Transit ridership rebounds
'Words were like bullets'
Deer stressed by wildfire
Jewish groups condemn MPs
Rental search 'stressful'
Town backs away from sea
Attempted spyware infection
Russia lambastes the West
Pig heart put into man
Workers ratify agreement
Using AI in wildfire fights
A new picture of the past
Warriors eke out OT win
Jittery Rockets fall in OT
Rockets ready for season
Brand facing fresh claims
DiCaprio has new model
Joe reacts to Sophie lawsuit
Skywatching
Life on Saturn's moon?
Carbon is an unusual element. Its atoms can join directly together to form huge molecules consisting of long chains and other structures. As my high school...
Everything about nothing
In the 17th century, Evangelista Torricelli invented the barometer. In the same century, Blaise Pascal carried one of Torricelli's barometers to the tops of...
The expanding universe
The universe is expanding. It started to expand at the Big Bang almost 14 billion years ago. We know how fast it is expanding and that it is accelerating. We...
Big sky astronomy
In the past, most radio astronomy consisted of pointing the instrument at the right place in the sky. Most cosmic objects change little over a human lifetime....
Life needs a sun like ours
Current thinking is that here on Earth, chemical-based life, like ours, started in bodies of water, muddy waterside places or on slimy rocks. Organic molecules...
Getting close to the sun
We are seriously interested in understanding the sun for two reasons. First, it is the only star in the universe that is close enough to study in fine detail....
Lake under Martian ice cap?
In 1993, a huge lake of liquid water was detected under Earth’s Antarctic ice. It lay some four kilometres below the surface of the ice, and 500 metres...
Close encounter with Mars
We are now having a close encounter with Mars. The planet rises as a brilliant reddish lamp in the southeastern sky around 10 p.m. It's clear why Mars is...
To the stars
Although we have no technologies that can get us to the stars in a human lifetime, our science fiction writers have been out there among the stars for decades....
Universe's speed limit
The fastest manmade object is the Juno spacecraft, which reached a speed of about 265,000 km/h. At that speed, we could get to the moon in about 90 minutes,...
Dust in the Martian wind
One of the most fascinating videos sent back by the Curiosity rover, currently exploring the surface of Mars, shows a number of dust storms marching across the...
Lights in the sky
One night, some years ago I had a phone call from a rather worried-sounding man. He lived a few kilometres to the north of where I live. He said that his...
Signs of life
In the shallow waters of Shark Bay, Australia are strange, mushroom-shaped rocks, called stromatolites. These are produced by living creatures. Millions of...
Little green men
In 1967, Cambridge graduate student Jocelyn Bell was investigating how the solar wind makes distant radio sources twinkle. These observations can tell us how...
Size matters in telescopes
During the last two or three decades, the progress made in development of new astronomical instrumentation has been nothing short of stunning. We can make...
The northern lights
My very first encounter with an aurora was in England, before I came to Canada, at the house of a radio amateur. He was communicating by sending shortwave...
Interstellar visitors
Last year, an asteroid from interstellar space flew through our Solar System and is now on its way back out into the space between the stars. Now, astronomers...
Solar flares
The Sun has many times demonstrated its power to disrupt our power, communication and transportation infrastructure, and to cause problems for many aspects of...
Another near miss
By the time you read this, asteroid 2010 WC9 will have passed the Earth at around 12.8 kilometres a second (46,000 kilometres an hour), at a distance of roughly...
Fly me to the moon
This is the first time I have had the opportunity to squeeze one of my favourite jazz titles into an astronomy article. Considering the rigours of the journey...