After decades of searching, Michelle Blanchard of Charlottetown finally tracked down her family, locating her biological mother, brother and sister in St. John’s. Michelle found them in December with help from an online DNA test and other relatives playing detective on Facebook, and met them in early January. “It was the most incredible day of my life,” Michelle said about the reunion.…

Two lawmakers in Sweden have nominated Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize. Jens Holm and Hakan Svenneling, who are both members of Sweden’s Left Party, said Monday that Thunberg “has worked hard to make politicians open their eyes to the climate crisis” and “action for reducing our emissions and…

After more than a decade and a half of scanning the skies, the Spitzer Space Telescope has been shut down for good. On January 30 the telescope was put in safe mode and ceased operation. Meanwhile, a much larger successor is being readied for launch. The Spitzer Space Telescope is not as famous as its cousin Hubble,…

As public health officials around the world remain on high alert, epidemiologists are already much further ahead in their ability to track the current coronavirus outbreak than they were during the 2003 SARS crisis.  “This virus, we think, has probably circulated in human populations for eight to 10 weeks or so. So it’s truly a…

It can be annoying to run out of smartphone battery power — and even more irritating to find someone with a charging cable in the nick of time, only to discover it’s not compatible with your device. A solution may be coming from an unlikely source: the European Union. EU lawmakers agreed this week to forge ahead…

Advertisers are starting to deploy technology that can place products inside finished films and TV shows you stream online, and tailor those products specifically to your tastes.  “We can take a 3D object and put it into the scene, and because the 3D objects sit in the cloud, we can change them based on almost any…