Canada’s most famous son, astronaut Chris Hadfield, just blasted off to the International Space Station. He and his two fellow travelers will fly up to the ISS, where he will stay for the next five months—taking command, the first Canadian…
Category: Gamma rays
Nuclear “waste” is a solution to major public health problems
The alleged problem of nuclear “waste” is perhaps the most comically overblown aspect of the entire debate over nuclear energy. You would never know it from the usual media reports, but the “waste” product of nuclear reactors—that is to say,…
Food safety and Canada’s economy: time to start using gamma rays, the sharpest tool in our toolbox
Mankind has since the beginning of time been waging daily, life-or-death war against toxic microbes in food. We either kill the microbes or they kill us; it really is that simple. Our primary weapons in this war, from earliest times…
Food, wine, fungus, and gamma rays: an ocean of seeming incongruity—and potential
One of my brothers runs an awesome bakery in Scarborough, which offers yeasted and naturally leavened—a.k.a. sourdough—breads of outstanding quality; see Fig. 1. Both yeasted and sourdough breads are produced using the biological process of fermentation, which is essentially the…
Innovation, water, and energy: semi-conductors cannot defeat physics
I was at a “maker’s lab” the other day, where inventors experimented with computer numerically controlled (CNC) designs of motors, and motored systems like three-dimensional printers. It was fascinating. There is technology today, a lot of it open-source, that enables…