Tag: Canada

News Science Technology

Students’ Experiments To Be Conducted In Space

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Three students have won the chance to have science experiments they created carried out by astronauts in space.

The students won an international competition called the YouTube Space Lab Contest. Last October, students around the world aged 14 to 18 were invited to come up with ideas for experiments that could be performed on the International Space Station.

The space station is a satellite that orbits the Earth. It includes a research laboratory where astronauts from the United States, Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada conduct experiments. Because there is no gravity on the space station, they are able to do experiments they could not do on Earth.

For the contest, students had to make a video explaining their hypothesis – the idea they wanted to test – and the method for doing the experiment. Then they posted the videos on YouTube.

Winners were chosen by people voting on YouTube, and by a panel of judges that included scientists, teachers, astronauts and journalists.

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Breaking News News Sports

Canadian Sets World Record At Boston Marathon

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April 16 was a very hot day in Boston, Mass. It was a record-setting 27 degrees Celsius.

It was the day of the 116th Boston Marathon.

A marathon is a long-distance race, covering just over 42 kilometres. On this day, many runners (16 per cent of them, in fact) decided to pass on the event because it was too hot. Many other racers posted slower than usual race times.

Except for one participant. Canadian Josh Cassidy, 27, set a world record.

Cassidy won the men’s wheelchair division. He raced in a three-wheel, high-tech wheelchair; he uses his arms to power it.

Cassidy finished with a record time of 1:18:25 (one hour, 18 minutes and 25 seconds). His time was two seconds faster than the previous best time, set by South Africa’s Ernst Van Dyk in 2004.

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News Politics Technology

How Much Did Fighter Jets Really Cost?

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In 2010, new F-35 Fighter Jets were ordered by Canada’s Defence Department (the department that oversees the country’s military).The new jets were supposed to cost around $15-billion.

Now, however, the Auditor General of Canada has said that the 65 planes will actually cost $25-billion, $10-billion more than expected. The Auditor General’s office watches over Government spending.

NDP and Liberal MPs (Members of Parliament) have accused the Defence Department (part of the Conservative government in power) of “hiding” the extra $10-billion in their financial reports when the 2011 election was coming up. Some are saying that the Conservatives wanted to keep it secret so people wouldn’t see the real costs and not vote for them.

Now that it is in the open, some MPs have demanded that Canada’s Defence Minister, Peter MacKay, step down from his job.

The Defence Department has explained their position saying that their original estimate did not include many costs such as operations (day-to-day expenses), people to run the project, or a “contingency fund” (in this case, this refers to money set aside for unknown problems in the project). Some of that money was already recorded in other budgets.

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News Science Technology

Nomadic Gnome Puts Gravity To The Test

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A plastic garden gnome is travelling around the world to help demonstrate how the pull of gravity changes in different locations.

Gravity is the force that attracts a person or an object to the centre of the Earth. It keeps us on the ground, and it also determines how much we weigh.

Gravity may be slightly stronger or weaker depending on where you are, which means things weigh different amounts in different places on Earth.

The difference is so small – 0.5 per cent or less – that most people using ordinary scales wouldn’t even notice it.

For example, if you weigh 40 kilograms, the difference would be no more than 200 grams higher or lower, depending on where you were.

But even such a small difference would matter to scientists who need to be very accurate when measuring amounts of chemicals for an experiment or comparing weights of different objects.

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Kids News

How Reading The News Helped Craig Kielburger Change The World

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One morning when I was 12, I was munching on cereal and flipping through the newspaper in search of the comics.

I couldn’t get past the front-page story. It was about a young boy in Pakistan, a child labourer named Iqbal Masih.

When he was just four years old, Iqbal went to work in a cramped, dusty room for 12 hours a day, six days a week, weaving carpets in a factory.

Iqbal was 12. I was 12.

I knew I had to do something for him. But what?

I hadn’t been looking to make a big difference in the world. I was looking for Calvin and Hobbes!

Still, I tore out Iqbal’s story and brought it to school.

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Health News Science

Canadian Awards Predict Nobel Prize Winners

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The Gairdner Foundation recently announced the winners of its 2012 awards.

The Canada Gairdner Awards are given to people who have made a new scientific discovery to combat disease or ease human suffering. It is one of the most important medical awards in the world.

As the Gairdner website puts it, “we’re dedicated to recognizing the world’s most creative and accomplished biomedical scientists.” Biomedical scientists work in medicine and biology (the study of living organisms).

The late James A. Gairdner established the Gairdner Foundation in 1957. Since then, 300 awards have been given. Seventy-three of those award winners have gone on to win a Nobel Prize in either medicine or chemistry.

The awards are selected by Canadians, but they are given to scientists throughout the world.

This year’s seven award winners include three people who broke through mysteries of the human circadian clock, the internal mechanism that controls our sleep and wakefulness, body temperature, and many other functions.

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Breaking News News Politics

Canada’s Plan To Balance Its Budget By 2015

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Last week Canada’s Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, spent $138.98 on a new pair of black dress shoes.

Why? Because he was announcing a new budget.

Flaherty is in charge of presenting Canada’s budget, which is why he bought the new shoes.

It’s a tradition in Canada that the Finance Minister wears new shoes to present the budget.

According to Wikipedia no one really knows why, but it’s something most Canadian Finance Ministers have done since the 1960s. It’s a tradition.

This year, the federal government structured its budget to reduce Canada’s annual deficit to zero by 2015.

A deficit happens when a government spends more than it collects in a year.

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News

Candy, Coins Scattered Across Highway After Truck Accident

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Millions of dollars worth of coins, and a load of candy, were scattered along the Trans-Canada Highway and in the bush in northeastern Ontario on Wednesday.

A Brink’s tractor-trailer truck was driving along Highway 11 north of Kirkland Lake, when it hit a rock cut.

In this case, rock cuts are steep, rocky cliffs on either side of the highway created when a highway is carved through a hill.

They are common in northern Ontario.

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News Politics

Mulcair Elected As Leader Of NDP, Official Opposition

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Thomas Mulcair is the new leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP).

Mulcair was elected, after a gruelling 12 hours of voting, at the NDP’s convention on the weekend.

The NDP is the political party that is Canada’s “official opposition” to the country’s governing party, the Conservatives.

As leader of the federal NDP, Mulcair will also become the leader of the Official Opposition.

The NDP had to elect a new leader after their last leader, Jack Layton, passed away from cancer in August 2011.

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