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132 articles from CBC - Technology & Science News
Ottawa signals plans to create Canada-wide child care system, collect digital sales taxes
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced Monday the first steps in a multi-year strategy to build a Canada-wide child care system to cut costs for families and encourage more women with kids to join the workforce. She also unveiled a plan to levy a digital sales tax to raise revenue for the cash-strapped federal...
Virgin Mobile shaves more than $12K off Ontario senior's hefty cell bill
An 80-year-old man who is visually impaired and received a $13,000 bill from Virgin Mobile is no longer on the hook for the large...
COVID-19 has sucked the oxygen out of the room on the climate economy
An essential debate over tree planting, carbon pricing and building a low carbon economy has been delayed by the COVID-19...
SUNDAY 29. NOVEMBER 2020
Canadian researchers turn to wastewater tests at long-term care homes to detect COVID hotspots
Several Canadian universities are preparing to test wastewater from long-term care homes in Ottawa, Toronto and Edmonton to get early warnings of COVID-19...
Weaker penis bones in river otters linked to oilsands contaminants in new study
A new study finds hydrocarbons, typically associated with oilsands operations, are contributing to decreased penis bone strength among river otters — a phenomenon that could have dire implications for animal health in northern...
What transporting ice cream across Canada tells us about vaccine logistics
The tricks to keeping potential COVID-19 vaccines as cold as ice could be as close as the ice cream aisle at your local supermarket — that is, if your ice cream aisle was at -70...
SATURDAY 28. NOVEMBER 2020
Tony Hsieh, retired CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos, dead at 46
Tony Hsieh, the retired CEO of Las Vegas-based online shoe retailer Zappos.com who spent years working to transform the city's downtown area, has died. He was...
Parcel delivery companies are trading trucks for bikes in some Canadian cities. Here's why
The Black Friday, Cyber Monday, pre-Christmas pandemic online shopping frenzy calls for huge fleets of trucks and vans to deliver those gadgets and gifts. But those road-clogging, polluting vehicles are starting to give way to a greener, more efficient option in some Canadian cities: e-cargo bikes and...
Russia says its COVID vaccine is 95% effective. So why is there still Western resistance to it?
Russia has tried to turn the search for a COVID vaccine into a 21st-century version of the space race that it intends to win. Despite criticism about transparency and how quickly it was approved, the vaccine will likely play an important role in ending the global pandemic, experts...
FRIDAY 27. NOVEMBER 2020
The world's major climate zones — polar, temperate and tropical — are transforming as we watch
Several recent studies look at how climate change is redrawing the...
Chinese sample return mission to the moon harkens back to 1960s lunar race
Bob McDonald's blog: Robot mission will return first moon rocks since...
Nature Trust warns of contamination in amphibian preserve
The Nature Trust of New Brunswick is warning that an amphibian preserve in Fredericton has high levels of heavy metal contaminants in the sediment, which could be affecting the...
Elon Musk's satellites now streaming to some rural N.B. homes
Billionaire Elon Musk's satellite internet service is now streaming to some homes in New Brunswick. Starlink has enlisted some households in rural areas of Canada and the northern U.S. to test the service before a full launch, possibly in...
Indigenous communities secure $100M to clean up old and gas wells
Indigenous leaders have secured an allotment of funding to clean up old oil and gas wells on First Nation and Metis land in Alberta, after more than half a year of lobbying, including several meetings with the premier and energy...
Life on Venus? Recent finding hinting at life in the clouds questioned
In September, scientists announced they had found a chemical signature in the clouds of Venus that they said could be associated with life. But those results were questioned, and in a new follow-up study, the authors announced that the level of the chemical is seven times lower than they had initially...
THURSDAY 26. NOVEMBER 2020
Is it possible to make a sustainable smartphone?
In this week's issue of our environment newsletter, we look at Fairphone, who claim to make a sustainable smartphone, as well as the efforts to repurpose Alberta's many inactive oil and gas wells for geothermal energy...
Scientists urge federal government to ramp up conservation efforts in eastern Arctic
A team of Canadian scientists is urging the federal government to step up its conservation efforts in the eastern Arctic to try and save some of the last remaining year-round sea ice and the undiscovered organisms that live within...
Fishing gear confirmed as major cause of right whale deaths
A major study of deaths of North Atlantic right whales has found that entanglement in fishing gear has become a leading cause of...
Rocky the Christmas tree stowaway owl returns to the wild
The owl found in a Christmas tree set up at the Rockefeller Center in New York is back in the...
T. Rex got huge via major teenage growth spurt: study
A close look at the bones of huge meat-eating dinosaurs, including Sue the T. Rex, reveals that some went through a major growth spurt, while others took decades longer to reach their gigantic adult...
Feds to keep more bureaucrats at home, overhaul property portfolio to get to 'net zero' emissions
Treasury Board President Jean-Yves Duclos will today release the federal government’s plans to drive down greenhouse gas emissions within the federal bureaucracy itself, with the goal of achieving "net zero" by 2050 through a radical restructuring of the government's property and vehicle...
AstraZeneca manufacturing error raises questions about vaccine study results
AstraZeneca and Oxford University on Wednesday acknowledged a manufacturing error that is raising questions about preliminary results of their experimental COVID-19...
WEDNESDAY 25. NOVEMBER 2020
N.S. company turning trash into fuel
Sustane Technologies Inc. in Chester, N.S., takes waste from a community landfill and turns it into biomass pellets and diesel...
Manitoba has spent less than 9% of federal cash to cut greenhouse gas emissions
Two years after both levels of government squabbled over the money, records obtained by the Opposition New Democrats show that roughly $5.9 million of Manitoba's $67 million in climate change funding has been...
TUESDAY 24. NOVEMBER 2020
Young people taking climate change lawsuit to Federal Court of Appeal
A group of 15 young people will try again to have the courts force Ottawa to develop a climate recovery plan after it was denied by the Federal...