You’re standing in line at the cash register, holding a sparkling roll of colourful gift wrap. You know it’s not a climate-friendly choice. You also know the paper is headed straight for the trash as soon as the gift is unwrapped.  But you buy it anyway.  It’s just this once, you tell yourself. It’s the…

The dramatic dimming of a giant star has astronomers wondering whether it’s getting ready to explode.  Betelgeuse — the red shoulder on the left side in the constellation Orion — has dimmed by a factor of about two since October, a change that has never been documented before. “We know that it’s the dimmest it’s been…

No damage is expected after three earthquakes struck off the northwest end of Vancouver Island Monday. Earthquakes Canada said the first tremor measured 5.1, the second had a magnitude of 5.6, and the third measured 5.8. The first quake struck at 8:44 a.m. PT, the second at 11:13 a.m. and the third was recorded at 11:49 a.m. All three were…

Every so often, David Rusch climbs into his white pickup truck and rumbles up a gravel forest service road into the endless lodgepole pine forests surrounding Williams Lake, B.C. He’s on the hunt for mistletoe, and not the festive kind. Rusch is tracking local dwarf mistletoe because it’s a destructive, explosive parasite that races through the woods and sucks the life from trees at a blistering pace.…

It took a blaze that nearly destroyed Paris’s most famous cathedral to reveal a gap in global safety regulations for lead, a toxic building material found across many historic cities. After the Notre Dame fire in April spewed dozens of tonnes of toxic lead dust into the atmosphere in just a few hours, Paris authorities discovered…

The Canadian navy will take possession of two Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships in the new year — and it looks like they’ll be spending as much time in the sunny south as they do in the Far North. Vice-Admiral Art McDonald, the commander of the navy, told CBC News recently that military planners see the ships playing…