When it comes to politics, Canadians are generally an apathetic bunch. Often, a controversy will brew and within a week or two we forget about it and move on.
It appears Bill C-38 is one issue we’re not willing to let go.
Saturday is the one month anniversary of the introduction of the so-called omnibus budget bill, a 425-page bill that amends 60 different acts, repeals a half dozen others and adds three more. Opposition parties have repeatedly said that the bill is too big and includes changes that ought to be broken off and presented as separate legislation. But the Conservatives are forging ahead with it as-is.
While Canadians haven’t hit the streets en masse yet, they are showing their dislike for the bill even one month later. On June 4, 13,000 website owners across Canada, including the NDP, PSAC and even Margaret Atwood, will be darkening their websites in protest of Bill C-38 as part of the ‘Black Out Speak Out‘ campaign.
And political analysts also continue to speak-out against the bill.
This week, the National Post’s Matt Gurney, who could never be accused of being a left-wing radical, said the bill was “sneaky” and “undemocratic.”
Many people anticipating the creation of an invisibility cloak might be surprised to learn that a group of American researchers has created 25,000 individual cloaks.
But before you rush to buy one from your local shop, the cloaks are just 30 micrometres in diameter and are laid out together on a 25 millimetre gold sheet.
This array of invisibility cloaks is the first of its kind and has been created by researchers from Towson University and University of Maryland who present their study on May 25, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics.
Although the well-reported intention to make everyday objects disappear with a Harry Potter-style cloak is beyond this array of cloaks, they could be used to slow down, or even stop, light, creating what is known as a “trapped rainbow.”
Quantum physics and plant biology seem like two branches of science that could not be more different, but surprisingly they may in fact be intimately tied.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame used ultrafast spectroscopy to see what happens at the subatomic level during the very first stage of photosynthesis. “If you think of photosynthesis as a marathon, we’re getting a snapshot of what a runner looks like just as he leaves the blocks,” said Argonne biochemist David Tiede. “We’re seeing the potential for a much more fundamental interaction than a lot of people previously considered.”
