On Sept. 30, HackMcGill hosted its second Learn to Code event at the Lorne Trottier Building. Created for McGill students unfamiliar with the programming world, Learn to Code offers newcomers help from those with experience. Following a brief introduction about the types of programming languages and a list of the[Read More…]
Science & Technology
The latest in science and technology.
This week in space
Throughout history, blood moons have been associated with bad omens. In Chinese tradition, a blood moon foreshadowed famine or disease. Mesopotamians believed that a lunar eclipse resulted from attacks by demons. But on Sept. 27, from 10:11 p.m. to 10:37 p.m., when the moon turned red, there were no famines[Read More…]
Bioinformatics is changing the experimental process
Every iPhone has a processor that is roughly 10 times faster than the Apollo Guidance Computer, used during the first moon landing. The IBM 7090, considered the fastest supercomputer in the 60s, would fail to keep up with today’s smartest watches. Computational power has grown exponentially over the years, but[Read More…]
Vaccines, GMOs, and cell phones: The Lorne Trottier Symposium discusses modern controversies
Known for his ventures in communicating science to the general public, Director of the Office for Science and Society (OSS), Joe Schwarcz moderated the 10th annual Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium this past Monday and Tuesday at Centre Mont Royal. Every year, the symposium brings together like-minded individuals to discuss[Read More…]
Notman House hosts Masters of Code hackathon
“Develop the greatest digitally connected application [or] solution that will profoundly alter your connected life.” This was the problem presented at the MasterCard Masters of Code hackathon this weekend. Stretching from Saturday to Sunday afternoon, the challenge attracted roughly 100 developers, designers, and tech enthusiasts to Notman House, Montreal’s hub[Read More…]
Twentieth edition of Soup and Science educates and entertains
For an entire week, five to six McGill professors took the stage in Redpath Museum for the 20th edition of Soup and Science. The professors, who were experts in fields varying from physics to geography, offered brief, three to five minute presentations on their work. Created by the Office of[Read More…]
Volkswagen cheats its way on to the roads
Volkswagen came under fire by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week following allegations of cheating and deceit. In a statement released on Sept. 18, the EPA stated that the German automobile company misled environmental regulators about its car emissions. Special software, colloquially known as the defeat devices, reported[Read More…]
Drug price hike causes global outrage
Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, was harshly criticized last week after raising the cost of one of the company’s drugs, Daraprim, from $13.40 USD to $750 USD—an increase of 5,000 per cent. Manufactured exclusively by Turing, this price hike has reignited the debate on the ethics of charging patients for[Read More…]
Ten-billion-year-old galaxy cluster discovered
This week, NASA announced the discovery of a galaxy cluster found billions of light years from Earth. The finding, published in The Astrophysical Journal, identified a unique property of the cluster, named SpARCS1049+56. It hosts what physicists call a wet merger, which is a unique type of galactic[Read More…]
Understanding the world of hiero-gifics
As platforms like Short Message Service (SMS), Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp grow in popularity, the amount of time people spend interacting face-to-face decreases. To make up for this, tech enthusiasts and artists have teamed up to develop novel ways to convey emotion over text. Ranging from the humble smiley to[Read More…]
