The program is open to international students and there are both paid and unpaid internships but it would seem most are unpaid. Still, they do offer some exciting work as can be seen on the the Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program (STIP) intern application page, The Science and Technology Innovation Program welcomes applicants for academic calendar internships. STIP focuses on understanding bottom-up, public innovation; top-down, policy innovation; and, on supporting responsible and equitable…

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I received (via email) this Café Scientifique July 15, 2018 notice , Our next café will happen on TUESDAY, JULY 31ST at 7:30PM in the back room at YAGGER’S DOWNTOWN (433 W Pender). Our speaker for the evening will be DR. NIENKE VAN HOUTEN from THE FACULTY OF HEALTH SCIENCES AT SFU. Her topic will be: TEST TUBES TO TEACHING: HOW ANTI-VAXXERS AND A GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS SHAPED MY CAREER Part research talk, and part memoir,…

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A March 20, 2018 news item on phys.org describes a new approach to treating wastewater (Note: Links have been removed), Humans have known since ancient times that silver kills or stops the growth of many microorganisms. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, is said to have used silver preparations for treating ulcers and healing wounds. Until the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, colloidal silver (tiny particles suspended in a liquid) was a mainstay for treating…

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It’s easy to become blasé about ‘futuristic’ developments but every once in a while something comes along that shocks you out of your complacency as this March 8, 2018 news item did for me, A revolutionary, cutting-edge technology, developed by researchers at Bar-Ilan University’s Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA), has the potential to provide a new alternative to eyeglasses, contact lenses, and laser correction for refractive errors. The technology, known as Nano-Drops, was…

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I have two bits of genetic engineering news. Eggplants in Bangladesh I always marvel at their beauty, Bt eggplant is the first genetically engineered food crop to be successfully introduced in South Asia. The crop is helping some of the world’s poorest farmers feed their families and communities while reducing the use of pesticides. Photo by Cornell Alliance for Science. A July 17, 2018 news item on phys.org describes a genetic engineering application, Ansar Ali…

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Setting the stage Not unexpectedly, CRISPR-Cas9  or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-CRISPR-associated protein 9 can be dangerous as these scientists note in a July 16, 2018 news item on phys.org, Scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute have discovered that CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing can cause greater genetic damage in cells than was previously thought. These results create safety implications for gene therapies using CRISPR/Cas9 in the future as the unexpected damage could lead to dangerous…

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Photo: The Aurora Named STEVE Couresty: NASA Goddard That stunning image is one of a series, many of which were taken by amateur photographers as noted in a March 14, 2018 US National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA)/Goddard Space Flight Center news release (also on EurekAlert) by Kasha Patel about how STEVE was discovered, Notanee Bourassa knew that what he was seeing in the night sky was not normal. Bourassa, an IT technician in Regina,…

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Italian researchers are hoping that graphene flakes will be instrumental in the development of spintronics according to a March 14, 2018 news item on phys.org, Graphene nanoflakes are promising for possible applications in the field of nanoelectronics, and the subject of a study recently published in Nano Letters. These hexagonal nanostructures exhibit quantum effects for modulating current flow. Thanks to their intrinsic magnetic properties, they could also represent a significant step forward in the field…

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Also known as human-on-a-chip, the 10-organ body-on-a-chip was being discussed at the 9th World Congress on Alternatives to Animal Testing in the Life Sciences in 2014 in Prague, Czech Republic (see this July 1, 2015 posting for more). At the time, scientists were predicting success at achieving their goal of 10 organs on-a-chip in 2017 (the best at the time was four organs). Only a few months past that deadline, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of…

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This story comes from Rice University (Texas, US). From a March 12, 2018 news item on Nanowerk, Rice University engineers have zeroed in on the optimal architecture for storing hydrogen in “white graphene” nanomaterials — a design like a Lilliputian skyscraper with “floors” of boron nitride sitting one atop another and held precisely 5.2 angstroms apart by boron nitride pillars. Caption Thousands of hours of calculations on Rice University’s two fastest supercomputers found that the…

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