Readable, teachable news.
Sunday, May 5, 2024
Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield will soon be simply, “Mr. Hadfield.”
That’s because he has announced that he is resigning.
In this case, “resigning” means stopping his job as an astronaut.
Hadfield has been an astronaut for 35 years.
Recently, he gained wide popularity after sending photos and videos to Earth from the International Space Station.
Many people around the world enjoyed his tweets and Facebook posts from space.
A dome-headed dinosaur skull found in southern Alberta is helping scientists rethink some of their ideas about dinosaurs.
The skull was found in 2008 by a team of scientists led by Dr. David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum.
The skull is about 85 million years old.
The top of the skull is made of a dome-shaped mass of solid bone about 10 centimetres thick.
This means the dinosaur belonged to a group of dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs (“thick-headed lizards”).
The scientists compared the skull to all of the known pachycephalosaur specimens in the world – about 600 of them.
They learned that there are 16 different species within that group, and the skull discovered in Alberta belongs to a species that has never been seen before.
To help his home city “bounce back” after a terrible storm, NBA player Kevin Durant has donated $1-million.
The number of people harmed by a recent tornado in the U.S. state of Oklahoma was greatly reduced, thanks to a special early-warning system.
On Monday, a major tornado hit Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City.
A tornado is a violent storm that usually looks like a whirling funnel.
Residents were warned there was a big storm coming, and possibly a tornado, days before it arrived.
When it actually hit, sirens blared, giving people a 16-minute head start to find shelter.
I’m watching history happen, right in front of my eyes.
It’s 12:30 Eastern Time on Monday, May 6.
On my computer screen, I’m watching a live satellite feed from space.
An astronaut is singing and playing guitar. He’s singing a song he wrote (with Canadian songwriter Ed Robertson from the band the Barenaked Ladies) called I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)?
But the really exciting part is something I can’t see. Hundreds of thousands of children in Canada and throughout the world are also singing, right at this moment, singing the very same song.
It’s part of Music Monday, which is an annual event in Canada that began in 2005. Each year, a song is chosen and school children across the country learn it so they can sing it at the same time on the same day.
It’s about a boy and an atom.
And it may just be the world’s most impressive stop-motion film.
That’s because the film is made entirely of atoms.
Stop-motion animation is a way of making a movie using still pictures.
One company, a computer company called IBM, has made the world’s smallest—and arguably the most amazing—stop-motion video.
The video features a boy named Atom playing with a “ball” (really an atom) and bouncing on a trampoline. It’s a simple film, but its importance is enormous.
That’s because, rather than a doll, the filmmakers used atoms.
An atom is a microscopic piece of matter. Atoms can’t be seen with the naked eye, or even a normal microscope, because they are too small.
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.
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.
Like many children, Daisy Morris loves to collect fossils.
Unlike other children, however, Daisy’s hobby has led to a pterosaur being named after her.
A pterosaur is a type of flying reptile closely related to dinosaurs.
The species Daisy discovered is now known as Vectidraco daisymorrisae, or “Dragon from the Isle of Wight.”
Daisy, who lives in England, was five years old in 2008 when she and her mother were taking a walk along the beach. She noticed some black bones—about 40 mm long– sticking out of the mud and she dug them out.
The family took the bones to a fossil expert at Southampton University in England.
Want to be a great doctor or scientist? Make sure you play video games.
New research shows that certain video games can help people “find things” better and faster.
For instance, if a doctor is looking for something on an x-ray, or if a scientist is looking at a satellite image—they may be able to do it better if they’ve “trained” by playing video games.
Certain video games, like driving games, can improve a person’s “visual search skills.” That’s the ability to see something that’s hidden in the middle of a confusing field of things. Like finding “Waldo.”
Researchers at the University of Toronto studied three groups of people: 20 people who played a shooting game called Medal of Honor, 20 people who played the driving game Need for Speed, and 20 people who played a puzzle game called Ballance.
Did you ever wonder how the astronauts who are living on board the International Space Station get fresh supplies, like food, medicine and materials for their research?
A cargo capsule called SpaceX Dragon was recently sent up to the ISS to bring the astronauts fresh supplies.
Dragon was loaded with more than a thousand kilograms of science equipment, food and other materials.
It left Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Friday.
