The Pink Army is preparing an ambitious invasion, and Andrew Hessel is its general. This is one war you can actually feel good about supporting, though: namely, the fight against breast cancer. Hessel is the founder and managing director of Pink Army Cooperative, the world’s first open-source synthetic biotechnology firm. Founded in Edmonton in 2009,… More »

There had been talk that 2010 might be a good year for sockeye salmon, maybe even a great one. But nobody expected what was to come. It started in early August, when the Pacific Salmon Commission, a government-appointed body of Canadian and U.S. scientists, forecast 10 million sockeye would reach the mouth of B.C.’s Fraser River… More »

In the world of green power, enhanced geothermal systems technology has big potential. How big? Like enough potential to provide 2,000 times the United States’ annual energy consumption kind of big. The premise of EGS is simple: use recently developed drilling technology to bore a hole four to six kilometres deep into the earth. Pump… More »

On March 18, 2000, Terence Young was at home catching up on the weekend paper when his 15-year-old daughter, Vanessa, came to ask his permission to go out with some friends that evening. Exhausted and not relishing the idea of another conversation about Vanessa’s curfew time, Young asked her to wait until after dinner. There… More »

The birth control pill has been a major game changer in the arena of women’s reproductive rights, opening up new doors in society and the workplace. But, in the wake of the birth control pill’s 50th anniversary on the market in the United States and its 40th in Canada, a major question remains: will there… More »

The Claim All-natural wood- and corn-based cat litter is a better, greener alternative to traditional clay cat litter. Not only is it biodegradable, but pet owners can flush kitty’s mess down the toilet without getting the guilty conscience that comes with adding a plastic bag per day to already overflowing landfills. But could cat poop… More »

Aging sucks, says Michael Roy Ames. At 45, he sees signs of his own mortality every time he looks in a mirror—the greying and thinning hair, the creases in his face. Ames doesn’t despair, though. He expects to see the day when scientific advances will reverse his aging process, replace his body parts as they… More »

Stories of Colony Collapse Disorder swarmed the mainstream media in 2006. Report after report claimed pollinating bees were dying en masse, abandoning their hives, and putting our entire modern food system at risk. Today we rarely hear about CCD, even though the number of bee colonies that survive each winter continue to drop at abnormal rates…. More »

The billions of dollars and years of research that NASA has spent studying Mars may have finally yielded some results here on Earth. Earlier this year, NASA scientists told the UN water conference in Egypt that they could use radar technology originally developed to search for water beneath Mars’ surface to find H2O buried up… More »