• Carleton Professor Helps Maple Syrup Producers Solve Mould Problem

    Maple syrup has been a Canadian staple for centuries and although many food-manufacturing processes have become automated, maple syrup is still largely made by small producers and bought from roadside stands and markets.

    The Ontario Maple Syrup Producers Association (OMSPA), which represents more than 600 producers across the province, noticed there was a problem with this value chain. After receiving a large number of complaints about mould in maple syrup,­ OMSPA called in Carleton Chemistry Prof. David Miller — an expert on fungi and fungal toxins in food — to see if he could crack the sugary conundrum.

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  • New Canadian telescope will map largest volume of space ever surveyed

    A Canadian effort to build one of the most innovative radio telescopes in the world will open the universe to a new dimension of scientific study. The Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, today installed the final piece of this new radio telescope, which will act as a time machine allowing scientists to create a three-dimensional map of the universe extending deep into space and time.

    The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, known as CHIME, is an extraordinarily powerful new telescope. The unique “half-pipe” telescope design and advanced computing power will help scientists better understand the three frontiers of modern astronomy: the history of the universe, the nature of distant stars and the detection of gravitational waves

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  • How neural networks think

    Artificial-intelligence research has been transformed by machine-learning systems called neural networks, which learn how to perform tasks by analyzing huge volumes of training data.

    During training, a neural net continually readjusts thousands of internal parameters until it can reliably perform some task, such as identifying objects in digital images or translating text from one language to another. But on their own, the final values of those parameters say very little about how the neural net does what it does.

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  • Airline industry could fly thousands of miles on biofuel from a new promising feedstock

    A Boeing 747 burns one gallon of jet fuel each second. A recent analysis from researchers at the University of Illinois estimate that this aircraft could fly for 10 hours on bio-jet fuel produced on 54 acres of specially engineered sugarcane.

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  • NASA Gets Night-Time and Daytime Look at a Weaker Wide Irma

    NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured night-time look at Hurricane Irma as it weakened to a large tropical storm and the GOES East satellite provided a daytime view as the large storm continued moving north over Florida.

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  • WHY YOUR ANCESTORS WOULD HAVE ACED THE LONG JUMP

    A 52-million-year-old ankle fossil suggests our prehuman ancestors were high-flying acrobats.

    These first primates spent most of their time in the trees rather than on the ground, but just how nimble they were as they moved around in the treetops has been a topic of dispute.

    For years, scientists thought the ancestors of today’s humans, monkeys, lemurs and apes were relatively slow and deliberate animals, using their grasping hands and feet to creep along small twigs and branches to stalk insects or find flowers and fruits.

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  • NASA Flights Map Summer Melt of Greenland Land Ice

    Operation IceBridge is flying in Greenland to measure how much ice has melted over the course of the summer from the ice sheet. The flights, which began on Aug. 25 and will go on until Sept. 21, repeat paths flown this spring and aim to monitor seasonal changes in the elevation of the ice sheet.

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  • MIT map offers real-time, crowd-sourced flood reporting during Hurricane Irma

    As Hurricane Irma bears down on the U.S., the MIT Urban Risk Lab has launched a free, open-source platform that will help residents and government officials track flooding in Broward County, Florida. The platform, RiskMap.us, is being piloted to enable both residents and emergency managers to obtain better information on flooding conditions in near-real time.

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  • Urban Climate Change

    Southern cities such as Houston and Tampa — which faced the wrath of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, respectively — may not be the only urban environments vulnerable to extreme weather. Northern cities also face the potential for flooding as global temperatures continue to warm.

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  • NASA Analyzes Hurricane Jose's Hidden Cloud-Filled Eye

    NASA satellite imagery provided a couple of views of Hurricane Jose's cloud-filled eye allowing forecasters to see that it still existed. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided a visible look at the storm, while the GPM satellite provided a deeper look under the high clouds that were covering the eye.

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