Tag: grade 8

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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News

Learning How To Write A Great Essay Could Pay Off

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If you can write an excellent persuasive essay, you may be able to get a three-bedroom house for $100.

Calvin and Diana Brydges live in Aylmer, Ontario but they plan on moving to Barrie, Ont.

For the past two years, they have been trying to sell their house, without luck.

Then they had a creative idea.

They would hold an essay contest, with the house going to the winning entry.

The winning entry will be the essay that best answers the question, “why will this home benefit you?”

The house is worth about $300,000. The Brydges will sell their home to the writer of the winning essay, as long as they get 3,000 essays. Each essay writer will pay $100 to submit their essay.

If the couple doesn’t get 3,000 essays by the end of August they will give everyone their money back.

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Health

Toronto Kids Need More Exercise

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Ninety-nine percent of children living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) don’t get enough exercise, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Toronto and Dalhousie University tracked the physical activity of 856 grade five and six students in the GTA for one week.

The students wore accelerometers – tiny devices that are similar to pedometers, but which measure all types of motion – for about 16 and a half hours a day.

The information recorded by the devices showed that, on average, boys got about 35 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day. Girls got about 24 minutes of activity per day.

Experts* recommend that children aged five to 17 should get 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity each day.

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Kids News

First Nations Teens Walk 1,500 Km To Raise Awareness

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Six young people and a guide walked 1,500 kilometres to bring awareness to the issues of First Nations people in North America. The walk was inspired by the Idle No More movement.

They called their walk, “The Journey of Nishiyuu.” In Cree, “nishiyuu” means “the people.”

The group left the Cree community of Whapmagoostui in Quebec on January 16. Along their walk, more than 300 people joined them; thousands more gathered with them at the end of their journey, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on March 25.

Along the way the group stopped at aboriginal communities. They also visited Victoria Island where Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence recently held a hunger strike to protest the Canadian government’s First Nations policies.

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