Tech News

Canada’s boreal forest will look different in the years to come. Scientists say the changing climate and increased severity of wildfires are altering their makeup.  Increased severity of wildfires and dryer, warmer weather means different species are growing back. In 2015, scientist Ellen Whitman set out on a visit to …

Joanne Nicklas says it’s exciting to think that, in future, ranchers like her may not have to worry about constant shade or turning on sprinklers around the clock to cool their cattle if summer temperatures soar like they did in B.C.’s last heat dome.  Angus-Senepol hybrid cattle have a natural …

Scientists last year finished the momentous task of completely mapping the human genome. But that map was based on just a few individuals and didn’t capture the diversity of the human population. Now, scientists have released a more diverse reference genome.  New ‘pangenome’ based on DNA of people from Africa, …

The discovery of another exoplanet in a binary star system more than 1,000 light years away may lead to discoveries of many more planets in these cosmic neighbourhoods first popularized by Star Wars.  Exoplanet ‘BEBOP-1c’ orbits a binary star system. A new discovery of a faraway planet, published today in …

An international policy struck decades ago is healing a hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic, but according to a new study — it’s also delaying the Arctic’s first ice-free summer by up to 15 years.  Without Montreal Protocol, Arctic polar cap would be almost 1 degree warmer by …

Millions of people are contributing billions of views to chopped up movies and films, parcelled up and delivered to TikTok users’ homepages in random order. It’s turning the platform into an ad hoc streaming service — and leading to the meme-ification of narrative.  Movies and shows broken into parts draw …

Nova Scotia’s record-breaking fires came as a shock in a region known for relatively mild and wet weather. But rather than being an anomaly, they are a sign of things to come for Atlantic Canada, experts say.  Experts identify 3 reasons why fires are going to get more intense and …

A Saskatoon teenager is off to Japan for the world’s most prestigious youth math competition. While taking the rest of his high school classes, Haozhe Yang moved on to university-level math. University of Saskatchewan math professor Steven Rayan says Yang scored a final mark of 100 per cent in a …

It’s unlikely that aliens, should they exist, will have a single brain and walk on two legs like they do in the movies, writes Bob McDonald.  The cephalopod’s nervous system diverged in many unexpected ways compared to humans. Everything about the octopus seems strange — unworldly, even, as some have …

Controlling feral cat populations is controversial and often involves capturing, surgically sterilizing and releasing the animals, which is complex and expensive. U.S. scientists have developed a new method for cat contraception that involves a single injection of a gene that prevents cat eggs from maturing.  An alternative to resource-intensive spay …