Bug Patrol
BIOCHEMISTRY
Vancouver has an itch that just won’t go away. Luckily, Darin Craig, a service manager with Local Pest Control...
Read More >>Battle of the nanotubes
MATERIALS
When one thinks of the word “nanotube,” the other word that’s likely to come to mind is “carbon.” Even a Google search reveals this bias. It’s easy to understand why....
Read More >>Tracking the chemical fracking controversy
ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY
The line of wheat waving in a field in the Alberta countryside is broken abruptly by a dark earthen wall. Packed in behind this berm are more than a dozen...
Read More >>What’s the buzz?
ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY
As insects go, bees undoubtedly lead the polls of popular opinion. While most...
Read More >>Something fishy with nanotechnology?
NANOTECHNOLOGY
Nanotech: Think big by thinking small. That could be nanotechnology’s tagline, if indeed this hot area of science needed a cool slogan — which it doesn’t. That’s because nanotech is...
Read More >>Waxing poetic about plastics
MATERIALS CHEMISTRY
It’s in your car tires and the roads you drive on. It bonds the wood particles in your desk. It coats the apples and fancy cheeses you eat for lunch....
Read More >>Quest to sequester
SEQUESTRATION
To paraphrase a famous observation, “Everybody talks about climate change, but nobody does much about it.” Indeed, media reports and scientific...
Read More >>Running Interference
BIOCHEMISTRY
In Guinea, West Africa, February is the dry season; a dusty haze, stirred by the northeasterly harmattan winds, thickens the air. This year, the winds were harbingers of ill omen....
Read More >>It’s a heat wave
ENERGY
It is a dream that fell short of its early optimism and hype: use abundant hydrogen to supply the planet’s energy needs to eliminate the global dependence on fossil fuels...
Read More >>Glorious graphene
MATERIALS CHEMISTRY
The paradoxical observation “less is more” applies perfectly to carbon, for if you think coal and diamonds are valuable, just wait to get your hands on a little bit of...
Read More >>Chemistry with a cherry on top
FOOD CHEMISTRY
A half-century ago, Doug Goff grew up in a home in Truro, NS where the freezer usually held seven or eight flavours of ice cream and a sleeve of cones was nearby. Today, Goff is known as Dr. Freeze around the world for his pioneering research into making consistently better ice cream.
Read More >>Microwaved Coal
ENERGY
Stick a chunk of lignite in your home microwave and you’ll find that it doesn’t even warm up: coal is transparent to microwave radiation. But you might also notice that...
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