Canadian Space Shuttle Experiments

Posted:January 17, 2003

Two Canadian experiments are flying aboard space shuttle mission STS-107: the OSTEO-2 bone loss experiment conducted by Toronto scientists Leticia G. Rao, Tim Murray and others; and an experiment by teams in Quebec, Ontario and Saskatchewan on growing protein crystals that could help fight cancer and diabetes.

Canadian Research Revises Meteor Science

Posted:December 2, 2002

Earth's upper atmosphere is hit once a year by objects that release energy equivalent to a five kiloton bomb, a Canadian meteor physicist, Peter Brown, of the University of Western Ontario claimed in a recent Nature article. Brown bases his findings on data from US Department of Defense satellites scanning the Earth for evidence of nuclear explosions.

Canada Creates Large Virtual Supercomputer

Posted:November 2, 2002

A team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta have developed CISS (Canadian Internetworked Scientific Supercomputer), the software and social infrastructure for a Canada-wide metacomputer. CISS open source software will go nationwide November 4, 2002 to attack a chemistry problem involving the energies of chirality or "right or left handedness" of molecules. This problem which would normally take 3 - 6 years of computing time should complete in one day on CISS. While software is a major component, Paul Lu, a CISS researcher says, "Much more time and arm-twisting has been spent to convince people to include their systems in CISS. We accept, and are trying to work with, human nature. Technologists ignore human factors at their own peril."

Canada's Space Telescope

Posted:August 2, 2002

UBC astronomer Jaymie Matthews says Canada's first space telescope contains "the most accurate light meter in the world." The telescope should be able to "see" into distant stars and to detect the light from possible planets orbiting them. The telescope was extremely cheap to build, costing 300 times less than the Hubble telescope. It will be launched in April 2003 atop a Russian rocket. Matthews hopes the Canadian telescope will confirm or disprove the existence of other planets which so far can only be inferred from the wobble of some stars.

Canadian offers natural solution to spruce budworm problem

Posted:May 12, 2002

Carleton University researcher Dr. J. David Miller believes that a family of

needle-loving fungi holds the key to stopping the 10 to 15 year cycle of destruction wreaked by the spruce budworm, Choristoneura fumiferana, on Canadian and American forests. Miller discovered that older, natural (not-replanted) forests harbour a "good" anti-budworm toxin-producing fungus. He has found a way to safely innoculate seedlings with it.

Canada\'s Sharing Attitude Attracts Top Scientists

Posted:April 10, 2002

Leading neurologist David Colman will move himself and his research team of 15 researchers from New York to Montreal where he will become the director of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill. Colman's stated major reason for the move: "In the States, the individual scientist is stressed, and that creates a system where everyone grabs, and no one is encouraged to share. In Canada, there is a lot more collaboration and sharing."

Canada Underinvests in Science

Posted:March 12, 2002

A study by Save British Science claims that, of the G7 nation governments, only Canada and Italy invest less in research and development per capita than the UK. Canada invests only 0.21% of its Gross Domestic Product in research. The report also claims Canadian businesses spend US$358 per worker on research and development compared to Americans who spend US$1065 per worker.

Canadian Scientists Go Faster Than the Speed of Light

Posted:February 2, 2002

Physicists, Alain Haché and Louis Poirier, at the University of Moncton, using what they call a "coaxial photonic crystal" have managed to send electromagnetic pulses a significant distance at three times the speed of light. The remarkable project breaks no laws of physics. In essence, they use cavitation at the tail of the pulse to drive the front wave forward. The result could exert a profound influence on information networking systems. PhysicsWeb has the story.

Canadians begin catalogue of human proteome

Posted:January 11, 2002

Now that scientists have worked out the human genome, the next task is to figure out the human proteome, the total set of proteins the genome encodes. Researchers at the University of Toronto are using supercomputers to do it. In this week's Nature, working with colleagues in Heidelberg, Germany, Canadian geneticists led by Mike Tyers and Michael Moran use a supercomputer to unravel the highly complex interaction of the thousands of proteins coded in the genome of yeast. Their key finding: each protein is involved in numerous interactions and therefore new designer drugs targeted to specific proteins could have serious side effects. Visit Tyer's Lab website to get an idea of the complexity involved.

