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Latest News
Heads Up Jan 16: Illusory birds, dung beetle dance, and reward chemicals
Kids these days PNAS A study in rats found that adult and adolescent brains process a reward differently. Both age... Read more
Heads Up January 10:
Northern Gateway Hearings Hearings began today on the Northern Gateway pipeline, proposed to run from Northern Alberta to the BC coast.... Read more
Heads Up Jan 4: Robot tails, delicate sabre teeth and nanocircuits
New insight from Antarctic thermal vents PLoS Biology Expeditions to little-explored hydrothermal vents on the seafloor near Antarctica have revealed... Read more
Concussion Backgrounder Dec 20
This is part of the Science in a Nutshell series produced by the SMCC. It offers a simple explanation of the science of concussions. Download a .pdf of the backgrounder here. Concussion BackgrounderWhat is a concussion? A concussion... Read more
Backgrounder: The Higgs Boson
What is it?The Higgs boson is a hypothesized elementary particle that, if confirmed, would provide the mechanism by which the other elementary particles in the universe have mass.Elementary particles are the smallest fundamental... Read more
Event Alert: Higgs Boson Announcement at CERN
On Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. ET / 5:00 a.m. PT, CERN will announce results from two separate experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS experiment, which involves a number... Read more
Heads Up November 29: Photoshop, HIV antibodies and worms in space
⚑ Puppet punishment Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences In an experimental study of babies, using puppets to demonstrate helpful versus antisocial acts, research led by the University of... Read more
Read What the Pros Read - Ten Key Papers - SMCC Heads Up
The Durban Reading List As the 17th Conference of Parties on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change gathers in Durban, South Africa, the fate of... Read more
Heads Up November 22: butterflies, fishhooks and more
Autopsy alternative? The Lancet Autopsies are invasive and many people object to them. A study compares imaging techniques for their ability to determine cause of death, and found that CT... Read more
Experts Comments Nov.18: IPCC Report on Extreme Weather Events
Extreme weather has severe consequences. It transforms landscapes, damages infrastructure, and results in human injury and loss of life. How is climate change influencing extreme weather?The Intergovernmental... Read more
Heads Up November 1 - Vikings, scary stress, gecko robots, and more
The end of the speculum? Lancet A study shows that a do-it-yourself cervical smear test is effective in detecting precancerous cells, although it had a high false positive rate. The... Read more
Webinar October 18: The 'Jenkins Report'
On October 18, the SMCC held an online briefing with Tom Jenkins. Mr. Jenkins, in addition to being the Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at OpenText Corporation, was also the... Read more
Heads Up November 9 - Sustainable fish, musical shares, shale trails and more
BIOLOGY & EARTH SCIENCE ⚑ Catchy fish food BioScience Canadian researchers say that some of the same conservation tactics used for marine fish and shellfish - like labelling and... Read more
Heads Up November 15: New tricks, old moths, and catapulting frogs
⚑ Not immune to surveillance Canadian Medical Association Journal Seroepidemiology - surveillance that provides estimates of population-level immunity against vaccine-preventable diseases -- is important for evaluating the impact and effectiveness... Read more
Heads Up October 25 - rainwater, flu shots and more
Mechanical stress PNAS A study in rats found that healing is disrupted in bone fractures if force is applied to the wound right away - but if stress is applied... Read more
Heads Up October 21 - bad news and bandwidth
Honeycreeper heritage Current Biology Researchers have used DNA evidence to work out the family tree for Hawaiian honeycreepers, one of the most endangered and diverse bird families in the world.... Read more
Heads Up October 19
Mastodon ribs, tracking oiled seabirds, tricking cancer cells, and more... All together now: endangered sea turtles Journal of Animal Ecology Studying their genetic... Read more
Heads Up October 14
Tracking typhoid Open Biology Health workers modeled a typhoid outbreak by locating patients’ houses on Google Earth and combining that information with a blood sample allowing... Read more
Heads Up October 12
