University secures Saskatchewan funding for nuclear research

(Image: University of Regina)Three nuclear research projects at the University of Regina have been awarded funding totalling CAD580,000 (USD424,000) by Innovation Saskatchewan through the Innovation and Science Fund (ISF).ISF matches federal innovation funding dollars for projects from Saskatchewan universities, colleges and research institutes to promote research excellence and competitiveness in the province. Innovation Saskatchewan has provided more than CAD18 million in ISF funding for innovative projects at Saskatchewan institutions since 2018.The University of Regina (U of R) projects receiving the latest funding are in nuclear energy, subatomic physics and high-performance computing in nuclear science.The first project - receiving CAD200,000 - will study ways of preventing rust and damage in materials used to protect fuel in small modular reactors (SMRs) and provide advanced training opportunities in SMRs technology.The second - receiving CAD83,109 - will be used to upgrade simulation laboratory equipment for studying nuclear matter under extreme conditions.The third project - receiving CAD300,000 - will be used to help construct and test components of the Heavy Gas Cherenkov (HGC) detector, a critical piece of the Solenoidal Large Intensity Device (SoLID), one of the world's most powerful microscopes.Innovation Saskatchewan...

Read More........→July 22, 2024

How global warming is reshaping winter life in Canada

H. Damon Matthews, Concordia University and Mitchell Dickau, Concordia University As we begin to emerge out of yet another mild winter, Canadians are once again being reminded of just how acutely global warming has changed Canada’s winter climate. The impacts of this mild winter were felt across the country and touched all aspects of winter culture. From melting ice castles at Québec’s winter carnival, to a dismal lack of snow at many Western Canada ski resorts, seemingly no part of Canada was unaffected. But the change that will likely be felt most keenly by many Canadians is the loss of a reliable outdoor skating season. For the second year running, Ottawa’s Rideau Canal Skateway was closed for what should be the peak of the skating season. In 2022-2023, the Skateway did not open at all for the first time ever. This winter, a portion of the Skateway opened briefly in January, but continuing mild temperatures forced a closure again after only four days of skating. In Montréal, fewer than 40 per cent of the city’s outdoor rinks were open in the middle of February. There is no obvious upside to this story. Outdoor skating in Canada is fast becoming the latest casualty of our failure to confront the reality of the climate crisis. On thin ice More than a decade ago, our research group published our first analysis of how...

Read More........→March 28, 2024

Polar bears may struggle to produce milk for their cubs as climate change melts sea ice

During their time onshore, polar bear mothers may risk their survival by continuing to nurse when food is not available. (Shutterstock) Louise Archer, University of TorontoWhen sea ice melts, polar bears must move onto land for several months without access to food. This fasting period is challenging for all bears, but particularly for polar bear mothers who are nursing cubs. Our research, published in Marine Ecology Progress Series, found that polar bear lactation is negatively affected by increased time spent on land when sea ice melts. Impaired lactation has likely played a role in the recent decline of several polar bear populations. This research also indicates how polar bear families might be impacted in the future by continued sea-ice loss caused by climate warming. Challenges of rearing cubs While sea ice might appear as a vast and perhaps vacant ecosystem, the frozen Arctic waters provide an essential platform for polar bears to hunt energy-rich seals — the bread and butter of their diet. Sea ice is a dynamic environment that can vary through time and in different regions of the Arctic. Polar bears in Canada’s western Hudson Bay area experience seasonal sea ice, which melts in the warmer summer months, forcing the polar bears to move onto land until cooler winter temperatures cause the sea ice to refreeze. On...

Read More........→October 09, 2023

More than one-third of kids with COVID-19 show no symptoms, says study

DEC 01, 2020 TORONTO: More than one-third of kids infected with the novel coronavirus are asymptomatic, according to a study which confirms that children diagnosed with COVID-19 may represent just a fraction of those infected. The research, published in the journal CMAJ, analysed results for 2,463 children in Alberta, Canada, who were tested during the first wave of the pandemic -- March to September -- for COVID-19 infection. "The concern from a public health perspective is that there is probably a lot of COVID-19 circulating in the community that people don't even realise," said Finlay McAlister, a co-author of the study from the University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry in Canada. "When we see reports of 1,200 new cases per day in the province of Alberta, that's likely just the tip of the iceberg -- there are likely many people who don't know they have the disease and are potentially spreading it," he said. Of the 2,463 children, 1,987 had a positive test result for COVID-19 and 476 had a negative result, and of those who tested positive, 714 -- about 36 per cent --reported being asymptomatic. Due to the asymptomatic nature of the disease in up to one-third of children, McAlister said closing schools for a longer period over Christmas was the right decision. "As far as we know, kids are less likely to spread disease...

Read More........→December 02, 2020

Canada reports first rare strain of swine flu in human

Canadian health authorities on Wednesday reported the country’s first case of a human infected with the H1N2 virus, a rare strain of swine flu.Accroding to a statement given by the country’s local health officials, the case was detected in the western province of Alberta in mid-October. The patient was isolated and “there is no increased risk to Albertans at this time,” the statement said.“This is the only influenza case reported in Alberta so far this flu season,” the statement read.It added that the unnamed patient experienced mild influenza-like symptoms “was tested and then quickly recovered. So, there is no evidence at this time that the virus has spread further.”Canadian health officials are looking into where the virus came from and to verify so that it does not spread.Since 2005, only 27 cases worldwide have been reported of people infected with the H1N2 — not to be confused with the more common H1N1 swine flu virus. There have been no cases in Canada prior to this one.The H1N2 strain is not a food-related illness and it is not transmissible to humans by eating pork or other pig products, officials said.“This a rare type of flu in humans, typically acquired from exposure to infected pigs and not known to spread easily from human to human,” Theresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada, wrote on Twitter.Source:...

