News

A woman’s scream pierces through the rolling hum of cheers from the sidelines, and Brent Plumley, BSc ‘08 is all nervous smiles.  Bound tightly with a canvas cocoon to a zip line, 350 meters long and 70 meters above a pit of bright blue water of an abandoned copper mine, she clutches a yellow ball.  Her scream culminates into a loud whoop of victory as her ball plops just inside the boundaries of a red target below, ensuring her team’s success.

This past Saturday, the University of Waterloo science buildings were filled with laughter, smiles, and exclamations of discovery, as families from the Kitchener-Waterloo community gathered for a day of curiosity-driven exploration and experimentation. The annual Science Open House and Gem and Mineral Show drew large crowds to UWaterloo.

Arctic regions have captured and stored carbon for tens of thousands of years, but a new study shows winter carbon emissions from the Arctic may now be putting more carbon into the atmosphere than is taken up by plants each year.

New Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics looks to the cosmos to solve the greatest mysteries of the Universe

By Sam Toman

University Relations

Astrophysicists can mostly agree that something called dark energy is expanding our Universe at an accelerating rate. That discovery was groundbreaking, but that’s only half the puzzle. Two of the top astrophysicists in the game, Waterloo researchers Will Percival and Mike Hudson, have been chipping away at the question of just how fast it’s accelerating for much of their careers.