All Posts Tagged With: "science"

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.”

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

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.

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.

Least educated are most likely to shun expertise

A new Ekos Research poll shows that even though the Conservatives have a hold on traditionalist voters who value morality and decency over science, they need to reach out to voters who value scientific knowledge and expert civil service advice if they want to get the 15 percentage points needed to form a majority government. The poll shows that anti-expertise and skepticism of science rise with socioeconomic vulnerability and age. For example, new Canadians are less committed to knowledge and expertise in government decision-making than the native born. Also, those who responded with less marketable experience and skills were more opposed to scientific knowledge and other forms of expertise, with the biggest tension being between the college-educated and wealthier university-educated elites. The poll suggested that showing a bit of respect for science and expertise may help win university-educated voters, since most Canadians lean toward the view that knowledge, expertise and evidence are crucial to societal decision making, and that science and expertise are undervalued in the country.

What the big thinkers know, what they’re trying to learn, and how close we may be to a genuine revolution

Not even the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., is immune to the rhythms of the seasons. Summer there this year was quiet and casual, with several regular faces away on vacation. And yet there were plenty of signs that the little think tank is heading into an ambitious new era.

Stephen Hawking was on a six-week working visit from Cambridge, England. Every day you could see a caregiver pushing his wheelchair along the footpaths outside the building at surprising speed. The most famous scientist in the world does not like to dawdle. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has left him no control over most of his body. Twitching a cheek muscle to compose even a short sentence with his speech synthesizer can take 20 minutes. So he is keenly aware of wasted time. “I encouraged lots of people to go and talk to him,” Neil Turok, Perimeter’s South African director and a Hawking friend and colleague of long standing, told me.

“A lot of people did. Several of them came away saying, ‘I went and explained to him what I’m doing—and he didn’t seem very interested!’ I entirely sympathize with him. He has very high standards and if you start telling him something that doesn’t sound plausible he’ll very quickly tell you, ‘I’ve had enough.’ ”

Leonard Susskind, a white-bearded and soft-spoken Stanford University prof, was on a similar extended visit. Susskind has no human story of physical courage to match Hawking’s, but to physicists he is in Hawking’s intellectual class. He is a pioneer in the surreal but influential field of string theory, which describes a universe made of tiny vibrating strings curled up across many more dimensions than the three we know. Hawking and Susskind are two of Perimeter’s 20 Distinguished Research Chairs, eminent international theorists who visit Waterloo occasionally to work without the distractions of home.

Susskind spent much of his time in the third-floor lounge surrounded by groups of young scientists still in graduate school or fresh out. They would show Susskind their work, neat lines of equations on notepaper or hectic scrawls on the lounge’s blackboard. (Perimeter has hundreds of blackboards, in every office, conference room and coffee nook. They all get a lot of use.) Susskind’s questions would make his young visitors stare at the paper or blackboard for long minutes, as if hoping an answer would appear.

The day I arrived, the inaugural class of Perimeter Scholars International (PSI), an intensive master’s-level course in theoretical physics for students from around the world, held their convocation after a year’s intensive study. One of the most impressive was Bruno Le Floch, a 20-year-old ponytailed Frenchman who was one of the younger students in his class. “He’s just a genius,” Turok said. But he is also just a kid. So rather than dive into a theory career, Le Floch will spend the next year teaching in Cape Town at the African Institute for Mathematical Studies, which Turok founded in hopes of giving Africa’s best students a reason to stay at home and lead the continent’s intellectual development.

One day Stephen Harper visited Perimeter to announce a $20-million federal investment in Turok’s African initiative. One rarely has to wait long at Perimeter before somebody comes along with a gift of money. Often the visitor is a local boy who made good, Mike Lazaridis, the founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion.

Years ago, Lazaridis decided to put much of his fortune into an institute that would study the questions that fascinated him when he was a University of Waterloo engineering student. On one hand, Einstein’s theories of space, time and gravity. On the other, the odd but powerful insights of quantum mechanics. In 2000, with $100 million from Lazaridis and $20 million from two other RIM partners, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics set up shop in the old post office building on King Street.

Since then it has grown steadily. In 2004, Perimeter moved into a slate-black 6,000-sq.-m building on the shore of Silver Lake in Waterloo Park. Already this summer, work crews were building an extension that will nearly double the institute’s floor space. Its faculty size will triple.

(Current full-time faculty is only 11, but if you add faculty it shares with area universities, visiting scholars, post-docs and graduate students, there are about 100 people thinking in the building on an ordinary day, and often about as many stopping through for a conference or seminar.) Enrolment at Perimeter Scholars International will double. The Distinguished Research Chairs will grow in number to 30.

But what do the people at Perimeter actually do? Many assume the institute must be the research and development branch of Research in Motion. This is not even remotely true. There are no laboratories at Perimeter. It has no equipment for manufacturing anything. There is very little in the sleek four-storey building except boxes of chalk and an excellent bistro.

But establishing what the Perimeter theorists don’t do is easier than explaining what they do.

