All Posts Tagged With: "science"
Experimental lakes research area to remain open this year
Ontario offers support
The Ontario government says it has found common ground with the federal government and other partners to keep a world-famous experimental research area open in the northwestern part of the province.
The province says it will provide operating support and work toward an agreement so the “important science” conducted in the Environmental Lakes Area near Kenora can continue.
The remote region of 58 pristine lakes has been used since the late 1960s for groundbreaking freshwater studies.
Continue reading Experimental lakes research area to remain open this year
Federal watchdog to study policies that ‘muzzle’ scientists
Government accused of not sharing environmental research
Federal policies that restrict what government scientists can say publicly about their work are about to be put under the microscope.
Federal Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault has agreed to investigate how government communications rules on taxpayer-funded science impact public access to information.
Legault is responding to a detailed complaint lodged by the Environmental Law Centre at the University of Victoria and the ethics advocacy group Democracy Watch.
Their lengthy report — “Muzzling Civil Servants: A Threat to Democracy?” — laid out repeated examples of taxpayer-funded science being suppressed or limited to pre-packaged media lines across six different government departments and agencies.
Continue reading Federal watchdog to study policies that ‘muzzle’ scientists
Bill Nye urges action on climate change
Science Guy’s talk sells out at University of Ottawa
Bill Nye (Jane Lytvynenko)
Bill Nye the Science Guy, star of the eponymous children’s television show that aired from 1993 to 1998, drew what organizers say was the biggest crowd for an event held by University of Ottawa students in nearly four decades.
Elementary school kids, university students and others packed the Ottawa Convention Centre’s biggest room on Thursday evening and listened to the 57-year-old man tell science jokes, personal stories and plead with them to fight climate change and make a difference in the world.
Nye began with the story of his father, who was a prisoner of war in China during World War Two. To tell how much time he spent in the camp, Nye’s dad used a shovel as a sundial. That story was passed down from father to son, and so the science guy became obsessed with sundials, developing what he jokingly called SOD (Sundial Obsessive Disorder). Because of this fascination, he started two projects. MarsDial created three sundials for rovers that were flown to the red planet. The second project, EarthDial, is a program that allows people all over the world to make sundials and learn about astronomy, the scientific method, “and our place among the stars.”
B.C. radio telescope will act like time machine
Research could help solve mystery of universe’s origin
Hubble Space Telescope photo of planetary nebula (NGC 5189 NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI))
Construction has begun on a new radio telescope in British Columbia’s south Okanagan that will act like a type of time machine and help astrophysicists travel back to better understand the composition of our expanding universe.
The $11-million project is being built at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory southwest of Penticton, B.C., and will use components from the cellphone industry to capture and turn radio waves emitted six to 11 billion years ago into a three-dimensional map.
It’s the first research telescope built in Canada in more than three decades and includes scientists from the observatory, the University of British Columbia, McGill University and the University of Toronto.
“It’s almost like time travel,” said Kris Sigurdson, an astrophysicist from UBC and co-investigator on the project. “It’s looking back into the past and how the universe was at that time and it’s just amazing.”
Continue reading B.C. radio telescope will act like time machine
Waterloo-led team creates virtual brain
“Spaun” learns patterns and uses new knowledge
Spaun learning (CTNWaterloo/YouTube)
A team led by a scientist at the University of Waterloo has created the world’s largest functional brain model and it’s the first to cross “the brain-behaviour gap,” Prof. Chris Eliasmith tells Canada.com. “Spaun” can learn patterns and then uses that new knowledge to answer questions. The team’s research was published Thursday in Science. Tenille Bonoguore of Waterloo communications explains more:
Spaun uses only its brain to understand images it sees, and “move” its virtual arm. In short, it uses the same processes that your brain does to pick up a cup of coffee.
“It has been interesting to see the reactions people have had to Spaun. Even seasoned academics have not seen brain models that actually perform so many tasks. Models are typically small, and focus on one function,” says Eliasmith, who is jointly appointed to the departments of philosophy and systems design engineering, and cross-appointed to computer science at the University of Waterloo.
A hated professor’s lesson in academic freedom
On the legacy of race researcher Philippe Rushton
Western University (Jessica Darmanin)
Over the past couple of weeks, academics were discussing the death of Western University’s Phillipe Rushton, a professor perhaps not familiar to many of today’s students, but who was, for a little while, among the most hated men in Canada.
Until the late 1980s Rushton had been a reasonably well-respected psychologist whose work on altruism was frequently cited. But then, he published a series of papers claiming that the three main human racial groups—whites, blacks, and Asians—could be grouped according to a wide range of racial traits, including intelligence and various sexual characteristics, with whites typically falling between blacks and Asians.
Not surprisingly, many took Rushton’s theories as thinly-veiled, or, indeed, not-at-all-veiled racism. They saw his essential claim as being that blacks were inherently inferior to whites, and many called for the psychologist’s resignation. At one point, Rushton was required to teach his courses by video to prevent on-campus unrest.
