secret so people wouldn’t see the real costs and not vote for them.

Now that it is in the open, some MPs have demanded that Canada’s Defence Minister, Peter MacKay, step down from his job.

The Defence Department has explained their position saying that their original estimate did not include many costs such as operations (day-to-day expenses), people to run the project, or a “contingency fund” (in this case, this refers to money set aside for unknown problems in the project). Some of that money was already recorded in other budgets.

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News Technology

New Information In Amelia Earhart Mystery

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An old photograph may solve the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart, the famous pilot who disappeared on a round-the-world flight 75 years ago.

Earhart was the first woman to fly alone across North America and back, and the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping.

In 1937, she and a navigator, Fred Noonan, set out to fly around the world. They had travelled more than two-thirds of the way when their plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. Ships and airplanes searched the area, but they were unable to find any trace of the plane or its crew.

What happened to them has remained a mystery. One theory is that the plane ran out of fuel and was forced to land on a tiny island called Nikumaroro, about halfway between Australia and Hawaii.

An organization called The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR; pronounced “tiger”) has been searching for Earhart’s plane. The group has an old photograph of Nikumaroro that was taken about three months after the plane disappeared.

Recently, they used new technology to make the picture clearer. Now they believe that a dark shape in the picture, sticking up out of the water, may be part of Earhart’s plane.

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