The Current, Canada’s Most Listened to Radio Show

Here are some of the stories I got to work on for The Current.  “GMO pigs’ cautionary tale of genetically modified food research” aired November 2, 2015. (Pitched and produced it) “Electrical brain stimulation moves from lab to home, experts wary” aired October 13, 2015. (Pitched and helped produce it) “Deep sea mining’s new frontier…

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Reality of Flight Safety (from a tv producer)

With all the aviation disasters that have occurred over the summer, I can’t help feel the need to put them into perspective. You see, recently, I had the privilege of working for the world’s longest running and most respected aviation disaster television shows – Mayday on Discovery Channel (or Air Crash Investigation – as it’s…

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Biohacking on Spark

The process of bioengineering is becoming democratized. People anywhere and everywhere can extract and tinker with a living cell’s DNA right from their very own home. The trend is called biohacking. The people getting into it range from the hobbyist to the closeted scientists. All the means to do it are at our fingertips. A…

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Designer Organs on Spark

Back when I was on maternity leave, a senior producer from CBC Radio’s show Spark contacted me to ask if I could look into a story for them.  It was about a biophysics professor at the University of Ottawa who tinkers with living materials.  He stretches and pulls stem cells to get them to act…

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Mind Controlled Digital World

EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON OUR NOT-SO-FAR-FLUNG SCI-FI’ISH FUTURE

When I started wondering, “When will I be able to tweet directly from my mind?” – I never imagined where that question would take me. It started as an idea for the CBC Radio program Spark – a show about tech, trends and ideas. I knew a biomedical engineer from the University of Wisconsin Madison had tweeted from his brain using an EEG system. I also knew researchers from the University of Utah recently announced they used microelectrodes implanted on the brain to decode a few words. I figured tweeting from our brains would be within our grasp.

It is and it isn’t.

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TV documentary scripts are a lot like jigsaw puzzles

Writing a television documentary script is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You have a lot of little pieces that need to fit together in just the right way to see the bigger picture. The longer the show or segment, the more complex the puzzle.

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Cosmic Vistas wins Gold & Special Jury Award

Today I got some amazing news.  Cosmic Vistas, the astronomy series I worked on last year, won a couple of major awards at the Worldfest Houston International Film Festival for best television or cable documentary.  Episode 3 is an action-packed adrenaline-filled exploration of Mars.   This episode really exemplifies the thrill of sending spacecraft to…

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King Tut’s gold couldn’t save him, but it saved his DNA

Everything the world knew about King Tut since Howard Carter discovered his tomb in 1922 was turned upside down when scientists applied today’s forensic science methods to the most famous mummy in the world.

King Tut was not a strong pharaoh riding chariots or murdered by some rival. Instead, he was a sick and frail king, born of incest, who needed walking sticks to get around.

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A High Temperature Superconducting Future

It’s hard to imagine a world where scientists have figured out how to get superconductors to work at room temperature.

Why superconductors are so cool is they can transmit electricity with virtually no resistance. If your laptop could do that, it would never heat up as it does now. Electronics waste energy.

The most practical use for superconductors that don’t have to be cooled to below -100 degrees Celsius would be to distribute energy. They could easily and efficiently transmit electricity from a windmill in Kansas to downtown San Francisco.

Other applications would be a little more difficult for us to get our minds around if it weren’t for the Jetsons.

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