canada

Canada's newest coin glows in the dark

Canadian money authorities just can't sit still. Like a hyperactive kid, they have revamped Canadian cash, first introducing plastic bills and then killing the penny. Now they want people to play with glow-in-the-dark quarters.

The Royal Canadian Mint's latest collectible coin features a dinosaur whose skeleton shines at night from beneath its scaly hide.

It's actually two images on one face, which could be a world's first. The other side depicts Queen Elizabeth. Her Majesty does not glow in the dark. … Read more

Crash test dummies go from four wheels to two

How can you get a concussion from falling off a bike? Canadian engineering students recently took the training wheels off a crash test dummy to find out.

Roughly 25 students from Carleton University and Algonquin College in Ottawa spent eight months building an intrepid mannequin that's designed to go over the handlebars at 15 mph.

Dummies designed for car crash simulations aren't considered useful for scenarios where a cyclist would slam on the brakes on impact and go hurtling over the front wheel.

The dummy is embedded with sensors and load cells, which can measure the force of an impact as it careens down a special track. The data will be analyzed to determine what kinds of injuries a human cyclist would experience under the same crash conditions. … Read more

So long, Canadian penny. I won't miss you

When I was a kid growing up in Montreal, I spent more than a year filling a big brown bottle with pennies. When they reached the top and I poured them out, I was crushed that they totaled less than 20 bucks.

Ever since, I've had little love for the lowly Canadian cent -- it's 2.35 grams, mostly steel, and has been nothing but dead weight in my pockets. The government now feels the same and has announced that the Royal Canadian Mint will stop distributing pennies this fall.

"Pennies take up too much space on … Read more

RIM, having lost its lead in Canada, looks to weak earnings

Research in Motion ceding its smartphone title to Apple in Canada may be seen as a minor hiccup after the struggling RIM posts its fiscal fourth-quarter results next Thursday.

Expectations for RIM this period are decidedly low, with a product line sustained by heavy discounts and the company lacking any new smartphones. It'll mark the first quarterly report for new CEO Thorsten Heins, who has opted to stick with the company's established strategy of a gradual move to its next-generation smartphone platform.

Wall Street analysts have been steadily lowering their earnings and revenue estimates over the past few … Read more

Hockey-playing robot can stick it to you

Here in Canada, you make the best of the long cold winters by getting out there and skiing, skating, testing solar bulbs, and launching Lego men into the stratosphere. Or you build hockey-playing robots.

Jennifer is a DARwin-OP robot from the University of Manitoba's Autonomous Agents Laboratory that can shimmy around on a rink and even stick-handle a bit. She's billed as the first of her kind.

Named after Canadian hockey Olympic medalist Jennifer Botterill, the bot has mini skates, a stick, a Team Canada jersey, and a ball and puck to play with. In the vid below, she shuffles around to the old theme from "Hockey Night in Canada" and you can't beat that.

The piece was put together as a submission to the DARwin-OP Humanoid Application Challenge at IEEE ICRA in May. The robots are open-platform humanoids developed by U.S. universities and sold by Korean firm Robotis.

The challenges facing Chris Iverach-Brereton and colleagues on the University of Manitoba team include getting the robot to hit the puck from a sideways orientation and improving her skating skills. She's not ready to join the Winnipeg Jets just yet.

"We want to improve a great deal and have proper skating and really precise stickhandling," Iverach-Brereton told Postmedia News. "By May, my personal goal is to have the skating down and have (Jennifer) be able to push off one foot and glide." … Read more

RIM's BBM service targeted for name infringement

Research In Motion could once again face a legal fracas over the name of one of its software products.

Broadcast measurement firm BBM Canada has taken offense with RIM's use of the "BBM" shorthand moniker for its BlackBerry Messenger service, Reuters reports. That's RIM's software that lets BlackBerry users communicate with one another, and comes pre-installed on many of the company's devices.

BBM Canada, which formerly went by the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement until a name shortening in the 1960s, sent a cease and desist letter to RIM for using the BBM naming on … Read more

NORAD ready to track Santa Claus again

Editor's note: This story originally ran in 2009. In the spirit of the holidays, we thought we'd run this touching piece again.

On a recent Christmas Eve, Jeff Martin found himself forced to explain to a Canadian general why, when Santa Claus passed through Toronto that night, Google Maps had placed the city in the United States.

Martin, then a senior marketing manager in Google's Geo group, was part of a huge team of people involved in the joint U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command's annual NORAD Santa tracker program, a long-running effort to … Read more

The 404 950: Where we hang it on our dongle (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 Podcast Episode

Wolfram Alpha Travel Assistant app answers the question, " Where's that plane going?" Who knew Rotten Tomatoes is owned by Warner Brothers? Canada unveils new plastic $100 bills with high-tech security features: changing colors, hidden text, and backward numbers. Tomorrow the world will join Singapore to celebrate the 10th annual World Toilet Day, as decreed by the World Toilet Organization (WTO), the World Toilet Summit, and the World Toilet College.… Read more

Roku boxes heading to U.K., Canada

Roku is taking its streams across the pond.

The company announced today it plans to begin selling its set-top boxes to consumers in the U.K. and Canada in early 2012. Roku will also expand its platform to support region-specific channels.

The announcement follows Netflix's expansion in September into 43 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

"This year has been one of many accomplishments for Roku in the U.S.," Roku CEO Anthony Wood said in a statement. "And now we're looking forward to kicking off 2012 by expanding to Europe and Canada to … Read more