Explorer

Canada's RADARSAT program has a long history, going back to experimenting with radar sensors onboard the Convair 580 aircraft, which is now in the collection of the Canada Aviation and Space Museum.

Last summer, the Canada Science and Technology Museum offered up access to its collection so that researcher Jennifer Thivierge could study “keypunch girls” — the women who punched holes in data cards and fed them into machines or tabulators, starting in the 1950s. The University of Ottawa’s Gazette writes about her findings, and what they say about gender discrimination within the field of computer science.

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

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.