Trans-Canada Slimeways

Slime Mold (Physarium polycephalum)
Physarum polycephalum. Photo: Jerry Kirkhart via Wikimedia Commons

Regular readers of this blog (I flatter myself that such people exist) will know I’m keen on slime moulds, a form of life that defies easy description. So the publication this week of a paper that show how a particular type of slime mould can model transportation networks in Canada was simply too good to ignore. Not only does the research explore important questions about how nature performs computations, there’s also a cool YouTube video showing a time-lapse of the cool/gross slime in action. What could be better?

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Clearing the Air on Chlorine

Earlier this week, I was forwarded the following video from SunTV. In it, Ezra Levant interviews self-confessed Greenpeace dropout Patrick Moore about a supposed controversy over a very common chemical: vinyl.

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Climate Change Hits Where it Hurts: Hockey

Playing Shinny
Outdoor shinny games like this one are just one more human activity under threat due to climate change. Photo: Jeremy Doorten via stock.xchang

I know I’ve been writing a lot about climate change lately, and I promise that after this post I’ll try to switch it up a bit. But in my defence, for a blog about Canadian science, it doesn’t get any more relevant than this: a group of researchers from Concordia University and McGill University have published the first evidence that climate change is having a measurable impact on our treasured national pastime of outdoor hockey.

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