Explorer

If you didn’t get the chance to read as many science stories as you would have liked in 2018, fear not: CBC has compiled its top 10 list just for you. From the discovery of an ancient Mayan city to evidence of Planet X, there’s no shortage of fascinating stories to review.

You don’t need to travel all the way to Amsterdam to see the Anne Frank House. The museum recently launched a 25-minute virtual reality tour that takes you through the rooms—hidden behind an Amsterdam canal-side house—where Anne wrote her diary. Read the full article and watch a trailer for the virtual reality tour.

Researchers at MIT and the Max Planck Institute have developed a method for quick, on-site E. coli detection in food. While current food safety testing either requires days to complete or expensive equipment, this new method, paired with a smartphone and QR code, will make testing inexpensive and portable. The new detection process uses Janus emulsions, droplets consisting of two hemispheres of different densities. In water, the less dense, hydrocarbon hemisphere sits above the denser hemisphere

Since the deciphering of the honey bee ‘waggle’ in the 1920’s by Karl von Frisch, researchers have been measuring the dance-like form of communication that allows bees to convey direction and distance to a food source. While this observation process was initially manual and time-consuming – requiring humans, protractors, and stopwatches – techniques have evolved with technology. Recently, a team from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Free University of Berlin, Germany

Have you ever played Ms. Pac-Man? If so... have you played over 3000 rounds of it? Because that's how long it took for a Microsoft Artificially Intelligent program called Maluuba to learn how to get the highest possible score in the game, 999999. Check out how it did it... and don't worry, there's no worry of this AI taking over the world.

Engineers are constantly taking cues from nature when designing new technologies, and the robotic tentacle arm created by German robotics company, Festo, is a great example.