Continue reading A hated professor’s lesson in academic freedom
Watch the Mars Rover’s descent
Curiosity photos compiled into neat video
NASA’s Curiosity Rover is impressive. It has been remotely controlled from earth and managed to cut through rocks with it’s laser. But until now, we were mostly watching it through still photos. Check out this video that someone put together using photos from its descent to the red planet:
Source: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=0&camera=MARDI
Dalhousie project takes aim at invasive species
Aquatron laboratory will test cleanliness of ballast water
Jane Gerster, The Canadian Press
Dalhousie University is working on a system to test the cleanliness of ballast water, the only such facility in Canada, just as new regulations could be introduced that would govern what ships could discharge at ports around the world.
The Aquatron laboratory is scheduled to conduct its first tests of ballast water at the Halifax school later this month.
“We have to imitate a ship taking on ballast and then we hold the water so that represents transit of the ship going somewhere,” said John Batt, the manager of the research facility. “Then we test the water on a de-ballast.”
Batt said water will be pumped through a control system and a ballast water management system separately. The results will then be compared and the tests will be repeated with different salt water levels.
Continue reading Dalhousie project takes aim at invasive species
UBC researchers help score ocean health
Scores range from 36 in Sierra Leone to 86 in South Pacific
The health of the world’s oceans has been assessed on a country-by-country basis for the first time. Overall, they got the passing grade of 60 out of 100. Canada’s received 70. The international team behind the list included University of British Columbia fisheries experts. From UBC:
The team undertook the first global quantitative assessment of ocean health and created the Ocean Health Index (http://oceanhealthindex.org), published today in the journal Nature. To calculate the overall score, ecological, social, economic, and political conditions were evaluated for every coastal nation in the world.
The scores for individual countries ranged widely: from Sierra Leone, with a failing scores of 36, to Jarvis Island, an uninhabited, relatively pristine island in the South Pacific, with the highest scores of 86.
Canada is among the top performers with a score of 70 while the U.S. received 63 and the U.K. received 62.
Scientists hold mock funeral for “evidence”
Hundreds protest on Parliament Hill
Hundreds of scientists donned in black made a sober march to Parliament Hill today, where they gathered to mourn the ‘death’ of something they knew well and loved: evidence.
Ottawa scientists organized the protest, which was orchestrated to look like a funeral, to oppose was what they say is a deliberate campaign by the federal government campaign to reduce the capacity of federal institutions to collect evidence and bring it forward to inform citizens.
They were provoked by the elimination of the mandatory long-form census last year, and recent closure of a laboratory that monitors climate change in Nunavut.
Organizer Katie Gibbs told the CBC that regardless of political ideology, the importance of facts is something all Canadians should agree to preserve:
“Regardless of the decisions that the government decides to make, our democracy depends on an informed public.”
Foundation gives 20 teens $100,000 each
Two new Thiel Fellows are Canadian
Laura Deming, Thiel Fellow (Thiel Foundation)
The Thiel Foundation announced its second class of 20 Under 20 on Tuesday. The 20 new Thiel Fellows, all 19 or younger on Dec. 31, will each get $100,000 to pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, along with guidance from tech entrepreneurs, investors and scientists.
Billionaire Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, created the fellowships because he believes university and governments aren’t the only routes to innovation.
“Pundits and hand-wringers love to claim that universities are the only path to a successful life. In truth, an inquisitive mind, rigorously applied to a deep-rooted problem can change the world as readily as the plushest academic lab,” Thiel said.
“In 1665 when Cambridge University closed due to the plague, Isaac Newton used his time away to pursue self-directed learning and ended up inventing calculus,” he added.
Forming bonds between chemistry and careers
This prof eschews flash-bang demos (but he is into peeballs)
In the first lecture of the semester each January, Prof. Charles Lucy gives students what seems like an odd assignment for a chemistry course.
Students are instructed to write their resumes.
“A large part of my role as a teacher,” says Lucy, “is not just teaching the subject, but teaching what the opportunities are and where to find them.”
Lucy is known for his research in chemical analysis. But he’s also known for helping students connect chemistry to their future careers. That’s one reason he won a 3M National Teaching Fellowship. On Campus is profiling the winners.
Without summer jobs in chemistry, Lucy might never have become interested in the field.
Continue reading Forming bonds between chemistry and careers
Professor criticized for course denying climate change
Tom Harris dismisses 142 “corrections”
Photo by stuartpilbrow on Flickr
A group of scientists has released a report condemning a Carleton University professor who taught a course centred on the idea that climate change is not caused by human emissions.
Tom Harris taught Climate Change: An Earth Sciences Perspective to mostly second-year non-science students between 2009 and 2011.
The Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism says in its report entitled Climate Change Denial in the Classroom that Harris hosted speakers who argued that climate change is not caused by humans but hosted “no scientist speaking to the generally accepted consensus.”
Continue reading Professor criticized for course denying climate change
Scientists narrow in on hunt for ‘God particle’
Canadian university researchers among international team
Photo of Large Hadron Collider courtesy of CERN
Two teams of nearly 3,000 scientists from around the world, including researchers from 10 Canadian universities, announced this week a new milestone in the hunt for the Higgs boson, a particle that explains the existence of mass.
Scientists at the CERN Physics Research Centre in Geneva, Switzerland presented evidence on Dec. 13 pointing to the existence of the Higgs boson, coined the “God particle” by the American Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman.
