I’ve bookended information about the talk with physicist Katie Mack at Canada’s Perimeter Institute on May 6, 2020 with two items on visual art and mathematics and the sciences. Mathematical sculpting Robert Fathauer’s Three-Fold Hyperbolic Form exhibits negative curvature, a concept in geometry and topology that describes a surface curving in two directions at every point. Hemp crochet by Marla Peterson. Image courtesy of Robert Fathauer. [downloaded from https://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/6643.full] You’ll find this image and a…

Continue reading

Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf’s February 21, 2020 article (Technology and innovation: How the Fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting the charitable sector) for Charity Village has an ebullient approach to adoption of new and emerging technologies in the charitable sector (Note: A link has been removed), …Almost daily, new technologies are being developed to help innovate the way people give or the way organizations offer opportunities to advance their causes. There is no going back.The charitable sector –…

Continue reading

This research from McGill University (Montréal, Canada) focuses on enzymes and their possible utility as nanomachines for producing drugs. (For the uninitiated, nano means billionth, which, in turn, means these enzymes are measured at the nanoscale.) An April 30, 2020 McGill University news release (also on EurekAlert) describes the work, Many of the drugs and medicines that we rely on today are natural products taken from microbes like bacteria and fungi. Within these microbes, the…

Continue reading

I wanted something completely different today and found it in a May 2, 2020 article, by Lucie Laumonier for University Affairs, about a multimedia app featuring the Canterbury Tales narrated in middle English, Four historians from Canada and England have launched the General Prologue app, the first app featuring an audio performance of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in its original 14th-century English.“Here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury,” says the expressive voice…

Continue reading

I missed a few science journalists (part 1 of this series, under the Science Communication subhead; Mainstream Media, sub subhead) as the folks at the Science Media Centre of Canada (SMCC) noted on Twitter, Science Media Centre @SMCCanada Apr 16 Replying to @frogheartThanks for the mention. But I think poor @katecallen at the Toronto Star would be dismayed to read that @IvanSemeniuk is the only science reporter on a Canadian newspaper. And @row1960 Bob Weber…

Continue reading

At long last, the end is in sight! This last part is mostly a collection of items that don’t fit elsewhere or could have fit elsewhere but that particular part was already overstuffed. Podcasting science for the people March 2009 was the birth date for a podcast, then called Skeptically Speaking and now known as Science for the People (Wikipedia entry). Here’s more from the Science for the People About webpage, Science for the People…

Continue reading

I was hoping this would be the concluding part of this series but there was much more than I dreamed. (I know that’s repetitive but I’m truly gobsmacked.) Citizen science Astronomy and bird watching (ornithology) are probably the only two scientific endeavours that have consistently engaged nonexperts/amateurs/citizen scientists right from the earliest days through the 21st century. Medical research, physics, chemistry, and others have, until recently and despite their origins in ‘amateur’ (or citizen) science,…

Continue reading

Part 1 covered some of the more formal aspects science culture in Canada, such as science communication education programmes, mainstream media, children’s science magazines, music, etc. Part 2 covered science festivals, art/sci or sciart (depending on who’s talking, informal science get togethers such ‘Cafe Sccientifque’, etc. This became a much bigger enterprise than I anticipated and so part 3 is stuffed with the do-it-yourself (DIY) biology movement in Canada, individual art/sci or lit/sci projects, a…

Continue reading

As noted in part 1, I’ve taken a very broad approach to this survey of science culture in Canada over the last 10 years. It isn’t exhaustive but part 1 covers science communication, science media (mainstream and others such as blogging) and arts as exemplified by music and dance. Now it’s time for part 2 and the visual arts, festivals, science slams, and more.. Art/Sci or Art/Science or SciArt—take your pick In 2005 my heart…

Continue reading

Originally, the plan was to produce some sort of a Canadian science culture roundup for 2019 but it came to my attention that 2019 was also an end-of-decade year (sometimes I miss the obvious). I’ll do my best to make this snappy but it is a review (more or less) of the last 10 years (roughly) and with regard to science culture in Canada, I’m giving the term a wide interpretation while avoiding (for the…

Continue reading