Robots sure do get around these days. They star in Bjork’s music videos, steal people’s jobs, vacuum, and haunt our dreams. It’s a classic “rapidly expanding field,” robotics is, with applications cropping up in more and more spheres from health care to household chores, manufacturing to space exploration. And though we’ve known the robots were [...]

Virgin Galactic’s VSS Enterprise and VMS Eve mother ship fly over Spaceport America (near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico). Photo by Mark Greenberg, courtesy of Spaceport America. What ever happened to space tourism? Weren’t commercial spacecraft supposed to make it so regular celebrity multi-millionaires like Lance Bass could experience the wonders of low Earth orbit? [...]

When most of us think of the ROM, we think of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, which is the museum’s instantly recognizable (if controversial) public face and main entrance. But go around to the opposite side of the building, just north of the mothballed and probably-soon-to-be-demolished McLaughlin Planetarium, and you’ll find a second, less inspiring, more [...]

In today’s Urban Planner: lectures on Earth, the universe, and a chance to look up into the heavens; trophy figurines get the love they deserve; a statistician presents quantitative data to prove or disprove racial differences; and Lady Gaga will try to stir up some controversy at the Air Canada Centre.

In today's weird and wonderful Urban Planner: visit a brothel with Anusree Roy, play some sexy bingo with Good For Her, catch a special performance of Tom Waits' music with the multi-instrumental Orchestre d'Hommes-Orchestres, and hear a space expert discuss his book about life beyond our solar system—aliens!

One of two fully-articulated sperm whale skeletons featured at the Ontario Science Centre’s Whales / Tohorā exhibition. The front part of a sperm whale’s head accounts for nearly a third of its length, and contains no eyes, no ears, no brain, and almost no bone. Which raises the question: what the heck is it for? [...]

InteraXon’s downtown headquarters on John Street. Photo by D.A. Cooper/Torontoist. Telekinesis—the ability to move matter through thought alone—has long served as fodder for comic books, late-night cable specials, and drug-fuelled fantasies. But aside from the occasional shiftless Star Wars nerd faced with a chicken wing just out of arm’s reach, it’s not something most of [...]

In the increasingly absurd quest to round out every conceivable aviation feat, one deceptively simple invention has eluded us—the human-powered ornithopter. Mythologized in the myth of Icarus, and sketched by Leonardo da Vinci, the idea of a wing-flapping, human-propelled flying mechanism has captivated the minds of aerialists for millennia.

Photo by Mike Scott, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. In September, the City conducted its first ever systematic count of the number of cyclists entering and exiting the downtown core, between Jarvis Street and Spadina Avenue on the east and west, and Bloor Street and Queens Quay at the north and south. The resulting report, [...]

It’s not hard to notice a supernova, the massively violent cosmic explosion signaling the death of a star. In the span of a few short weeks, this cosmic flashbulb can shine brighter than entire galaxies. The sheer force of the explosion—think on the order of a million-billion-trillion megatons of TNT—provides enough energy to fuse atomic [...]

The planetarium’s digital projector, which uses a fish-eye lens to render images on the inside of an inflatable dome. In early 2009, the University of Toronto notably bought the disused McLaughlin Planetarium, attached to the south side of the Royal Ontario Museum, for eventual redevelopment—meaning probable demolition. Last summer, less notably, the university purchased a [...]