Environment minister Peter Kent has announced the construction of a new Glacier Discovery Walk and visitor centre on the Icefields Parkway in Jasper National Park. It raises the issue of how to balance commercial development in our National Parks against the preservation of the last refuges of wilderness.

A Russian drilling expedition in Antarctica is close to breaking through four kilometres of ice to sample the pristine waters of Lake Vostok, which has not seen daylight for millions of  years. 

It's a fascinating project, but it has international scientists seriously concerned about contamination of a lake that might have been isolated from the rest of world for tens of millions of years. 

The Sun threw the largest storm in a decade our way this week, but there was little reported damage thanks to improved space weather forecasts and better preparedness on the ground.

New research shows a collection of factors in the Gulf of Mexico helped reduced the potential environmental impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but if the same type of spill happened in the Arctic we wouldn't get off so easily.

The X-Prize people are at it again, offering $10 million to anyone who can come up with a real version of the fictional hand-held device used by Dr. McCoy in Star Trek to diagnose medical conditions without touching the body.

The year 2012 is upon us and astronomers are not worried about a looming catastrophe from space.

For more than a decade, authors, moviemakers and soothsayers have been predicting the end of the world this year, often based on the ancient Mayan calendar. And while scientists are not forecasting doom, there is a lesson the Mayans can teach us about survival.

This was another remarkable year in science, with space shuttles retiring and new particles being detected (perhaps). Here is a partial list of the more interesting science stories of 2011.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider cringe when journalists use the term "god particle" to describe the Higgs Boson, because it has nothing to do with religion - even though it may have been essential to the very creation of the universe as we know it.

While Canada was being panned  at the UN Climate talks in Durban, South Africa, this week for our lack of action towards reducing carbon emissions, solar and nuclear industry events in Toronto provided hope that a low-carbon future is possible.

Canada's refusal to sign a new international agreement and our rumoured withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol earned us the Fossil of the Day Award from the Climate Action Network at the UN Climate Talks. Meanwhile, three reports released recently suggest the climate change issue is only getting worse.