For anybody who has invested a great deal of time into a research project, you probably feel a certain sense of expertise on the topic. Sure, it is impossible to know a whole field (every answer raises more questions), and lab work is rife with puzzlement and failures, but at the end of the day, you probably still know a lot more about your subject than the general populace. As an MD-PhD student working on…

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3D printing is a topic we’ve covered before at Signals. It’s still hot and trendy, and still making the cut on top technology lists. Back in 2012, Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, predicted that 3D printing “will be bigger than the web.” Given that good 3D printers are now cheap enough (US$150) to be affordable for home use and that everyone from shoe companies to airplane engineers to the space station are using…

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Baseball pitching motion. Wikipedia With the Toronto Blue Jays* off to a terrible start, I was almost dissuaded from reading anything about baseball, until I happened upon the following article: “Stem-cell therapy is poised to disrupt the Tommy John epidemic in baseball.” First, I had to do my standard “fake news” check by triangulating the sources, readings, etc., but after a few minutes, it was clearly apparent that this was a legitimate thing…. Really? Yep.…

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If you are a knowledge worker, it may seem as though “innovation” is on everyone’s lips these days. First, Canadians saw Industry Canada renamed Innovation, Science and Economic Development when Prime Minister Trudeau unveiled his first cabinet. Then, Budget 2017, titled “building a strong middle class” could have had “the innovation budget” as its working title. (If you compare it to Budget 2016, you’ll see words like “growth, building and strengthening” have been mostly replaced…

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Earlier this year, the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) published its Annual Report, chock full of impressive numbers about enrolment, new programs and research published by its esteemed faculty. (If you’re curious, you can read it for yourself.) In response, I summarized the regenerative medicine research here. But I only covered half the story. Some IBBME faculty are focusing on enabling technologies – such as tools, methods, devices and innovative…

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Remember back in 2013 when Tourism Australia launched the “Best jobs in the world” global youth campaign? Well, the Waag Society in Amsterdam may just have the “coolest science summer job” around! (Yes, Waag Society, you can quote me on this.) The Waag Society, an “institute for art, science and technology,” needs a science bus captain to drive their science bus across Europe. This is their pitch: We’re looking for enthusiastic, hands-on workshop leaders with…

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The month of March is a time for celebrating women around the world. As a science enthusiast, I have been so inspired by the women I see succeeding in the research field. Since I started writing for this blog, I have had the chance to write about and interview female researchers such as Jin Hyung Lee of Stanford University, and Milica Radisic and Molly Shoichet of Univerisity of Toronto (U of T). I recently had…

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via GIPHY Artificial Intelligence (AI) already permeates our culture and that’s only going to increase with time and advances to the technology. Some think this is good news, progress and inevitable while others, like Stephen Hawking for example, fear where AI could take us. AI is on my mind this week with the announcement that the new Vector Institute, focused exclusively on AI, is opening in Toronto, Canada. It is heavily funded by government and…

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Creative Commons license to reproduce Research and development (R&D) of a medical therapeutic is a long slog. This isn’t news to anyone working in the field. The average time to bring a new drug product to market is over a decade. Moreover, this is the timeline when everything progresses well – funding and business decisions align, manufacturing processes come together, and regulatory submissions don’t face any substantial setbacks. For less established cell and gene therapies…

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StemCellTalks Toronto, March 10, 2017 The eighth annual Toronto StemCellTalks (SCT) symposium took place on March 10, 2017, in Toronto’s urban innovation hub (and CCRM’s new home), MaRS Discovery District. SCT is a national stem cell biology outreach program for high school students in partnership with Let’s Talk Science and the Stem Cell Network. (CCRM is also a proud national sponsor of this annual event.) This year’s theme was Immune Cells and Cancer; however, for…

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