Laboratory

It wasn’t like Marlon Brando to go spilling his private beans to the world about the life he had spent his years protecting. American actor Marlon Brando, circa 1965, about a year before he bought Tetiaroa. (Screen Archives / Getty Images) But about Tetiaroa — the Tahitian atoll of his childhood yearnings, and the refuge of his adult life — he did.We were friends for the last years of his life, and one day in 1997, at his house on the crown of Mulholland Drive, he said to me something he’d never…

A privately funded satellite is set to push methane tracking into a new era, once it launches into space on Monday.A collaborative mission between Environmental Defense Fund, Google, the Government of New Zealand and several other partners, MethaneSAT will track methane emissions around the globe in attempts to identify and quantify sources spewing the climate-heating greenhouse gas. For 20 years after its release into the atmosphere, methane gas is 80 times more harmful than carbon dioxide in its ability to increase…

One of the scientists who was fired from Canada's top infectious disease laboratory "intentionally" shared scientific information with China — potentially putting people's health in jeopardy — says an assessment by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).  The intelligence assessment was released late Wednesday afternoon by the federal government, along with hundreds of other documents about the mysterious dismissal of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng.The scientists and their students worked in the…

A spare robotic hand for Canadarm2 tested at Ottawa's David Florida Laboratory in 2015. The Canadian Space Agency says the lab can run tests ranging from –25 to 60 C. (Canadian Space Agency)The Canadian Space Agency has confirmed a west Ottawa spacecraft laboratory it calls "Canada's national facility for spacecraft assembly  integration" is closing at the end of March 2025.The David Florida Laboratory officially opened in 1972 in the Shirley's Bay complex off Carling Avenue. It's one of the few complexes in the world…

I've been very fortunate as a documentary and adventure series filmmaker, having the opportunity to travel all over Canada and the world doing what I love. But my latest project sent me on a mission to a lunar landscape in Canada's Far North — one of the most difficult places I've ever had to reach. For the CBC Short Doc My New Moon Suit, we travelled to Devon Island, nestled in Canada's Arctic, to run our very own test of a new spacesuit. It's here, on the world's largest uninhabited island, that new-concept spacesuits…

Even is not immune to . The agency says it's cutting around 530 employees from its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California amid budget uncertainty. That's eight percent of the facility's workforce. JPL is laying off about 40 contractors too, just weeks after imposing a hiring freeze and . Workers are being informed of their fates today."After exhausting all other measures to adjust to a lower budget from NASA, and in the absence of an FY24 appropriation from Congress, we have had to make the difficult decision to…

By now, most people are well aware that 2023 was the hottest year on record, coming in at 1.48 C warmer than the pre-industrial average from 1850-1900. This beat out 2016's record of 1.25 C.  In climate terms, an increase in warming by 0.23 C is considerable and climate scientists are still trying to figure out why it happened.Was 2023 just a big blip on the upward trend of global warming? Perhaps. Scientists are trying to tease out all the potential contributors.But one of the things that is inarguably a contributor is…

In a converted shipping container perched oceanside in Ketch Harbour, N.S., a group of people gather to peer into tanks filled with fuzzy pieces of gravel. The rocks are covered with tiny blades of sugar kelp. Soon, the squares of steel mesh they're fixed to will be suspended in the water at a kelp farming demonstration site in Mahone Bay, in the hopes of safeguarding the future Nova Scotia's kelp beds.It's an effort by scientists, conservationists and a West Coast company working together on the restoration technique for…

It's not every day that a video of a cat goes viral.OK, it's not every day that a video of a cat goes viral and marks a historical milestone for space exploration. But that's what happened when NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications experiment beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video back to Earth on Dec. 11 from 31 million kilometers away, or about 80 times the Earth-Moon distance.The 15-second test video is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming very high-bandwidth video and other data from…

As It Happens6:28Why do these mosquitos keep perching on the nostrils of frogs who want to eat them?John Gould had been snapping pictures of mosquitoes on frogs for years before he noticed a trend — the bloodsuckers always seem to land right on the amphibians' noses."You would think that a frog would be the worst place to land, because frogs love to eat mosquitoes," Gould, a behavioural biologist at Australia's University of Newcastle, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. Nevertheless, Gould has collected more than a dozen…