Did you see the full moon Tuesday night? For those who don’t know, it wasn’t just a full moon, but a supermoon. Supermoons happens when the moon passes closest to Earth in its elliptical orbit, making it appear much larger than usual. The supermoon certainly didn’t disappoint with many social media users sharing their photos of the ‘beautiful’ phenomenon on …

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has yet to identify the cause of the herring die-off in southwest Nova Scotia. “What it is, is a bit of a mystery,” said David Whorley, director for Fisheries and Oceans Canada in southwest Nova Scotia. The first sightings were reported late last month along the eastern edge of St. Marys Bay, and more …

Don’t you just hate it when your ex-husband has to go and drop your salary details for the world to see? Then spare a thought for poor Game of Thrones star Lena Headey, because that’s exactly what’s happened to her. Headey and Irish musician Peter Loughran are locked in a legal fight over their six-year-old son Wylie, with Loughran demanding …

Synaptics announced today that it has developed an optical fingerprint sensor, the FS9100, “capable of high-resolution scanning through 1mm of full cover glass and enables clean, button-free industrial designs.” The successful rollout of this technology would help bring true edge-to-edge smartphones closer to reality. According to Les Santiago, Research Director for IDC, “By bringing optical sensing technology with the right …

Many health professionals recommend seasonal flu vaccines as a preventive measure. But are they safe? Are they necessary? Do they actually work? Or are they a shot in the dark? Here’s what you need to know about influenza vaccines to decide for yourself. Overall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends all Americans older than six months get …

A new report from a group seeking to end the practice of keeping whales in captivity challenges claims by the Vancouver Aquarium and others that research on captive whales helps whales in the wild. The report “A Crumbling Case for Cetacean Captivity?” looked at original, peer reviewed papers from the Vancouver Aquarium and Marineland in Niagara Falls and counted how …

Mikhail Gorbachev almost certainly never saw this coming. When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, it seemed, for all intents and purposes, that the West had won the Cold War. Speaking to the BBC on the 25th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s collapse, which followed his resignation from power in 1991, Gorbachev said his imperative was to …

We finally have footage of tardigrade mating, and it’s even weirder than expected. Scientists have captured the creatures mating for the first time, providing insights into the weird ways tardigrades reproduce. The video shows that tardigrades perform a form of foreplay, described as ‘mutual stimulation’, before semen ejaculation and egg deposition, which can last an hour.

NASA is currently working with Stephen Hawking to understand his fantasies of sending a nano-starship to the nearest star system to our nearby planetary group. In April, Hawking and Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner announced that they were working together on the Breakthrough Starshot initiative to develop tiny spacecraft that could travel at one fifth the speed of light (100 …

Conair announced a massive recall of about 8 million Cuisinart food processors due to laceration hazard. Only food processors with four rivets in the blades are included in the recall, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The food processors have model numbers on their bottoms that begin with the following: CFP-9, CFP-11, DFP-7, DFP-11, DFP-14, DLC-5, DLC-7, DLC-8, DLC-10, …

Christmas Bird Counts are the world’s longest-running citizen science wildlife survey recruiting tens of thousands of observers in Canada, the US, Latin America, the Caribbean, and some Pacific islands. In 1900, Frank Chapman, who was the founder of Bird-Lore, (later to become Audubon Magazine), had an idea that instead of doing a hunt to kill as many small animals, including …