Alanna Mitchell

Health The legendary scientist turned to highly experimental deep brain stimulation to treat his own alcoholism. He’d devoted his whole life to science, he joked. Why not his brain, too? The research he took part in is revolutionizing how we treat…

The whale was so big that it took until the middle of the night, and nine hours of manouvering, before the industrial excavator could drag her body from the ocean shallows onto the flat beach of Grand Étang, N.S., a rope tied to her tail. By dawn, a…

How big is a foot? In the United States, that depends on which of the two official foot measurements you are talking about. If it comes as a surprise that there are two feet, how about this: One of those feet is about to go away. The first foot is…

WE ARE HUNTING WHALES in Antarctica and time is running out. Unlike the harpooners of old, our goal is not to butcher them for blubber. Instead, it’s to get close enough to slap satellite-linked tracking tags on them. And rather than kill them, the…

In two days, Donna Strickland will be on a flight to Stockholm to pick up her Nobel Prize in Physics. But today, she is carrying a slender wooden cross across the sanctuary of Westminster United in Waterloo, Ont., answering questions about how she…

One of the rare disagreements between my parents came early in their marriage. My dad, George Mitchell, a biologist, had shot a magnificent buck pronghorn, had had its head taxidermied, and then wanted to give him pride of place in my mother’s…

About a year ago, while I was passionately immersed in getting the manuscript of my latest book, The Spinning Magnet: The Force That Created the Modern World and Could Destroy It, to my publisher, I found myself with a brief moment to surface and…

Editor's note: For Canadian Geographic's November/December 2017 issue, Alanna Mitchell interviewed six members of the Survivors' Circle of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and one member of the Centre's Governing Circle. Here, she…

Editor’s note: Broadview first published this story in 2013. In part 1 of the story, writer Alanna Mitchell travels to southern Argentina in search of the hooded grebe, a critically endangered water bird found only in the Patagonian wilds. Her guide…

Editor’s note: Broadview first published this story in 2013. Does the fate of a tiny, quizzical, picky, jaunty, crimson-eyed, migrating, night-flying, snail-eating, lagoon-living and horribly threatened water bird that lives only in the outback of…