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Wandering pole: Scientists predict Mag North will leave our territory by 2005 When Scene in the Northwest, a painting by the explorer and artist Paul Kane, was sold to an unnamed Canadian buyer in Toronto for more than $5-million on Feb. 25, Canada reclaimed a work of art commemorating an important event in her history: the 19th-century quest for the North Magnetic Pole. But new data suggests the Magnetic Pole will soon be leaving Canadian territory and heading for Russia. Estimates say that the pole, known as Mag North, has been in what is now Canada for at least four...

ATLANTA, GA. - An outbreak of polio in the Dominican Republic and Haiti last year was caused by an interaction between a polio vaccine and a related wild virus. The international team that conducted the study of the outbreak, appearing online in Science this week, said it points to the need for complete vaccination coverage. The oral polio vaccine used in the two countries contained a weakened version of the polio virus. An inoculated person would be exposed to the virus, and have immunity to future infection, without experiencing symptoms. The vaccine virus was somehow released into the wild, probably...

SHAH-E-KOT, AFGHANISTAN - Canadian soldiers embarked on a new offensive on Wednesday to hunt down and destroy a pocket of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in the eastern mountains of Afghanistan. Canadian and American soldiers launched the land and air attack, called Operation Harpoon, near Bagram north of Kabul. quot;The land component is a battalion-sized force led by the Canadian battlegroup commander who has both Canadian and American soldiers under his tactical command,quot; said Vice-Admiral Greg Maddison, the deputy chief of defence staff. Maddison confirmed there have been no Canadian casualties. A total of 2,484 members of the Canadian forces are...

A Canadian researcher has discovered how to make butter spreadable straight out of the refrigerator. Dr. Alejandro Marangoni, a food scientist at the University of Guelph, rearranged the tiniest level of fat molecules in butter to change its texture. The new substance remains as soft as margarine at low temperatures. "You can still call this butter. It is still the same old milk fat, the same material," said Dr. Marangoni, who was awarded a fellowship covering two years of his salary from the federal government's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to study the smallest particles -- called the nanostructure ...

In January, the true colour of the Universe was declared as somewhere between pale turquoise and aquamarine, by Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook at John Hopkin's University in Baltimore Maryland. They determined the cosmic colour by combining light from over 200,000 galaxies within two billion light years of Earth. The data came from the Australian 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. The new colour is much more subdued Glazebrook now says the true colour this data gives is closer to beige. "I'm very embarrassed," he says, "I don't like being wrong." The ...

Scientists at the Royal Ontario Museum are slowly but successfully piecing together the genetic blueprint of the Great Auk from the scattered remains of a bird whose extinction at the hand of man in the first half of the 19th century has made it the tragic figure of Canadian nature. In a project aimed at tracing the Great Auk's evolutionary history and establishing its relationship to several living species of birds, the researchers are also taking the first steps toward a tantalizing possibility: the complete mapping of an extinct animal's genome and its resurrection through cloning. ''Technically it's possible,'' said ...

Morale among 107 soldiers from a Winnipeg-based battalion is positive even though they are headed for what is becoming an increasingly tense situation in Afghanistan, a spokeswoman said Tuesday. "From what I can see, their morale is very high. They are ready to go," said Sub-Lieutenant Petra Smith, a public affairs officer for the Department of National Defence, told globeandmail.com from Winnipeg where the soldiers were preparing to leave mid-month. On Monday, it was learned that Canadian snipers from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry as well as special-forces members from Canada's elite JTF2 commando unit are involved in a ...

Canadian combat troops have opened fire on enemy soldiers in southern Afghanistan after an enemy patrol was caught trying to plant mines near a U.S. military base. The incident was sparked when two allied Afghan fighters were killed and four others wounded in a mine blast just outside of the perimeter of the U.S. army base at Kandahar Airport, where about 750 Canadians are stationed. A joint Canadian-Afghan reconnaissance team was sent out to investigate the blast when two men were spotted planting pizza-sized mines. The Canadians fired warning shots at the men. However, Lieut. Luc Charron, a Canadian military ...

Ancestors of the flightless figurehead of extinction island-hopped. The flightless dodo's ungainly shape hid an island-hopping past, say researchers. DNA from the extinct bird has revealed its place in the pigeon family tree, and suggests how it came to end up on its home, and graveyard, the island of Mauritius. The dodo's strange appearance led to centuries of wrangling over its ancestry. "It's the figurehead of extinction, yet little is known about its evolution," says zoologist Alan Cooper of the University of Oxford. Cooper and his colleagues extracted DNA from museum specimens, including the one in Oxford that was the ...

LOS ANGELES - American scientists have found the first evidence of a genetic link to migraines. Scientists have known for a while that migraines appear to run in families, but this is the first time a specific region on a chromosome has been linked to migraines with aura, also called classic migraines. The University of California, Los Angeles researchers analyzed blood samples from 50 Finnish families. Each of the families had three or more members who suffer from migraines. The scientists looked for genetic markers in common among the blood samples. They found three common markers linked to the fourth ...