Canadian Scientists Question National Security ID Schemes

Posted:December 11, 2001

Canadian computer scientists Andrew Clement (U of T) and Felix Stalder (Queens) claim on a website sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility that none of the recently proposed national identification schemes spawned by the events of Sept 11 clearly state which problem they try to solve and how exactly they would contribute to reducing the danger of terrorism. The scientists point out that such ID systems do endanger our civil liberties. Even more, by relying on the wrong approach to security, the new measures may actually create a false sense of security that leaves us more vulnerable than before.

Vancouver bio tech firm to supply US military

Posted:December 4, 2001

A Canadian biotechnology firm is working with the U.S. Army to develop a nasal spray vaccine that would protect against plague.

ID Biomedical will help ward off the threat of "Black Death" as a bioterrorist weapon.

The Vancouver company's proteosome vaccine technology causes protective immune responses at the mucosal surfaces lining the respiratory tract, including the nose, throat and lungs.

Parasite genome stripped to bare essentials

Posted:November 23, 2001

"This is an exciting time for parasitology," says Patrick J. Keeling of the University of British Columbia, in a News and Views article in this week's Nature magazine refering to the discovery by French researchers that the parasitic microsporidion Encephalitozoon cuniculi has a genome less than 0.1% the size of the human genome and is even smaller than the genomes of many bacteria. Its genes have little ‘junk’ DNA between them. This has nearly erased the genomic record of the organism's evolutionary history, making it difficult to determine how it originated. According to Keeling, other emerging genome sequences will "usher in an age of comparative parasite genomics." If E. cuniculi is an indication, he concludes, "many ‘rules’ are about to be broken." Visit Keeling's lab.

Male garter snakes mimic females to get warm

Posted:November 15, 2001

Australian scientists studying Canadian garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis) suggest in this week's Nature magazine that slow and sleepy male garter snakes might mimic females to fool other males into warming them up. These 'she-males' produce female pheromones at the end of hibernation, causing them to become engulfed in large 'mating balls' of amorous males — sometimes containing more than 100 snakes.

Canadian scientist explains source of ocean colour

Posted:November 4, 2001

"The single most important independent factor responsible for the colour of

the open ocean is free-floating, microscopic phytoplankton," says Shubha

Sathyendranath, an expert in underwater optics at Dalhousie University. Sathyendranath is the first person to use satellites to map diatom distribution in the North Atlantic.

Science Teachers Association of Ontario Conference

Posted:September 9, 2001

The creator of this website, Barry Shell, spoke at the STAO Conference : A Science Odyssey Nov 1-3, 2001. The talk focused on the functions, features, and production of science.ca with free open-source Unix software and low cost computer hardware.

Canadians Solve Missing Neutrino Mystery

Posted:July 19, 2001

The 30-year-old "Missing Solar Neutrino Mystery" has been solved in

Canada. The first, long-awaited, scientific results from the Sudbury

Neutrino Observatory were released in early July 2001. These results offered

the first direct and definitive proof that electron-neutrinos produced in

the sun's core undergo transformations into muon- and tau-neutrinos en

route to the earth. See the details at www.sno.phy.queensu.ca.

Global Change Conference

Posted:July 10, 2001

The Global Change Open Science Conference is being held in Amsterdam

July (10-13) just prior to the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol (COP6)

meeting in Bonn. This novel conference will present the latest global

change research and spell out the major challenges that are facing humanity.

For more information, see the International Geospere and Biosphere Programme.

Women at the Frontier of Excellence

Posted:April 7, 2001

The late great Nobel laureate Michael Smith donated much of his prize winnings to promote Canadian Women in Science. The Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology used the money to produce Women at the Frontier of Excellence. 8AM - 6PM, April 7, 2001.