Hope for HIV British Medical Journal The life expectancy for someone with HIV was fifteen years longer in 2008 than it was in 1996, researchers say.... Read more
Heads Up October 7
Is preeclampsia linked to immune system conflict? Reproductive Sciences Yale researchers say that preeclampsia, a disease in pregnancy, could be explained by how trophoblasts (cells in... Read more
SMCC Annual Report
Check out our annual report for 2010, covering everything from our opening in September 2010 to the end of our fiscal year in June of 2011. SMCC Annual Report - English... Read more
Experts Comment Oct 3: Nobel Prize in Medicine
The 2011 Nobel Prize winners are being announced this week, and today’s prize for Medicine included Canadian Dr. Ralph Steinman, who tragically passed away last Friday. Although Nobel Prizes are... Read more
Heads Up September 26
⚑ A step towards quantum computing Physical Review Letters An international team of researchers including Michel Pioro-Ladrière at the Université de Sherbrooke have developed a semiconductor... Read more
Heads Up September 24
⚑ Budworm blues as Earth warms Canadian Journal of Forest Research (published by NRC press) Researchers show in a study published today how climate change means... Read more
Heads Up September 20
⚑ Gonorrhea gains multi-drug resistance CMAJ Gonorrhea is quickly becoming resistant to multiple antibiotics, an editorial in CMAJ states. ⚑ Prions and ALS... Read more
Heads Up September 16
Cancer in the developing world The Lancet A paper in the Lancet counts breast and cervical cancer cases worldwide for the last thirty years,... Read more
Heads Up September 12
Sperm, made to order? Nature Communications Following up recent research where sperm stem cells are made to form sperm in vivo in mice, a team of... Read more
Experts Comment September 12 - explosion at Marcoule
On Monday, September 12, there was an explosion at a nuclear facility at Marcoule, in France. Authorities were quick to say that the explosion was not at a reactor and... Read more
Experts Comment August 31 - Viral Therapy for Cancer
Canadian researchers have completed the first clinical trial where viral therapy is delivered to cancer patients intravenously, and the virus selectively replicates only within tumour cells. The trial... Read more
Experts Comment September 9 - BC Earthquake
An earthquake of magnitude 6.4 occurred at 12:41 p.m. PT off the west coast of Vancouver Island today. Michael Bostock Professor, Earthquake Seismology, University of British... Read more
Heads Up September 6
HIV Misunderstandings ⚑ American Journal of Public Health A University of Toronto study says better communication is needed around HIV drug trials to reduce misunderstandings and... Read more
Experts Comment August 25 - Lancet Series on Obesity
Today, medical journal The Lancet is publishing a series of four papers on the worldwide rise of obesity. This series examines some of the underlying causes of obesity,... Read more
Experts Comment August 15 - Sulfur from Fukushima
(En anglais seulement) The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has published a paper today on radioactive sulphur detected in California, from the Fukushima nuclear plant.... Read more
Heads Up August 30
Blood vessels Nature Medicine Stanford researchers have developed a way to use adhesives rather than sutures to reattach severed blood vessels. ⚑... Read more
Heads Up August 22
Cheers PNAS Researchers have identified a strain of yeast they believe travelled to Europe from the Americas during the 1500s and hybridized with saccharomyces... Read more
Heads Up August 9
⚑ Fanged frogs McMaster university researcher Ben Evans has led a team that discovered nine new species of fanged frog in Indonesia. ... Read more
SMCC Heads Up August 16
Fukushima sulfur detected in California PNAS Researchers at the University of California - San Diego have detected elevated levels of radioactive sulfur in California following efforts... Read more
Job Posting - Media Officer (Vancouver)
(En anglais seulement) Science Media Centre of Canada (SMCC) Position: Media Officer Term: 1 year contract with the potential for ongoing work Please submit application... Read more
Heads Up August 5 - right whales, bats and more
⚑ Fraud for ghostwriters? PLoS Medicine University of Toronto law professors Simon Stern and Trudo Lemmens argue that academic ghostwriters of industry-sponsored articles in journals and... Read more
Heads Up July 27 - yellowstone, elephants, and more
OBESITY Imaging emotional eating Journal of Clinical Investigation Researchers have imaged changes in the brain that further show the relationship between emotional state and... Read more