Even they have learned to leave it vague. “When the neighbours ask, I say I just want to understand why the universe works the way it does,” said Chris Fuchs, a tremendously engaging Texan who has been a visiting scholar at Perimeter since 2007. “And that’s when they usually say, ‘Isn’t it great that Stephen Hawking’s there?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, it is.’ ”

What Perimeter’s theorists do is think, singly and in groups. Sometimes they scribble equations on the chalkboards to enlist colleagues and visitors in their attempts to solve some new or nagging riddle. Once I passed Fuchs’s office on my way to the third-floor pop machine. He was staring intently, slack-jawed, at the chalkboard that makes up one wall of his office. When I returned 20 minutes later he had not moved.

What they think about, from assorted conceptual angles that make up the subdisciplines of modern theoretical physics, are ways to refine, extend and, ideally, reconcile the two great early 20th-century advances in physics—general relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity refers to Albert Einstein’s realization that space and time are aspects of the same thing, as are matter and energy. Einstein described how massive bodies like stars warp the space-time around them, bending the fabric of existence in a way we experience as gravity.

Quantum mechanics is the product of research into the behaviour of the component parts of atoms by Einstein’s contemporaries—Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and others. What they found is so odd it still puzzles physicists. A particle can sometimes be in one place and, in a way, somewhere else at the same time. Observing a particle to find out where it is destroys any chance of knowing for sure where it’s going. Two particles can become “entangled” so that a change to one particle will be reflected in a change to the other, no matter how distant.

In nearly a century of investigation, researchers have made great use of these odd insights. Electronics depends on the quantum behaviour of electrons moving through semiconductors. The same phenomena drive lasers, DVD players, computers, electron microscopes. The Nobel-winning physicist Leon Lederman has said that quantum mechanics is responsible for one-third of U.S. GDP.

Why can’t our newest and best educated cardiac surgeons get jobs?

Sebastien Trop knew from his second year of medical school that he wanted to be a heart surgeon. A star student, he went through university and medical school on full scholarships, and landed a highly competitive residency spot at McGill University. The one thing he didn’t consider during his 12-hour marathons in the O.R., the 90-hour workweeks, the years of study, was that at the end of it all, he wouldn’t have a job. “It’s a lot to ask your spouse,” says Trop, who finished training to be a cardiac surgeon in 2007. “At the end of all this sacrifice to tell her: ‘You know what? I need to take every little job that comes my way because I don’t know if, in a couple of months time, I’ll have something to put bread on the table.’ ”

Trop has cobbled together a living out of a collection of part-time jobs at three Toronto hospitals. Like most newly trained cardiac surgeons in Canada, his resumé is stacked with additional qualifications; he has a Ph.D. in experimental medicine and immunology, and a specialty in critical care. He currently works as an ICU doctor, does lab research and clinical work, and assists on cardiac surgeries. A father of three, he knows he’s treading water at a huge financial cost. So far, Trop estimates he’s at “over half a million dollars in potential revenues lost from not being able to land the job I was trained for.”

His situation is far from unique. The hiring landscape for today’s new heart surgeons is dismal, with one in five failing to find full-time work. It’s a problem that may soon affect the public, as the current employment situation discourages today’s medical students from joining the profession. “It seems paradoxical but a lack of jobs for new surgeons today may lead to a shortage of heart surgeons in the future,” says Maral Ouzounian, a cardiac surgery resident at Dalhousie University and lead author of one of two groundbreaking papers due to be published this week in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. Until 2006, Canadian cardiac surgery residency programs—which require six years of training after medical school, usually followed by fellowships—were full. In 2009, 55 per cent of spots stayed empty. If that continues, Canada’s cardiac surgical workforce could be cut in half in 20 years.

Last year, Ouzounian and her collaborators surveyed new cardiac surgeons about their experiences finding work. “Traditionally, heart surgery was a very competitive specialty that attracted the cream of the crop. But the best and brightest med students won’t apply to train for 10 years with the possibility of no job at the end,” Ouzounian says.

So why are today’s job prospects so grim? Technology is partly to blame, as coronary artery stents have offered a less invasive alternative to bypass surgery. But analysis suggests this reduction will be more than offset by the impact of an aging population—we just haven’t seen it yet.

There is another factor, which proves a little touchier. In much of Canada, surgeons are paid on a “fee-for-service” basis, a system that actually creates a financial incentive not to hire. “If you are in a heart centre that does a thousand heart surgeries a year, and you have five people doing those surgeries, each person gets one fifth of the fees associated with those thousand cases,” explains Christopher Feindel, senior cardiac surgeon at Toronto General Hospital. “If you add two more surgeons, it’s the same fees coming in, but more surgeons, which means everyone gets less. There’s a certain disincentive to taking on new people.”

The fee-for-service structure worked well in the past when there weren’t enough surgeons to meet demand, notes Feindel, who was the principal investigator on both papers. “It’s a very efficient way to get people to work very hard when there’s a definite need.” But in a recessionary environment, in which older surgeons may be tempted to retire later and work more, the benefits are less obvious.