Last week, the McGill Office of Science and Society hosted the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium, a lecture series that brings science to the public. Food: A Serving of Science featured four lectures on the science of diet and nutrition. The panelists explored topics ranging from fad diets to the[Read More…]
Science & Technology
The latest in science and technology.
McGill hockey lab has high impact on gear
Your professor could be testing the hockey gear that you bought this season. Researchers in the McGill Ice Hockey Research Group perform tests for some of the biggest companies on the market, and are involved in numerous projects involving the safety and efficiency of ice hockey equipment. One of the[Read More…]
Naturopathic medicine: health care boon or bane?
Last week, SUS hosted its annual Graduate and Professional Schools Fair. Some students were surprised to see the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine and the Ontario College of Homeopathic Medicine listed next to the McGill University Department of Human Genetics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.[Read More…]
This Week in Research
HIV Vaccine Researchers at the University of Western Ontario and Sumagen Canada are one step closer to creating a marketable HIV vaccine. Last week, Dr. Chil-Yong Kang successfully completed the first phase of human clinical trials. The vaccine SAV001-H, is a genetically modified, killed whole-virus vaccine. First, the virus is[Read More…]
The tentative link between autism and genius
Jacob Barnett is only 13, but he is set to become a paid atrophysics researcher at Indiana Unversity-Purdue University Indianapolis. He believes that he is close to disproving Einstein’s theory of relativity. Matthew Savage is now 20, but he was solving complex mathematical problems at the age of six, and[Read More…]
McGill lab uses novel technology to model human body
While most McGill students are likely more interested in finding free food than understanding the biological processes that allow them to digest it, researchers at McGill are using new technologies to examine digestion, and other important physiological processes. To determine exactly how the body digests without using human test subjects,[Read More…]
Open Access offers antidote to overpriced journals
To students leaving the academic world, the cost of information may come as a shock. Without access to the extensive collections of the McGill library, journal articles cost around 30 dollars per view. The library pays thousands of dollars per journal subscription. In 2011, McGill paid $12,224,900 for journals and[Read More…]
Researchers seek to unfog mysteries of hurricanes
Last week, Hurricane Sandy caused massive storms as far north as New England and Southern Ontario. Sandy’s aftermath is still making headlines across the East Coast. Like many hurricanes and storms, Sandy’s early development seemed erratic and unruly; sources from the American Global Forecast System and other organizations in North[Read More…]
This week in research
Flightless Birds Flightless birds are an evolutionary puzzle. The most befuddling aspect of these seemingly-related animals is their dispersion across far corners of the earth, because, well, they’re flightless. Two opposing ideas seek to explain the far-reaching origins of these birds. In one, Charles Darwin suggested that a common ancestor[Read More…]
Why leaves change colour during the fall
There is always a sense of child-like wonder that is evoked by staring at that vibrant, multi-coloured silver maple en route to work. Indeed, why trees change their colour during the fall is the kind of question a father might have to answer for his curious five-year-old daughter. Yet changing[Read More…]