The teams worked independently for 21 months inside the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, to re-create the conditions at the time of the creation of the universe—the Big Bang. The experiments produced the same results: scientists determined that the Higgs boson has a mass between 128 and 525 gigaelectron volts, in the lower regions of the energy field.
The researchers are quick to point out that the news another step in the process, not a definitive discovery. Still, University of Toronto physicist Robert Orr tells the Toronto Star we owe a lot to the elusive Higgs boson: “The whole world we live in is based on the science of electromagnetism. Our whole society has evolved from that: iPads, cameras, lights, computers.”
Scientific journal is a lot like YouTube
Meet JoVE. It’s peer-reviewed. It’s indexed. And it’s fun.
Capture from JoVE promotional video.
Are you tired of reading textbooks and journal articles? Imagine if you could research your lab report or learn an experimental technique by watching a YouTube video.
I just learned that you basically can, thanks to the Journal of Visualized Experiments. It’s like YouTube, except you’re not watching videos of kittens playing patty cake or people doing stupid stuff with trampolines. JoVE publishes peer-reviewed research just like any other academic journal, but in video format. It’s even indexed in PubMed Central, which is the Google of biochemical and life sciences research. At five-years old, JoVE may be the only journal of its kind. But one can imagine there will soon be more like it.
The most (and least) lucrative degrees in Ontario
Pity the poor arts grad
Dentist photo by ^@^ina on Flickr.
The new Council of Ontario Universities’ study of the 2008 graduating class reveals big differences in what graduates were making two years after tossing their mortarboards in the air. Below are the average salaries reported by nearly 20,000 Ontario graduates in 2010, from highest paid to lowest paid. In parentheses are the employment rates two years after graduation. It’s clear that people with plain old humanities, arts and biology degrees are in lower demand and get paid less than those with more specialized degrees.
Continue reading The most (and least) lucrative degrees in Ontario
Students are fleeing STEM degrees
And why they may want to reconsider
Photo by jeremy.wilburn on Flickr
Today, the New York Times suggested that President Obama’s goal of training 10,000 more engineers per year, plus 100,000 more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) teachers annually is unlikely to be reached.
For decades, the U.S. has been trying to up its output of STEM students. But the percentage of all students earning Bachelor of Engineering degrees has actually fallen from nearly 10 per cent of the total in the mid-1980s to 5.4 per cent in 2009-10. Computer engineering hit peaks of 4.3 per cent of the totals in 1984 and 2004, but has fallen again to 2.4 per cent in 2009-10. It’s a similar story in other STEM fields too, like biology. As more people are educated, it seems fewer are choosing STEM.
Canadian wins “Dance your PhD” competition
Contest helps share science
Emma Ware, a PhD biology candidate at Queen’s University is among four winners in an international contest called Dance Your PhD, reports CBC News. Click here to see the video.
The contest, which is exactly what its title suggests, was founded by John Bohannon, a science journalist and researcher at Harvard. He first held the contest as a way to have fun at a party, but quickly realized that it could help scientists with the perennial problem of communicating their work to the public. The video-based entries were judged by both scientists and professional dancers. Ware’s video for her thesis, which is called A Study of Social Interactivity Using Pigeon Courtship, won in the social science category, which comes with a prize of $500.
An overall best PhD dancer will be chosen next. He or she will receive an additional $500, plus a trip to Brussels in November to perform at the Tedx conference.
Feds fund science outreach in Ontario
Money will create programs for under-represented youth
More students from under-represented groups will be encouraged to pursue careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine) fields, thanks to $1.25-million from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario.
“Our Government recognizes the importance of preparing young people for today’s high-tech economy,” said Conservative MP Peter Braid at the announcement in Waterloo. “By developing our next generation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians, we can help drive innovation and keep the economy growing in southern Ontario for years to come.”
The money goes to Actua, a science, engineering and technology outreach network that provides summer camps and classroom workshops delivered by university students. The funding will help create new programs for under-represented children, including Aboriginals, at-risk youth and girls.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Commerce released a study that showed women make up only 25 per cent of the STEM workforce, despite holding nearly 50 per cent of all jobs. They concluded that America’s economic growth is held back by the gender gap in STEM fields.
Female science profs less satisfied
Nearly half say they have fewer children than desired
Photo courtesy of jeremy.wilburn on Flickr
A new study in PLoS One found that women working in science are less satisfied than their male counterparts in a number of ways.
Most striking is the fact that 45 per cent of female science faculty members said they have fewer children than they desire, compared to only 25 per cent of male science faculty members.
Similarly, more female faculty said they have trouble balancing work and family life — 48 per cent versus 32 per cent.
The study also showed that women are slightly less satisfied with their incomes and slightly more dissatified with their working hours than their male colleagues are. They also claim to work one hour more per week on average than men (56 hours versus 55 hours).
The findings may help to explain why fewer women are attracted to jobs in science. Just last week, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a study that showed that women hold only 24 per cent of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) jobs, despite making up nearly 50 per cent of the workforce.
The PLoS researchers surveyed 1,302 faculty across 100 science departments.
