Official time in Canada is maintained by the National Research Council in Ottawa as UTC(NRC), Canada’s realization of Coordinated Universal Time. Legal time — the hour a school, court, or bus schedule uses — is generally determined by provincial and territorial law, while federal law also contains rules governing standard time for federal enactments. A…
Jealousy arrives like a verdict. In the moment it feels certain: someone is taking what is yours, or is about to. Science treats it more narrowly. Jealousy is a reaction to a perceived threat that a third person will take or change a relationship you already have. That is why psychologists separate it from envy….
Rock salt does not heat the ice. It makes a brine that freezes colder than water, and that brine has a floor. On a real driveway or road, ordinary sodium chloride becomes a poor bet around –9°C, although published working-temperature ranges extend lower depending on conditions, application and the standard being used. The bag most…
The water cycle, also called the hydrologic cycle, is the continuous movement of water on, above, and below the surface of Earth. The total amount of water on Earth changes very little on human timescales. What changes is its form and location. Water exists as liquid in oceans, rivers, lakes, and soil; as solid ice…
A star spends its life in a contest between two forces. Gravity pulls its gas inward. Pressure pushes back—first from heat, then from nuclear fusion in the core. For most of the star’s life those forces stay in balance. Astronomers call that balance hydrostatic equilibrium. When the fuel runs out, the balance breaks. What happens…
Are we alone in the universe? It is one of the oldest questions humans have asked, but scientists can now investigate it with tools that would have been unimaginable only a few decades ago. Astronomers have confirmed thousands of planets beyond our solar system. Space missions are investigating potentially habitable worlds in our own solar…
We all grew up believing trees grow out of the soil. Roots reach into the dirt, pulling up what they need to build towering trunks, branches, and leaves. But modern science reveals a far more surprising truth: the vast majority of a tree’s dry mass consists of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, with carbon entering primarily…
Artificial intelligence is transforming our world, but it comes with a surprising cost. Discover how much water AI really uses, the massive electricity demands of data centers, and the other resources powering modern AI.
Roughly 12,800 years ago, Earth hit a climatic brick wall. The Younger Dryas—a roughly 1,200-year cold reversal that interrupted the post-Ice Age warming—has often been explained through changes in North Atlantic circulation, including freshwater forcing and weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). But the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis offers a radically different possibility:…
Few scientific pursuits carry as much long-term potential as nuclear fusion. Often described as the process that powers the Sun and stars, fusion represents one of humanity’s most ambitious goals: generating large-scale, clean energy by combining light atomic nuclei. While still in the experimental and demonstration phase, fusion research has made encouraging progress in recent…