Deborah Samuel’s photo-based artwork, now showing at the Royal Ontario Museum, is eerily life-affirming in its exploration of death. Called Elegy, the show consists of 33 images of delicate, white bone structures—10 of them belonging to animal skeletons in the ROM’s collection—on infinite-seeming black backgrounds. On Tuesday, the room was alive with conversation, thanks to [...]

In a master stroke of programming, the Images Festival wrapped up its 25th year on Saturday night with “The Sounds Of Science,” a collection of vintage short films on marine life by French filmmaker Jean Painlevé and his partner, Genevieve Hamon. The truly brilliant part: the festival also booked indie rock band Yo La Tengo [...]

For the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at the land that makes up Toronto—specifically, at what was happening here before human habitation. We moved through geologic time periods, tracing the effects of rock formations and ice ages, and explored the fossil record to learn about the creatures big (sometimes very big) and small that [...]

Mammoths, mastodons, and giant beavers! Prehistoric Toronto looks back—wayyyyyy back—and explores the terrain that is now Toronto, as it developed through the ages. Long before human beings arrived to perform the function, rocks acted as Earth’s record-keepers. Today, they hold faithful and extensive accounts of the planet as it once was. To learn what kinds [...]

Mammoths, mastodons, and giant beavers! We look back—wayyyyyy back—and explore the terrain that is now Toronto, as it developed through the ages. A creature makes its way doggedly along the sloping floor of a shallow, subtropical, Paleozoic sea. Its body is low, flat, and roughly the size of a phone book. The eight segments of [...]

With a crest on its head loosely resembling hair styled into a pompadour, Cryolophosaurus lived, once upon a time, in the middle of present-day Antarctica. Giganotosaurus was a carnivore, similar in size and fearsome appearance to Tyrannosaurus rex. And Futalognkosaurus, at more than 30 metres long, may well have been the largest terrestrial animal of [...]

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is more than glass angles and that room full of swords. On Friday, the ROM held a free, day-long colloquium, as it does every year, to present a year-in-review of discoveries by the museum’s researchers and curators. These investigative endeavours cover every imaginable field, from natural history to textile art; [...]

Consultation with a calendar reveals that Groundhog Day falls very near the precise midway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Strange, then, that the day is supposed to herald—depending on the relative shyness of a few arbitrarily chosen and unwitting rodents—the early onset of spring. This year, regardless of the mixed verdicts [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday's heat was not quite record-breaking, but it was one of the hottest days in recent memory, making it a perfect time for science. The local-news cliché is to try frying an egg on the sidewalk, but Google it and all you'll find are pages and pages of disappointed reporters watching uncooked albumen trickle into gutters. (Eggs don't even start to coagulate until they hit 60 degrees Celsius.) The Star cooked a roast inside a car yesterday, which was pretty original.

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 [...]