Be Giant

Share The decades-long journey to discovering the weight-loss drug that changed the world ​​took an unlikely turn in an Air Canada cargo hold, where a venomous, black-and-orange Gila monster was travelling from Utah to Toronto in a metal cage. ​​​It was 1995 and, after landing at Pearson, the lizard was transported to the laboratory of Daniel Drucker, ​​an endocrinologist determined to solve a medical mystery.

On a clear day, you can see Nova Scotia while standing among mountains of "red gold" from Saskatchewan. Here on the rocky coastline of Saint John, N.B. sit two massive storage sheds filled with huge piles of potash, the heavy pink-hued mineral crucial to the global food supply - and your morning cup of coffee. From here, the fertilizer is loaded onto cargo vessels and shipped to markets in Brazil and Europe.

Benjamin Hatton spends a lot of time contemplating the perfect window. In the summer, it would keep out the sun's heat while letting in light. In winter, it would let in both light and heat. It would scatter and evenly distribute light on overly bright days to keep a building naturally lit. In short, the perfect window would act a little like a squid. Hatton is a University of Toronto materials science and engineering professor who leads the Hatton Lab for bio-inspired materials and design.

Robert Weatherbe loves a creative solution. Almost four decades ago that meant driving around Vancouver in an old hatchback with his longtime business partner, Louise Schwarz, collecting used office paper for recycling.

Share Dive into the typical treatise on Canadian labour productivity and the picture that emerges is of a maple leaf-painted tortoise being outpaced by a star-spangled hare. The trope that Canada's businesses can't keep up with their American counterparts has been part of the national consciousness - and a source of collective self-doubt - for decades.

A new strain of Canadian confidence took over downtown Toronto this week, as thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, executives and wonks convened for Nrth Festival, the recently rebranded tech event formerly known as Elevate. For two and a half days, delegates wearing lanyards and toting half-open laptops and food-truck lattes scurried along Front Street to catch keynotes, bounce ideas and - judging by the volume of startup pitches overheard in the lobby - shoot their shots. And why not?

Outside a drone hangar at Nenana Municipal Airport, judges conferred over what, if anything, could still be salvaged from a day of expensive failures. An $11-million prize for reinventing how wildfires are detected and fought was at stake. The panel of judges, whose expertise spanned wildfire science, emergency management, aviation and autonomous drones, gathered outside the hangar in Alaska, where the finals for XPRIZE Wildfire were taking place this summer.

Earlier this year, in the depths of the Fredericton winter, professor Matt Dinan cracked the hefty spine of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov for the first time. This was embarrassing: Dinan is the director of the Great Books program at St. Thomas University, and there he was, at age 40, only just broaching one of the greatest books of all.

"Why didn't I learn how to write code in school?" Indra Kubicek asked herself that question when weighing the decision to launch a digital startup a decade ago. It changed her career trajectory, from working in finance to starting a digital literacy not-for-profit. Today, she's the CEO of Digital Moment, a Montreal organization that trains teachers on how to incorporate AI into curriculums in primary and secondary schools.

What it is A cluster of Canadian tech that will ride shotgun on an upcoming NASA lunar mission: a space-age lawn dart plus a toaster-sized satellite armed with a souped-up camera and antenna. The first, called MAPLE (Multipurpose Autonomous Impact Probe for Lunar Exploration), is an impact probe that will be sent to the moon's surface to gather data.