Alice Walker A recent report on the health of Canadians commissioned by the CBC highlights some unpleasant truths about the country’s perception of health and wellness. Among the key findings of the report was the revelation that while 77 per cent of those surveyed believe that they generally live a[Read More…]
Science & Technology
The latest in science and technology.
For ICU patients, private rooms help cut infection rates
Panoramio.com Being admitted to a private room in a hospital’s intensive care unit can dramatically decrease the likelihood of a patient contracting an infection, a recent McGill study suggests. About one in three patients admitted to hospital ICUs contract some sort of infection, which increases the length of the average[Read More…]
Music can be your aeroplane, study says
Those who experience euphoria when listening to their favourite music could be achieving the same pleasure as that which comes from good food, sex, or drugs, a McGill study has found. In a first in the field, neuroscience researchers at McGill have discovered a connection between the neurotransmitter dopamine, a[Read More…]
Evidence of climate change washing up on Arctic shores
wallpaperbase.com Science Outreach’s Cutting Edge Lectures welcomed the University of Alberta’s Professor Marianne Douglas to McGill’s Redpath Museum last Thursday to present her research on climatic warming in the Canadian High Arctic. Her recent research suggests that environmental warming is occurring at an alarming rate in certain arctic regions. [Read More…]
Drop the laptop!
The beginning of a new semester is typically similar to the beginning of semesters past. But this semester is particularly different for me, not only because it’s my last semester at McGill, but also because it’s the first semester at the beginning of which I have resolved to only take[Read More…]
7 gadgets to look for in 2011
1. Mitsubishi 92″ 3D HDTV Look for 3D televisions to start taking off in 2011. It may not be the biggest television to hit the market, (Mitsubishi is marketing a 155″ OLED TV), but it is one of the largest 3D TVs. While the TV is a rear-projector type television[Read More…]
Phishing for a steal during the holidays
In the month between Black Friday and Boxing Day, people everywhere deck the Internet with their credit card numbers. Maybe this year Amazon’s servers will finally crash, but it’s more likely that you, or one of your friends, will have their identity stolen as a result of a careless online[Read More…]
Poetic programming
What if you could talk to your computer and it actually did what you asked it to do? McGill’s Michael Wagner and Harvard’s Katherine McCurdy hope that their three-year study, published in Cognition magazine this November, will help you do just that. Poetry uses rhythm, syllable stressors, and speech[Read More…]
Suprising space savers
During exams, your apartment is probably going to end up looking like the site of a pipe bomb explosion. It also means you won’t have the time or money to make another trip to Ikea for assorted Scandinavian organizing junk. Instead, some ordinary household objects can be used to tidy[Read More…]
Alcohol worse than crack, says British study
Alcohol is worse than heroin, according to a recent study by the British Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs. The study, conducted by David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacology professor at the University of Bristol, along with Drs. Leslie King and Lawrence Phillips, ranks the harmful effects of alcohol and other addictive substances[Read More…]