How Bob McDonald goes where no Canadian has gone before - National Post

There's nothing quirky about it, if there's a man who deserves to wear the Order of Canada, it's Bob McDonald. The longtime top CBC science correspondent was and is for many Canadian children, synonymous with science and learning. How else do you come to possess 13 honorary degrees, medals from NSERC and The Royal Society of Canada, and a Gemini? How, in the name of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, do you get an honest to goodness space-borne asteroid named after you? A good Victoria boy, McDonald was sailing around Vancouver Island when he got the news he was also somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, as the story goes. "I almost fell overboard," he told the national broadcaster in 2014. "It's huge for me. As a little kid, I dreamt about going into space, being out there. That hasn't quite happened yet, so having an object named after me is almost as good. "As a main belt asteroid, Bobmcdonald is a "leftover planetary building block that never accreted enough material to become" a planet, according to Harvard University (which some pretty smart Canadians have attended). "They are therefore keys to understanding how the Solar System formed and evolved.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.

Forests that stood on Mozambique's coast thousands of years ago now lie beneath shallow seas, and they have become fish-filled "peat reefs" with marine life comparable to coral reefs, researchers report in Scientific Reports. A team from the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies (BCSS) Ocean Observatory, led by Mario Lebrato, documented the submerged peat in the Bazaruto Archipelago in the Western Indian Ocean. BCSS, founded in 2017, describes itself as Africa's first permanent ocean observatory. Working with universities and institutions in the U. K., U. S. and Canada, the team believes it has carried out the first ecological study of peat reefs anywhere in the tropics. Old forests, new seafloorRadiocarbon dating shows the peat formed between about 300 and 5,000 years ago, and chemical analysis indicates it came mostly from coastal land plants and trees. Some samples contain up to 40% organic carbon by dry weight. Lebrato said the coastline has very little natural hard seabed, mostly shifting sand. As rising seas expose the old peat layers, they create rare solid habitat where marine life can settle, hide and feed.

Coral bleaching restoration at Stanford – by Dan Griffin / GG Films (via SWNS, cropped) Coral bleaching has been reversed at record speed using a new method developed at Stanford University.