Lucy Gregory discovered she doesn’t mind spending time in the dark. Gregory, a first-year student at the University of British Columbia, was part of a UBC team that placed second in a new North America energy-saving competition that ended Nov. 20. UBC was the only Canadian university to participate in the three-week competition between 39 [...]
A 25-metre-long skeleton of a blue whale stunned hundreds of visitors at UBC’s new museum last month. Large skulls, piles of bones, stuffed birds or meticulously assembled rodents intrigued people wandering through the maze of black cabinets. Dimly lit windows offered peaks at jars filled with pickled snakes, lizards or fish that glowed yellow or [...]
Everyday in Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet, giant cranes move thousands of containers on and off cargo ships. The rotten-egg stench from yellow sulfur piles fills the air. And tankers full of Alberta crude wind through the narrows. There are also harbour seals bobbing up and down checking-out boats and hunting for fish. Hundreds of commuters fill [...]
Jenny Hughes has a problem with reusable shopping bags. Hughes owns , a company that makes high quality, reusable bags in Vancouver. Her organic cotton totes hit the market at the right time: In 2004, plastic shopping bags had just become a environmental issue. She said that Me & You could barely keep up with [...]
The high winds of the Easter weekend brought trees crashing down in Vancouver’s parks and across roadways. In addition to appreciating the wrath of Mother Nature, you may have become more aware of our city’s trees. This week Rod MacNeill takes a look a Vancouver’s urban forest. Listen to his report below.
In 1974 a researcher at the University of Connecticut submitted a paper to the journal Science. He claimed that large amounts of energy could be extracted from the natural mixing of fresh water and salty sea water that occurs at river mouths around the world. The author, Richard Norman, was surprised when the manuscript was [...]
Northern Alberta is home to some of the fastest-growing bodies of water in the world. Every day roughly two billion litres of water – enough to fill 800 Olympic swimming pools – are added to these lakes, which are already over 11.5 trillion litres in volume. The largest one, located near Mildred Lake just north [...]
Curtis Ballard rushed to fasten plywood between parking curbs as rain cascaded down Wesbrook Mall. The water runoff streamed toward TRIUMF, the laboratory for particle and nuclear physics at UBC. “The water outside eventually rose to our knees,” said Ballard, TRIUMF’s operations manager, who worked with personnel from the lab and the physical plant to [...]
British Columbia’s economy could suffer another multi-million dollar loss this winter, but if it does, the global financial crisis won’t be to blame. Honeybees, which have an annual impact of approximately $250 million on BC’s economy, experienced a significant drop in winter survival rates over the past few years, declining 38 per cent in 2008. [...]
New research shows that fish play an important role in the fight against climate change. Research published in the January 16, 2009 issue of Science, co-authored by Villy Christensen, professor at the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia, will change our understanding of the factors that mitigate climate change. “We had not recognised [...]
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