NEW YORK (AP) Public interest groups and other Internet watchdogs are denouncing a proposal that would give the world's governments a greater say in how the Internet is run. Under the plan to overhaul the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, representatives chosen by governments would replace ones directly elected by the Internet community at large. The proposal, issued Sunday by ICANN president Stuart Lynn, would drop the U.S. government's original objective of transitioning to the private sector the policy decisions over domain names and other issues. Karl Auerbach, an ICANN board member often critical of his own ...

Intellect thrives on sleep Land of nod is a learning experience Cramming all night might help you to scrape through exams, but it won't make you clever in the long run. Human and animal experiments are lending new support to a common parental adage: that a good night's sleep is essential to learning. "Modern life's erosion of sleep time could be seriously short-changing our education potential," warned Robert Stickgold of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston this week. Many pianists find that sleeping on a tune can help ...

ZAMBOANGA, PHILIPPINES U.S. troops in the southern Philippines face the prospect of battle with descendants of the Muslim insurgents that brought U.S. General John "Black Jack" Pershing to the country more than a century ago. Before deploying to Basilan on the weekend, the Green Berets took seminars on the roots of Muslim rebellion in the poverty-wracked south as they brought Washington's war on terrorism to one of the most remote parts of the former U.S. colony. "It's an old war," said Datu Amil Jumaani, a Muslim professor who lectured the U.S. troops. Arab missionaries brought Islam to the Philippines in ...

BT Group PLC will appear in a New York federal court on Monday to try to enforce a patent it says covers all hyperlinking. BT claims it invented the hyperlink in 1976, and anyone who uses the World Wide Web owes them money. If upheld, the patent would give BT the right to collect royalties from any Internet Service Provider. BT sued Prodigy Communications after the ISP refused to purchase a license for the right to use hyperlinks, the clickable links that connect one web page to another. If Prodigy loses the case, other ISPs would also be charged ...

Evidence of an ancient "lost river civilisation" has been uncovered off the west coast of India, the country's minister for science and technology has announced. Local archaeologists claim the find could push back currently accepted dates of the emergence of the world's first cities. Underwater archaeologists at the National Institute of Ocean Technology first detected signs of an ancient submerged settlement in the Gulf of Cambray, off Gujarat, in May 2001. They have now conducted further acoustic imaging surveys and have carbon dated one of the finds. The acoustic imaging has identified a nine-kilometre-long stretch of what was once a ...

LONDON - Aspirin may work to prevent a first heart attack or stroke in those at high risk, according to a fresh look at earlier aspirin studies. Aspirin has been widely used for long-term protection in patients who have previously had a heart attack or stroke, but evidence suggests 40,000 extra lives could be saved each year if those with high-risk conditions received aspirin treatment. Colin Baigent, a Medical Research Council (MRC) scientist who lead the research, said the study shows aspirin is beneficial in a wider range of conditions than previously believed, including high-risk conditions such as angina, peripheral ...

Question: Why does looking at a bright light or sunlight sometimes make people sneeze? Carl Owens, Corcoran, California Louis Ptacek of the University of Utah's Howard Hughes Medical Institute replies: Sneezing provoked by sudden exposure to intensely bright light is known as the photic sneeze reflex. It is not uncommon'about one in 10 people are photic sneezers. Some studies suggest it may be due to an accidental crossing of nerve signals involved in normal sneezing and pupil dilation. But the photic sneeze reflex occurs only after someone has been adapted to the dark for at least five minutes. Even photic ...

LORD MELCHETT, the environmental campaigner, has resigned from the board of Greenpeace International following controversy over his new job with a public relations firm. The former Labour minister, who was arrested for destroying a field of genetically modified crops in 1999, disclosed last week that he is to join Burson-Marsteller, whose clients include the GM food company Monsanto. The firm has also worked to improve the image of companies and governments accused of serious environmental and human rights abuses. The furore that followed Lord Melchett's announcement resulted in his decision yesterday to cut all ties with Greenpeace, the world's biggest ...

A MAN who plunged to his death from a light aircraft at 5,000ft was identified last night as a former SAS man who had written an autobiography entitled Freefall. An expert skydiver, Charles 'Nish' Bruce apparently leapt without a parachute from the twin-seater Cessna 172 aircraft into fields near the village of Fifield, Oxfordshire. The plane, being piloted by a woman believed to be Mr Bruce's girlfriend, had taken off from Spain and was bound for Hinton-in-the-Hedges, Northamptonshire. Mr Bruce, 46, was the first special forces soldier to parachute into the Falklands in the 1982 conflict with Argentina, according to ...

SCIENTISTS have proved for the first time that bacteria can survive in outer space, supporting the theory that life on Earth began with extra-terrestrial microbes. Researchers showed that spores could stay alive when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun if they were protected by particles of clay and red sandstone commonly found in meteorites. The tests, in which spores were released from a Russian satellite, suggest that the 'panspermia' theory that life began elsewhere and was carried to Earth on meteorites is plausible. The hypothesis was first proposed by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, in 1903 and was ...