The global disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic served as a wake-up call to the world’s lack of resilience and infrastructure to guard communities from viral pathogens. This, in turn, has driven a global focus on viral pathogenesis, fostering collaboration and innovation. It also triggered a landmark coordination effort in[Read More…]
Science & Technology
The latest in science and technology.
The effects of tobacco and cannabis use during pregnancy
Around 70 per cent of people who use cannabis have been found to use nicotine and tobacco products (NTP) as well. This trend is similarly observed among pregnant people. While both NTP and cannabis use during pregnancy have individually been shown to negatively impact pregnancy outcomes—such as preterm birth for[Read More…]
How dominant genomic narratives reinforce colonial narratives
The ‘Vanishing Indian’ myth—the idea that Indigenous populations are destined to disappear— has long been used to excuse and enact the physical and cultural genocide of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas. This rhetoric remains prevalent in modern genomics, often supporting the treatment of modern Indigenous Peoples not as autonomous communities,[Read More…]
How aspects of body image may predict self-injury in university students
Content warning: Self-injury Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) remains an urgent and often overlooked mental health concern, and one that demands greater attention from universities worldwide. As many as 44 per cent of those who engage in NSSI in adolescence continue to do so when they start university, and eight per cent[Read More…]
The cooling power of wetlands: Climate benefits in Canada’s prairies
Amid rising global temperatures and intensifying heatwaves, wetlands are among Earth’s essential natural defences. However, Canada’s Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) ecosystems are under threat from decades of drainage and agricultural expansion that have turned much of the landscape into cropland. This shift reduces their capacity to store carbon and regulate[Read More…]
The cost of silence: How occupational therapy institutions have failed Palestinians
In the face of the Palestinian genocide, Canadian occupational therapy institutions have largely remained silent. This institutional silence has deeply affected many practitioners, who must navigate both ethical responsibilities and moral obligations. To challenge this lack of a clear institutional stance, Hiba Zafran, assistant professor in McGill’s School of Physical[Read More…]
Sex-specific autonomic signatures of tonic pain
The subjective experience of pain varies drastically between people, but subjective measures of pain correlation provide an important understanding of its underlying mechanisms. Emerging literature on pain points to a relationship between muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA)—a measure of how active the sympathetic nervous system is while signalling blood vessels[Read More…]
Trust your gut: How your gut microbiota uses the foods you eat to prevent disease
Hidden deep within the human digestive tract lies a dynamic and complex population: The gut microbiota, a community of over 100 trillion microbial cells that influence the body far beyond digestion. Consisting of bacteria, viruses, eukaryotes, and archaea, a diverse microbiota has been shown to have many beneficial health effects,[Read More…]
There are not plenty more fish in the river: A story on endangered Quebec fish
Copper redhorses, a kind of freshwater fish, are the only vertebrates found exclusively in Quebec. However, their population is declining. Recent evidence suggests that the ‘recruitment’—a measure similar to birth rate—has dropped in the past few years. Hugo Marchand, a postdoctoral researcher in Jessica Head’s ecotoxicology laboratory at McGill’s Department[Read More…]
Can Canada uplift AI innovation while keeping Canadians’ data safe?
Canadians helped pioneer the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Researchers like Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto and Yoshua Bengio of Université de Montréal, known as the ‘godfathers of AI,’ laid the groundwork for technologies now reshaping economies and geopolitics. Yet as AI and the race for data become[Read More…]
