Your hosts are Lynn, Marc and Carmel
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Ever since it was announced that an international consortium of oil and gas companies wanted to explore the sea-floor off the coast of Baffin Island, Canada’s northern peoples have been very concerned.
The seismic exploration would send strong sound wave throught the sea to bounce off the layers beneath the ocean floor.
The reflected signals would be analysed to determine if and where any reseruves of oil and gas lie. The Inuit however say the sonic booms will likely harm sea creatures many of whom depend on their own sonar to travel and hunt in the ocean.
These are animals they depend on for food and livelihood.
Now the consortium says it will not conduct the government approved testing this season as had been planned, and a number of environmental and Inuit groups are pleased with that news. Lynn spoke to Farah Khan, Arctic campaigner with Greenpeace Canada.
In a star cluster far far away, well actually about 14 thousand light years away, scientists on earth made an important discovery.
Using the Hubble space telescope, they were observing the star cluster 47 Tucanae, with its hundreds of stars. They were specifically looking at “white dwarfs”. These are stars at the end of their life cycle, when all that remains is the white hot, no longer burning core of a star.
Scientists had long presumed that stars lose mass as they burn their fuel, and as they lose mass are pushed out from the centre of the cluster. What they discovered was this was not the case, and the stars lose mass and begin to speed up and more outward only near the very end of their life cycle. This new information changes the way distances to far off clusters are measured. and modifies our understanding of how the universe works.
Marc spoke to Jeremy Heyl, a former Canada Research Chair in Neutron Stars and Black Holes, and is now a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of British Columbia.
An international symposium was held in Montreal this week. The gathering of scientists, researchers and related professionals came to talk about the latest findings on how the brain organizes itself in relation to the ability for an individual to speak two languages.
Topics included why learning a second language is good, and best learned early in life, and also how to keep your brain healthy in later years.
The event was hosted by the Montreal Neurological Institute, part of McGill University.
Carmel spoke to professor Denise Klein of the Montreal Neurological Insitute.
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