If a star began to eat another star, what would it look like? Natasha Ivanova can tell you better than almost anyone; as the Canada Research Chair in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Alberta, pondering questions like this is her full-time job. Last week, Ivanova and her colleagues published a paper in Science which showed that a certain type of stellar cannibalism previously thought to be invisible can be observed from Earth after all. The finding may explain the existence of the recently-discovered phenomena known as luminous red novae.

If you’re reading this on a computer, take a moment and look around your monitor or laptop screen. Do you see any stray pieces of paper, such as articles with highlighted passages, notes to yourself, or contact details to follow up with later? Me too. It seems that even after more than thirty years of widespread use, personal computers still haven’t completely replaced paper as a way of displaying and manipulating information. So can they? Should they? Members of the Human Media Laboratory (HML) at Queen’s University have been asking themselves this question for almost a decade. Last week at

Of all the terrifying things that have ever lived in the ocean, mosasaurs hold a special place in my heart. Admittedly, the similarity between the name of the biggest mosasaur species – Tylosaurus – and my own may play a small role. But mostly it’s because they are the original sea monsters. Although more closely related to snakes and iguanas than dinosaurs, these giant aquatic lizards had huge heads full of terrifying teeth that would put Tyrannosaurus rex to shame. (Literally: when it comes to skull size, mosasaurs easily outrank any land-based carnivore you care to name.) And if ruling

“Congratulations on the new paper! By the way, what’s the impact factor on that journal?” Scientists get this question more often than they would care to mention. Despite numerous critiques since it was first developed in the 1960s, today the impact factor remains the gold standard for judging the reputation of a given scientific journal, and is often used in funding decisions, in some cases even to calculate scientist’s salaries. But according to new research from Université de Montréal, information technology is slowly rendering the impact factor irrelevant. Increasingly, the highest-impact papers are being published outside the highest-impact journals.

I can feel the atmosphere heating up, and it’s more than just the sweltering August weather. The next few hours will either make or break the mission for the Mars Science Laboratory, better known as Curiosity. Just after midnight, it will attempt to land in the Gale Crater that straddles the border between the northern lowlands and southern highlands of Mars. It’s by far the biggest Mars probe to date: at more than half a tonne it’s the size of a subcompact car. And while the landing itself has attracted most of the attention, it’s really just the beginning of