Writing competition runner up: Phlebotomy to improve surgical outcomes and donor blood economy – a redemption story

Writing competition runner up: Phlebotomy to improve surgical outcomes and donor blood economy – a redemption story Transfusion Tuesday, May 21, 2019 Lily Park For thousands of years, traditional medicine placed blind trust in phlebotomy, which involves the withdrawal of blood from a patient for therapeutic purposes.1 Considering the paradigm of medical knowledge at the time established by Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine himself, there was some plausibility to this practice: if illness was caused…

Dinosaurs in the Frost

May 21, 2019 21mediair Biology and Life Sciences, Environmental and Earth Sciences, General Science

Dinosaur paleontology is full of apparent contradictions. One of the biggest of these is not only the very presence, but abundance, of these reptiles in and around Polar Regions. For animals long thought to have had metabolisms and bodies ill-suited for bearing the cold of prehistoric winters, the fact that a wide variety of dinosaur types are present in high latitudes has been making paleontologists question what they know about dinosaur biology and the Mesozoic…

Love, and its complexity, in a butterfly’s name

May 21, 2019 Stephen Heard Biology and Life Sciences, General Science

Images: The red admiral butterfly, Vanessa atalanta; © Kristian Peters, CC BY-SA 3.0. Portrait, “Vanessa”, 1868, by John Everett Millais, collection of Sudley House, Liverpool; public domain. Last week I shipped off the final revision of my forthcoming book, The Strangest Tribute: How Scientific Names Celebrate Adventurers, Heroes, and Even a Few Scoundrels.* You know […]

Kids donate their birthday money to the Nature Conservancy of Canada

May 21, 2019 Nature Conservancy of Canada staff Biology and Life Sciences, Environmental and Earth Sciences

On April 27, my two sons, Finn and Bodhi, had a "toonie party" to celebrate their joint birthday. In lieu of gifts, my husband and I asked their friends and other family members to bring each of them a toonie to save or spend on something special and another toonie for the boys to donate to a charity of their choice: the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC).

Natural legacy: Nature comes full circle at Quebec’s pointe Saint-Pierre

May 20, 2019 Nature Conservancy of Canada staff Biology and Life Sciences, Environmental and Earth Sciences

Standing on the shores of the Gaspé Peninsula, there is a certain serenity that washes over you like waves.Here at the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s (NCC’s) pointe Saint-Pierre (Point St. Peter) property, you can completely immerse yourself in a 360-degree nature experience.

Companion Animal Psychology News May 2019

May 19, 2019May 19, 2019 Zazie Todd Biology and Life Sciences, Health, Medicine and Veterinary Science

Insect-detecting dogs, the challenges of science with cats, and spider's brains...Some of my favourites this month“Three very good dogs – named Bayar, Judd and Sasha – have sniffed out the endangered Alpine Stonefly, one of the smallest animals a dog has been trained to successfully detect in its natural habitat.” Sit! Seek! Fly! Scientists train dogs to sniff out endangered insects by Dr. Julia Mynott.“The cats performed as well as the dogs. But, foreshadowing a…

Pre-emptive thoughts on Pride Month 2019 & a look ahead

May 19, 2019 Alex Bond Biology and Life Sciences

June is Pride Month, and for the first time since 2012, I will be away in the field, this time on the remote Henderson Island in the South Pacific Ocean with no email/phone. To be honest I’m quite looking forward to it. But it does mean that I’ll be largely absent for Pride Month this year, which is a bit sad because I see it as an important time, to celebrate successes and renew battles…

STEMinism Sunday: Maud Leonora Menten

May 19, 2019 L. E. Carmichael Biology and Life Sciences, Communication, Education and Outreach, General Science

Welcome to STEMinism Sunday! As a former woman in science, I have a deep and enduring interest in the experiences and representation of women in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). This series will be an opportunity for me – and you – to get to know some of these intellectual badasses. Have you ever heard of Maud Leonora Menten? I hadn’t, until last week, when I read this fascinating post about her life…

Space-time maps & tracking colony size with OpenCV in Python

May 18, 2019 Theory, Evolution, and Games Group bloggers Biology and Life Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics, Technology and Engineering

One of the things that the Department of Integrated Mathematical Oncology at the Moffitt Cancer Center is doing very well, is creating an atmosphere that combines mathematics and experiment in cancer. Fellow TheEGG blogger, Robert Vander Velde is one of the new generation of cancer researchers who are combining mathematics and experiment. Since I left Tampa, I’ve had less opportunity to keep up with the work at the IMO, but occasionally I catch up on…

Le rendez-vous annuel des nerds des chauves-souris

May 17, 2019 Le Beagle - CSBQ Biology and Life Sciences, Communication, Education and Outreach, Environmental and Earth Sciences

par Virginie Lemieux-LabontéLe prix excellence CSBQ m’a permis de participer à la 47ième édition du symposium de la North America Society for Bat Research (NASBR), rassemblant la communauté de spécialiste des chauves-souris d’Amérique du Nord à Knoxville au Tennessee (États-Unis). C’est devant ce public avisé que j’ai présenté par affiche une étude sur la communauté de microorganismes de la peau de la grande chauves-souris brune (Eptesicus fuscus) exposée au syndrome du museau blanc (SMB). Cette maladie…

Biology and Life Sciences