This is my last posting for the next few days. I will be taking my office apart so that we can move to our new apartment downtown next Tuesday. I will be unplugged and disconnected except by tablet. Expect me to be back in the saddle before the end of next week probably in time to pro

In this month’s Report on Business Magazine, a  supplement that comes with The Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers, Stanford University’s Mark Jacobson provides a best case scenario for powering our planet in the year 2030. A civil and environmental e

A team of researchers are asking the public to help them locate and count all the sources of CO2 coming from power plants on the planet. Called Ventus: Global Citizens Powering Solutions in Climate Change, the team of scientists from Arizona State University are crowdsourcing the info

Initial results from a selective breeding program at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany based in Cambridge in the UK, indicate the successful creation of a new super wheat. Scientists combined a more primitive plant with a modern wheat variety to create a new strain. Early

One of my readers recently asked me to write about flying cars. I have looked at this technology in the past and considered it of little value as a common mode of transportation. Cars drive on roads. Airplanes take off from private or commercial airports. When you fly you file a fligh

Off-the-grid solar power is one of the solutions that could dramatically alter the lives of an estimated 1.5 billion humans who today have no access to electricity. Of these 80% come from countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. And of that 89% of the 80% live in rural areas ve

If you ever have used a salad spinner to dry out your lettuce then you know the principle behind the GiraDora, loosely meaning “spinning washing machine” in Spanish. GiraDora both washes and spin dries clothes placed in it, and it does it without electricity, just pedal po

It’s official. The observatory atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii recorded on Thursday this week that we had reached 400.08 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. It was barely a week ago that I wrote about following the Keeling Curve on Twitter. And if you subscribed this week then

Another interesting week of technology and science announcements has led me to pick the following five stories:   World’s Biggest Companies Tackling Climate Change; Idaho Potato Gets Better by Mixing Genes from Five Spud Varieties; Google Timelapse Shows Decades of Planetar

My wife and I have been downsizing and ridding ourselves of over 40 years of furniture collecting as we prepare to move to our new apartment in downtown Toronto. IKEA, the assemble-it-yourself furniture store, has figured largely in our lives in the last few months as we replace the o