A third place for the internet.

NSERC, CIHR, and SSHRC have merged their separate scholarship and fellowship programs into one harmonized suite, the Canada Research Training Awards (CRTAS) -- increasing the total number of awards by 1,720 annually and raising values to $27,000 (Master's), $40,000 (Doctoral), and $70,000 (Postdoctoral).

Scientists built a synthetic cell that combines more lifelike properties than ever before — proof of concept that it’s possible to bring nonliving materials to life, or something close to it, in the lab.

This paper describes oxygen loss in water not merely as another consequence of climate change or pollution, but as a potentially independent threat to the stability of the Earth system.

The central idea is that aquatic deoxygenation, i.e. declining dissolved oxygen in oceans, lakes, rivers, reservoirs and coastal waters, should potentially become a tenth "planetary boundary."

Buried inside federal Bills C-22, C-34, and C-9 is a sweeping surveillance architecture. Here is what it means for Canadians and how to self-host your way out.

Everyone expected $150 oil when Iran choked the Strait of Hormuz. Instead prices keep falling — and one contrarian forecast says they could crash below $40. Not because the crisis is over, but because a recession is starting: factories slowing, freight collapsing, consumers pulling back until demand for oil itself dies. Meanwhile America’s emergency reserve keeps draining. If the thesis is right, cheap gas isn’t relief — it’s the opening act of something much worse.

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

This article tells a story of the birth of neural networks. Two physicists, John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton, are the inventors of neural networks. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to them.

Neil Fligstein is the Class of 1939 Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California.

This essay responds to an invitation by the editors of Sociologica to write about publication strategy.

"The good thing about the modern era of publishing is that there are many outlets for publication...The bad thing is that the proliferation of these outlets means that having others’ find your work becomes harder."

Published: 2019-05-08

Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object we have ever sent into space, and on November 18, 2026, it will cross a pretty incredible threshold: it will be 1 light-day away from Earth, the first human-made spacecraft to reach this distance.

This article introduces a dataset and an AI model to classify ancient plant seeds. This classification task is difficult and it requires a well trained specialist with several years of experience. Their model has good performance and can assist experts in this classification task.

This book is an exploration of how language shapes public understanding of urban change. Its central theme is that debates about gentrification have become increasingly focused on the symbolism of the term itself, sometimes at the expense of understanding the deeper forces that determine who benefits from, and who is displaced by, the transformation of cities

When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days.

The article examines emerging evidence that the human genome functions as a dynamic, three-dimensional system whose activity depends on cellular and environmental context, rather than as a fixed set of genetic instructions. It explores whether this complexity may limit AI models that rely primarily on DNA sequence data, while highlighting ongoing research aimed at integrating genome structure, regulation, and cell state to improve biological predictions.

This article discusses the wildfires in Canada, caused by the climate crisis, and the public response to hold fossil fuel CEOs accountable.

The gates of Jinwar are guarded but inside is a peaceful refuge created by women escaping war and hardship. Photographer Matteo Trevisan documents life here and at other female-led communities in the country’s north-east.

It describes itself as “a place for women who want to live a free life with other women and children, women who do not want to get married, women who lost their husbands in war or who were facing violence in their families”.

Colonial Americans were drinking coffee long before they dumped tea into Boston Harbor or fought a war for independence -- and the coffeehouses that served it were already brewing revolutionary ideas.

Canada just cut a hole in the roof of a working nuclear reactor, hauled out eight steam generators weighing 100 tons each, and lowered new ones into the same hole, bringing the reactor back online seven months early to run another 35 years.

This article gives an overview of Monte Carlo event generators, which act as a bridge between theory and experiment in particle physics.