Month: April 2013

Lighter News Technology

Judge Finds Himself In Contempt Of Court

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A judge in Michigan did something very unusual last week. He charged himself with “contempt of court” and gave himself a fine of $25.

People can get charged with contempt when they do something during a trial that the judge believes shows disrespect to the court.

So when judge Raymond Voet’s cell phone went off during a trial on April 13, he declared himself to be in contempt. Then he had to pay his own court $25.

It happened during a speech that was being given by one of the lawyers.

The judge’s phone started “talking,” loudly speaking some voice commands.

He thinks he may have accidentally bumped it, which turned on its voice activation–a feature the judge told MLive.com he didn’t even know it had.

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News Politics

Justin Trudeau New Leader Of Federal Liberals

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Justin Trudeau is the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Justin Trudeau is the son of Pierre Trudeau, who was the charismatic Prime Minister of Canada for more than 15 years in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

A new kind of Trudeaumania swept the Liberal Party on Sunday, where Justin Trudeau won the leadership of the party by a landslide.

He took more than 80 per cent of the vote, winning handily on the first ballot.

Trudeau has a big challenge—to get the Liberal party focused again, and eventually to get it back in power.

He wants to be Canada’s next prime minister.

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Arts News

New York’s Met Museum Gets $1B Donation Of Cubist Art

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Leonard Lauder’s interest in art began when he was six years old and began collecting Art Deco postcards.

His postcard collection eventually grew to include more than 120,000 postcards. Last year, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston exhibited 700 of them.

But postcards weren’t Lauder’s main artistic interest. He became more interested in Cubist art, by artists such as Pablo Picasso. He collected Cubist art for 37 years and built up a collection of 78 famous works.

Last week, he decided to donate his collection of Cubist art to New York’s Metropolitan Museum and to create a new research centre for modern art.

Lauder’s collection is worth more than $1-billion.

Some of the paintings are “the best and most important works of the four pre-eminent Cubist painters—Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris,” according to a statement from the Metropolitan Museum.

Lauder, 80, comes from a very wealthy family. He is the son of Estée Lauder, who co-founded the Estée Lauder cosmetics company.

Lauder said he is donating his collection as “a gift to the people who live and work in New York and those from around the world who come to visit our great arts institutions.”

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Animals Science

Unlocking The Mysteries Of The Monarch Butterfly’s Incredible Journey

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Every year, Monarch butterflies fly more than 4,000 kilometres from Canada to Mexico.

Until recently, no-one was sure how the Monarch butterfly knew the exact path to take that would ensure it would end up at its intended destination after such a long flight.

Now Canadian scientists believe they have discovered the secret to the butterfly’s internal sense of direction.

Scientists wanted to know if the Monarchs used a type of “internal compass” or an “internal map.” Some animals and birds have both.

To find out, researchers tested the butterflies by starting them different locations than they normally would. Ryan Norris, an associate professor of biology at the University of Guelph, started them on their journey from Guelph, Ontario and Calgary, Alberta.

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News

Montreal To Put A New Spin On “Street Food”

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Montreal is known for its fine and unique culture. Visitors flock to the city for its art galleries, high fashion and excellent cuisine.

Now, people in Montreal have a special treat in store for them.

The city’s mayor, Michael Applebaum, recently announced that the ban on food trucks has been lifted. That means that people may now be able to sample the city’s unparalleled cuisine from special food trucks on the street.

In many big cities, street vendors offer hot dogs and sausages from food trucks.

In typical Montreal style, the food trucks in that city will be a little different. The “street food” in Montreal will be “of a quality that is going to be highly respected and renowned,” the mayor said at a news conference, according to the Globe and Mail newspaper.

After the announcement, the mayor approached a food vendor called Grumman 78, which served him a Vietnamese-style taco and tomato salad with cornbread croutons.

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Health Science

Calgary Student Wins National Science Prize For Cancer Therapy Research

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A high school student from Calgary has won the Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada competition for his research into an experimental cancer therapy.

Arjun Nair, 16, is a grade 11 student at Webber Academy. His winning experiment involved photothermal therapy (PTT), which is used to treat cancer.

With PTT, a patient is injected with gold nanoparticles. A nanoparticle is a microscopic particle of a substance, less than one-millionth the size of a grain of sand.

The gold nanoparticles collect in the patient’s cancerous tumours. When the tumours are bathed with laser light, the nanoparticles heat up and kill the cancer cells.

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News Politics

Britain’s “Iron Lady” Dead At The Age Of 87

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Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister of England from 1979 to 1990. That was the longest time for any British prime minister since the early 19th century.

Thatcher was Britain’s only female prime minister and she was considered an important leader around the world.

On Monday Thatcher died of a stroke; she was 87 years old.

When she was Prime Minister, Thatcher was considered by most people to be very strong-willed. Her nickname was “The Iron Lady.” Once when her own Conservative party members asked her to tone down her a hard decision, she said to them: ‘The lady’s not for turning.’

On the other hand, Thatcher had a vision for her country and she was loyal to it to the end.

She believed strongly in lowering government spending, letting private companies buy government agencies and letting companies compete with each other without government help.

When a terrorist bomb, meant for her, killed five people, she made a speech that evening telling her own party that the British would never give in to terrorism.

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Animals Science

Camel Fossils Found In Canada’s Arctic

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Scientists have discovered fossilized bone fragments belonging to a prehistoric camel that lived in Canada’s High Arctic about 3.5 million years ago.

The fossils were found on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, in a site near the Strathcona Fiord.

Scientists have also found the fossilized remains of mammals such as bears, beavers and deerlets (small deerlike animals) in this area.

The site is a polar desert now, but during the Pliocene era – the time when the when the camel was alive – it would have been a forest. The average temperature in the Arctic was 14 to 22 degrees warmer then, so it was warm enough for trees to grow, but still cold, snowy and dark for much of the year.

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Sports

New Blue Jays Pitcher Separated From Beloved Pit Bull

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Mark Buehrle is a baseball pitcher who recently joined the Toronto Blue Jays.

Buehrle is an extraordinary pitcher. He is one of only 18 people in the game’s history to pitch a “perfect game.”

The Blue Jays are pinning some of their hopes of winning this season on Buehrle.

However, there is a problem. When Buehrle signed on with the Jays, he had to move to Toronto.

Ontario law doesn’t allow people to keep pit bulls as pets; Buehrle has a pit bull named Slater.

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Politics

Cyprus The Latest Country To Get A Bailout

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Cyprus is the latest country to require a financial “bailout” from other European countries to keep its banks and economy from collapsing.

Like Greece, which was bailed out of an economic crisis last year, Cyprus is one of 17 countries in Europe that uses a type of currency, or money, called the Euro.

The problems for Cyprus began with the country’s banks, which loaned money to people who didn’t pay it back. Governments of other countries that use the Euro became nervous that Cyprus banks would fail if they were re-paid, and that the problems could spread to their countries.

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