Canada

Oh Canada, Bring Me My Zeppelin

Canada has at last entered the Zeppelin Age, and it looks as if Calgary, Alberta will be the first city to make the leap into an alternate history where people use giant, helium-filled balloons to move stuff around instead of trucks or trains. A Calgary-based company called SkyHook, working with Boeing, has developed what they call the Jess Heavy Lifter (JHL-40) or a "blimp on steroids." This is no pleasure cruiser, though. It's seriously mega, and will be used for transporting heavy loads in areas of northern Canada where there are no roads. More »

3:39 PM on Wed Jul 9 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,504 views, 33 comments

Latest by Counterglow: Just as a "by the way", Zeppelins and Blimps aren't the same. A zeppelin has a frame, a blimp doesn't. The term actually comes from the original balloon model, which was called "B-Limp" (as in no real more »

Canadian space program

Canada Needs (Space)Men. And Women.

If you're Canadian and want to spend a few months in space, then you could be in luck, eh. (No, I can't really believe that I went there, either. Sorry.) Our friends in the North are on the lookout for two good people who'd be interested in getting away from it all for six months, and the only qualifications necessary to apply are your nationality, a science degree and a head for heights. More »

10:03 AM on Fri Jun 20 2008
By Graeme McMillan
847 views, 12 comments

william gibson interview

William Gibson Talks to io9 About Canada, Draft Dodging, and Godzilla

Yesterday William Gibson rolled into San Francisco to do a book signing for the paperback release of Spook Country, his recent novel about surveillance, augmented reality, dream politics, and advertising. The novel is also, incidentally, a fairly overt critique of the idea of "cyberspace," a term Gibson invented early in his career, and which several characters in Spook Country describe as something that has been surpassed by newer ideas. I caught up with Gibson at a coffee shop downtown, and we chatted about everything from Godzilla movies and draft-dodging, to the novel he's always dreamed of writing. More »

1:37 PM on Tue Jun 10 2008
By Annalee Newitz
13,408 views, 38 comments

Latest by n/a: I feel like I have a little better understanding of some of William Gibson's motivations and attitudes than I did after watching "No Maps for These Territories", and I feel better about things because of it. Tell the truth. more »

extinction prevention

Canada To Save Humans From Extinction

Well, it's about time. Asteroids hitting Earth has been a big problem for life this planet since forever, and at last governments around the world have been united in their inability to give a shit. And they did it without Gort the giant robot forcing them! Next year, the Canadian Space Agency will launch the Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat), the first space-borne asteroid hunting device ever made. More »

1:40 PM on Thu May 8 2008
By Michael Reilly
1,410 views, 32 comments

robots

Meet McSleepy, the World's First Robot Anesthesiologist

Anesthesiologists are required to participate in every surgery, standing by to administer drugs and monitor the patient's vital signs while surgeons do their jobs. But now a group of researchers at Montreal's McGill University have invented a device that could replace human anesthesiologists with robots in the next five years. An anesthesia bot called McSleepy has just successfully completed its first surgery, administering drugs to a patient undergoing a tumor removal on his kidney. More »

11:39 AM on Fri May 2 2008
By Annalee Newitz
849 views, 10 comments

atmosphere porn

A Red Storm Boils over the Jovian Prairie

It looks like somebody photoshopped the Canadian prairies inside the red gasses of Jupiter, but this is an actual picture, untouched, of Earth. It's a "shelf cloud" lit up by early-morning light. Photographed from the Trans-Canada highway in Saskatchewan, this shelf cloud was most likely the bleeding edge of a storm. More »

6:40 AM on Wed Jan 23 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,254 views, 10 comments

Latest by cheesebubble: ah yes. in the immortal words of stompin' tom connors: "roll on, roll on, saskatchewan." more »

dystopia

Who Says Oil Has No Future?

In the vast, untapped oil sands of Alberta, Canada, Syncrude's upgrader looks like an industrial Martian base as it sucks oil out of the shale. There's are no spouts of black gold here — just bitumen, a viscous substance that has to be heated or diluted before it becomes liquid. The upgrader sits in an oil sand field that's almost half the size of Colorado in northern Alberta. Oil sand will probably become a huge source of energy for the world if those factory farms full of corn for Ethanol don't work out. AP Photo by Jeff McIntosh.
More »

7:40 AM on Wed Nov 14 2007
By Annalee Newitz
37 views, Comment

io9

Brace For Impact! A Turbulent Video Compilation

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