Canadian Science News

Bay of Fundy might give enough energy for all of Canada
The Bay of Fundy around Nova Scotia and New Brunswick is the not-so resting place of the “highest and strongest tides in the world.” It might be utilized for a sustainable and renewable form of energy called tidal power. The coastline at the bay narrows to 5km across. That “pinches” the water and speeds it up. At that point, there’s “14 billion tonnes of water moving over five metres a second.” It is that force that provides tidal energy.

Canada is not the only place having proposals like these come forward from entrepreneurs. Executive director of the Offshore Energy Research Association, Stephen Dempsey, said, “It’s happening in Europe and it’s happening here at the same time in the Bay of Fundy.”

Woolly Mammoth found
The New Royal Museum of BC has a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth. It has been moved around the world since 2010, and is on loan from the Shemanovskiy Yamal-Nenets District Museum and Exhibition Complex in Siberia. The ancient mammoth is known as Lyuba. A female, it’s named after the wife of Siberian farmer that found it. The mammoth drowned and then froze shortly thereafter, so is extremely well preserved.

This is the first presentation in Canada for it. The man that helped bring the exhibit to BC, Chris McGarrity, said, “It?changes some misconceptions about what these animals were and how they lived, when they lived, where they lived, their evolutionary relationships. That’s something that I was really interested in.”

Four new exoplanets found at by UBC Student
A new graduate at The University of British Columbia, Michelle Kunimoto, discovered four new exoplanets. She sifted through data from NASA’s Kepler mission to find them. The mission used a powerful telescope that helped her research.

Technically, the ’exoplanets’ are called planetary candidates because they require further independent verification. There were signals from “the original mission considered to be too weak to fully pursue.” Kunimoto collaborated with Jason Rowe, who worked on “original Kepler mission.”

Kunimoto said, “When he was able to say, ’Yes, these look like planets,’ that was just an amazing moment.”

A native British Columbian, Scott Douglas Jacobsen is an AU undergrad and AUSU Councillor. He researches and runs In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, and In-Sight Publishing.