There used to be a joke about the ‘immune theory of education’. From my observations, it is especially true among junior high students. The theory goes something like this: once a student has been taught something, they never have to hear about it again. Don’t mention mathematics in a science class. They already had that. They are somehow now immune from ever having to ‘take’ it again.…

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GENICE researcher Mawuli Afenyo has won a KLU Young Researcher Best Paper Award for his paper, A Method for Assessing the Socio-Economic Impacts of Oil Spills in the Arctic Area. Mawuli has been studying the behaviour of oil in ice and notice there is a lack of research into how adequately Canada is prepared to deal with an oil spill off our northern coastlines. There is more open ice for longer periods of time in…

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Antimicrobials are important in medical, veterinary, and agricultural settings to prevent and treat bacterial infections in humans, animals, and even crops. As with all organisms however, disease-causing bacteria evolve, and many have become resistant to the drugs we throw at them. The problem of antimicrobial resistant bacteria has become a serious threat to all of us and the Council of Canadian Academies created an independent Expert Panel on the Potential Socio-Economic Impacts of Antimicrobial Resistance…

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The University of Lethbridge’s Collegiate iGEM team set its sights on solving a problem that affects nearly nine per cent of the world’s population, and earned a gold medal for their efforts at the recently concluded International Genetically Engineered Machines World Jamboree in Boston, MA. The collegiate team, accompanied by the U of L’s High School iGEM entry that achieved a silver medal standing for its project, presented Algulin, which is the development of a…

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Sylviane Duval has been engaged with Canada’s Genome Centres for some time now through her work on knowledge transfer, science communication, and support in preparing grant applications. Her work has given her ample opportunity to see first-hand how science and research is communicated, how people react to those communications, and we make decisions and form opinions. She has taken that wealth of experience and distilled it into a one-day workshop which will be rolled out…

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(Guest post by Farah Qaiser , a graduate student at the University of Toronto, freelance science writer, and Subject Editor with Science Borealis.)                                                         Last week, the Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC) returned once again to Ottawa to explore the theme of building bridges between science, policy and society. In this blog post, I’ll highlight one of the sessions that particularly stood out to me, titled the 'Promise of Science and Its implications for Science…

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Researchers at the University of Lethbridge will delve further into the basic markers associated with the development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) thanks to two funding grants. Dr. Majid Mohajerani, principal investigator, and co-investigators, Drs. Robert Sutherland and Bryan Kolb from the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience (CCBN) at the University of Lethbridge, and Dr. David Westaway from the University of Alberta, will primarily use mouse models to understand the underlying biological processes associated with the…

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Ottawa, Ontario (November 12, 2019) On behalf of the Board of Directors of Genome Canada, Chair of the Board Dr. Elizabeth Douville announced today the appointment of Dr. Rob Annan as the organization’s new President and CEO, starting January 1, 2020. For 20 years, Genome Canada has worked to advance research that helps us understand the living world in unprecedented detail and in ways that support our health, our environment, and our economy. The organization…

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This is the fifth in my series of ‘genetics explainer’ videos on YouTube for students, parents and teachers. I have received feedback from teachers that these videos are of great use in a flipped-classroom instructional strategy. Mendelian genetics is a type of inheritance first described by Gregor Mendel in the 1860s and rediscovered in the early 20th century. Thomas Hunt Morgan and his student Alfred Sturtevant are credited with coming up with the idea to…

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If you think sustainability is overrated, try running a business without it. In fact, it’s a key objective for scientists striving to boost feed efficiency and reduce methane emissions in dairy cattle through the Efficient Dairy Genome Project. Ultimately, success for the project would mean production of dairy products via a more sustainable system, where science has bred for feed efficient animals; but to get there, consumers must buy in. Put another way: If we…

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