Readable, teachable news.
Thursday, November 21, 2024
DC Comics will introduce a new superhero in April: a 16-year-old Cree girl from Moose Factory, Ontario, who goes by the name Equinox.
The character will be part of a five-issue series featuring Justice League Canada, a team of superheroes based in Northern Ontario.
Some toy companies have recently introduced new lines of toy weapons designed especially for girls.
While the toys are a hit with girls, some adults object to them. Some people say the toys encourage violence and aggression among girls. Others say they are too feminine, and promote old-fashioned stereotypes.
Last fall, Nerf introduced its Rebelle line, which includes bows and guns that shoot foam darts or spray water. The weapons have names like the Heartbreaker Bow Blaster and the Pink Crush Blaster gun. They are brightly coloured in mostly pinks and purples.
A team of researchers announced March 17 that they have detected light patterns in space that could be relics of the earliest moments of the universe.
A group of scientists in the United States has come one step closer to harnessing a source of energy that would be clean, safe and nearly unlimited.
The scientists, who work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, are trying to find a way to generate energy efficiently using a process called nuclear fusion.
For many years, archaeologists have wondered why the people who built Stonehenge – a prehistoric monument in the south of England – used huge rocks that came from more than 300 kilometres away.
Now, a team of researchers believes the rocks may have been chosen because they produce musical sounds.
The Great Lakes were almost completely frozen over by March 2, with 90.5 per cent of their total surface covered in ice.
The five connected lakes are located on the border between Canada and the United States, in northeastern North America.
Although some sections of the lakes freeze each winter, usually only about 50 per cent of the water is covered with ice.
In 2012-2013, only about 38 per cent of the lakes was frozen over, and just 13 per cent was covered with ice in the winter of 2011-2012.
Tiny pieces of plastic – each about the size of a grain of sand – are posing a huge threat to marine life in the Great Lakes.
For the past two summers, researchers from an organization called 5 Gyres have been collecting water samples from the Great Lakes.
They used fine-mesh nets to skim the surface of the water.
When they looked at what they had collected, they found thousands of tiny plastic beads, each less than a millimetre.
At first the scientists didn’t know where these “microbeads” came from. Then they used an electron microscope to compare them to products such as face and body washes or toothpaste that people use to help scrub and polish our skin and teeth.
Environment Canada has issued an emergency protection order that will limit construction activity and loud industrial noise near the habitat of an endangered bird species.
The greater sage-grouse is a shy bird that lives in southeastern Alberta and Saskatchewan.
There are fewer than 150 adult birds left in Canada, and environmentalists believe the species could be extirpated (locally extinct) within five years unless it is protected.
The birds’ natural habitat is long prairie grass, but much of this grassland has been destroyed by agriculture and oil and gas development over the past hundred years.
In December 2013, Environment Canada – the government department responsible for the environment – issued an order that prohibits any activity that would disrupt the birds’ habitat during the spring mating season.
Seven Canadian species that were once considered endangered or nearly extinct are beginning to flourish again, thanks to efforts by conservationists.
Canadian Geographic magazine reported in its December 2013 issue that populations of endangered whooping cranes, North Pacific humpback whales, eastern wild turkeys, swift foxes, sea otters, wood bison and peregrine falcons have increased in recent years.
Most of them are no longer considered endangered.
Several factors contributed to the disappearance of these species, including loss of habitat, pesticides, disease and over-hunting.
Scientists have discovered 60 species of previously unknown plants and animals living in a remote rainforest in southeastern Suriname.
Suriname is a small country on the northeastern coast of South America, just north of Brazil.
It is located in a geographic area called the Guiana Shield, which contains more than one-quarter of the world’s rainforest.
An expedition of 16 field biologists spent three weeks in Suriname in 2012, exploring the remote, mountainous rainforest region.
Thirty indigenous men helped transport their food and equipment by boat and guided team through the forest.
