By Shamim and Zoe Come into the Business, Science and Technology Department on the third floor of the Toronto Reference Library to view this display by one of our Science Librarians marking the 100th Anniversary of Marie Curie's Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Maria Salomea Sklodowska was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, in Russian […]
Are you one of those Torontonians who are willing to drive for hours for the pleasure of diving into a cool, clean Canadian lake? How would you feel if you knew that you could have the same experience for the price of a token? Yes, I'm talking about taking a trip to one of Toronto's […]
Nature photographer Thomas Maren’t loved butterflies as a child and his ongoing passion culminated in Butterfly, a stunning collection of photographs from around the world. Maren’t documents the butterfly life cycle in incredible detail. His close-up photos of butterfly wings reveal a multitude of tiny scales which together form mosaic patterns. Some of the caterpillar photos are […]
Toronto's Pug Award nominees [celebrating the best in Toronto architecture] were released in early May and we are proud to say that the beautifully renovated and re-imagined Bloor Gladstone Branch is on the list. One nice thing about these awards is that your vote counts in determining who makes it into the Hall of Fame […]
Last week, following a Zoocheck presentation at his school, my son wrote to officials at San Diego's Sea World imploring them to free Corky, a performing Orca. I was interested then to read in The Globe and Mail that the Toronto Zoo board has decided to retire its elderly elephants and send them to a better […]
Ah, Yonge Street – that loved and loathed thoroughfare that, for better or for worse, is Toronto's main street. Recently, there seem to have been an unusual number of articles about Yonge Street, including a recent post from Spacing Toronto that questioned its claim to fame as 'the longest street in the world'. […]
The Business, Science and Technology Department at the Toronto Reference Library has unique horticultural books which are sure to please every type of gardener, from the beginner to the experienced, the obsessive to the carefree. If you have ever wondered how your every day garden plants fit into the big botanical scheme of things, […]
The Frank Gehry-designed expansion and renovation of the Art Gallery of Ontario has been one of the more critically well-received Toronto building projects of the last few years [unlike the ROM's Crystal, for example, which has had a much more mixed reaction]. If you want to find out more about the whole process of how […]
The National Geographic Magazine website is very impressive. Not only does it feature the current issue, as well as all issues going back to December 2006, but it incorporates the photographs so central to this publication. Each article is accompanied by a photo gallery. April's feature article examines new archaeological discoveries at Machu Picchu, the fifteenth-century Inca ruins, believed to have […]
Understanding the complexity and diversity of our planet is the first step towards preventing its further degradation. Healthy oceans are crucial for humanity's well-being, yet learning about oceans is really like discovering another universe. A treasured volume in my personal library is Ocean: the World's last Wilderness Revealed which is also available in the Quick Reference section of the […]