Canada’s NanoMedicines Innovation Network (NMIN) must have been excited over the COVID-19 vaccine news (Pfizer Nov. 9, 2020 news release) since it’s a Canadian company (Acuitas Therapeutics) that is providing the means of delivering the vaccine once it enters the body. Here’s the company’s president and CEO [chief executive officer], Dr. Thomas Madden explaining his company’s delivery system (from Acuitas’ news and events webpage), For anyone who might find a textual description about the vaccine…

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It’s a bit odd that the organizers for an event held in Canada would arrange to have Remembrance Day for the opening day and not make any acknowledgements. (For those not familiar with it, here’s more about Remembrance Day (Wikipedia entry) and there’s more here on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s [CBC] Remembrance Day 2020 webpage and on this Nov. 10, 2020 ‘Here’s everything you need to know about the poppy’ article for the Daily Hive.)…

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I imagine that most anyone who’s been in contact with Ms. Shoichet is experiencing a thrill on hearing this morning’s (November 10, 2020) news about winning Canada’s highest honour for science and engineering research. (Confession: she, very kindly, once gave me a brief interview for a posting on this blog, more about that later). Why Molly Shoichet won the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal Emily Chung’s Nov. 10, 2020 news item on the Canadian Broadcasting…

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I imagine that most anyone who’s been in contact with Ms. Shoichet is experiencing a thrill on hearing this morning’s (November 10, 2020) news about winning Canada’s highest honour for science and engineering research. (Confession: she, very kindly, once gave me a brief interview for a posting on this blog, more about that later). Why Molly Shoichet won the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal Emily Chung’s Nov. 10, 2020 news item on the Canadian Broadcasting…

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This looks like interesting work and I think the integration of visual images and embedded video in the news release (on the university website) is particularly well done. I won’t be including all the graphical information here as my focus is the text. A Sept. 10, 2020 City University of Hong Kong (CityU) press release (also on EurekAlert) announces a greener, more effective face mask, Face masks have become an important tool in fighting against…

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The same folks who bring us Ada Lovelace Day in October each year also produce a conference. (For anyone unfamiliar with Ada Lovelace, a 19th century mathematician and computer scientist, there are more details here in my Oct. 13, 2014 posting.) As for the conference, here’s more about the 2020 edition from the event page on the Finding Ada website, The Finding Ada Conference is a fully online global conference for women in STEM and…

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It looks like STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and design, and math) has undergone a change. At one point, it was simply; science, technology, engineering, art, and math. It’s not the only term that’s changed, the Vancouver (Canada) institution that was rebranded as Science World at Telus World of Science in 2005 (after they got money from Telus) has reverted to its original name Science World this year in 2020. Now the naming has been…

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The folks at the University of Alberta have created a course for learning critical thinking skills where science is concerned. An Oct. 24, 2020 article by Nicole Bergot for the Edmonton Journal describes the course, …“The purpose of this course is to teach people about the process of science and how it is used to acquire knowledge,” course host Claire Scavuzzo, researcher in the Department of Psychology, said in a release. “By the end of…

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Intelligence Squared (IQ2US) was featured here in a January 18, 2019 posting when the organization hosted a ‘de-extinction’ (or ‘resurrection’) biology debate. I was quite impressed with the quality of the arguments, pro and con (for and against) and the civility with which the participants conducted themselves. Fingers crossed their upcoming Nov. 6, 2020 debate proves as satisfying. It should be noted that Bloomberg TV is co-hosting this event with Intelligence Squared (IQ2US) and IBM…

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