Read More........→November 21, 2020

World's first fully electric plane takes to air for almost 15 minutes

The world's first fully electric commercial aircraft took its inaugural test flight on Tuesday, taking off from the Canadian city of Vancouver and offering hope that airlines may one day free themselves from polluting fossil fuels and end their polluting emissions. The first flight of the fully electric commercial aircraft took place on Tuesday around Vancouver, Canada. The whole flight lasted just 15 minutes. The plane was a 62-year-old, six-passenger seaplane that had been retrofitted with an electric motor. It was designed by Australian engineering firm MagniX and tested in partnership with Harbour Air, the world’s largest seaplane airline.  Harbour Air says it plans to electrify its entire fleet by 2022, depending on whether it can secure the necessary safety and regulatory approvals. The aircraft can only fly about 100 miles (160 kilometers) for now, but that’s sufficient for the sort of short-hop journeys the airline needs. However, Harbour Air will have to wait at least two years before it can begin electrifying its fleet of more than 40 seaplanes. The e-plane needs to be tested further to confirm it is reliable and safe. In addition, the electric motor must be approved and certified by regulators. Harbour Air ferries half a million passengers a year between Vancouver, Whistler ski resort and nearby islands and...

Read More........→July 07, 2020

Quantum Computing With Time Travel

Credit: Adapted from npj Quantum Information, doi:10.1038/npjqi.2015.7 (2015) Why send a message back in time, but lock it so that no one can ever read the contents? Because it may be the key to solving currently intractable problems. That's the claim of an international collaboration who have just published a paper in npj Quantum Information. It turns out that an unopened message can be exceedingly useful. This is true if the experimenter entangles the message with some other system in the laboratory before sending it. Entanglement, a strange effect only possible in the realm of quantum physics, creates correlations between the time-travelling message and the laboratory system. These correlations can fuel a quantum computation. If the universe allows 'open timelike curves', particles travelling back in time along them could help to perform currently intractable computations. Even though such curves don't allow for interaction with anything in the past, researchers writing in npj Quantum Information show there is a gain in computational power as long as the time-travelling particle is entangled with one kept in the present. Around ten years ago researcher Dave Bacon, now at Google, showed that a time-travelling quantum computer could quickly solve a group of problems, known as NP-complete, which mathematicians have lumped...

Read More........→December 11, 2015

‘Death Stars’ In Orion Blast Planets Before They Form

Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF; B. Saxton The Orion Nebula is home to hundreds of young stars and even younger protostars known as proplyds. Many of these nascent systems will go on to develop planets, while others will have their planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the fierce ultraviolet radiation emitted by massive O-type stars that lurk nearby. This artist's concept shows two proplyds, or protostars, around a massive O-type star. The nearer proplyd is having its planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the radiation from the star. The farther proplyd is able to retain its planet-making potential. A team of astronomers from Canada and the United States has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the often deadly relationship between highly luminous O-type stars and nearby protostars in the Orion Nebula. Their data reveal that protostars within 0.1 light-years (about 600 billion miles) of an O-type star are doomed to have their cocoons of dust and gas stripped away in just a few millions years, much faster than planets are able to form. "O-type stars, which are really monsters compared to our Sun, emit tremendous amounts of ultraviolet radiation and this can play havoc during the development of young planetary systems," remarked Rita Mann, an astronomer with the National Research Council...

Read More........→March 16, 2014

The Council Of Giants And Earth's Place In The Universe

Credit: Marshall McCall / York University We live in a galaxy known as the Milky Way – a vast conglomeration of 300 billion stars, planets whizzing around them, and clouds of gas and dust floating in between. Though it has long been known that the Milky Way and its orbiting companion Andromeda are the dominant members of a small group of galaxies, the Local Group, which is about 3 million light years across, much less was known about our immediate neighbourhood in the universe. An animation that illustrates the positions of the nearby galaxies, including those in the "Council of Giants, " in three dimensions.  Now, a new paper by York University Physics & Astronomy Professor Marshall McCall, published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, maps out bright galaxies within 35-million light years of the Earth, offering up an expanded picture of what lies beyond our doorstep. "All bright galaxies within 20 million light years, including us, are organized in a 'Local Sheet' 34-million light years across and only 1.5-million light years thick," says McCall. "The Milky Way and Andromeda are encircled by twelve large galaxies arranged in a ring about 24-million light years across – this 'Council of Giants' stands in gravitational judgment of the Local Group by restricting its range of influence."...

Read More........→March 13, 2014

Water Found On Extrasolar Planet, Jupiter-Sized Alien World Has Atmosphere With Water Vapor

A team of international scientists including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist has made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-size like planet beyond our solar system. The finding provides astrophysicists with additional insight into how planets are formed. Artist's rendering of the planetary system HR 8799 at an early stage in its evolution, showing the planet HR 8799c, a disk of gas and dust, and interior planets.  "This is the sharpest spectrum ever obtained of an extrasolar planet," said co-author Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "This shows the power of directly imaging a planetary system -- the exquisite resolution afforded by these new observations has allowed us to really begin to probe planet formation."  According to lead author Quinn Konopacky, an astronomer with the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto and a former LLNL postdoc: "We have been able to observe this planet in unprecedented detail because of Keck Obervatory's advanced instrumentation, our ground-breaking observing and data processing techniques, and because of the nature of the planetary system." The paper appears online March 14 in Science Express and in the March 21 edition of the journal, Science.  The...

Read More........→November 15, 2013

Could turning on a gene prevent diabetes?

Type 2 diabetes accounts for 90 % of cases of diabetes around the world, afflicting 2.5 million Canadians and costing over 15 billion dollars a year in Canada. It is a severe health condition which makes body cells incapable of taking up and using sugar. Dr. Alexey Pshezhetsky of the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center, affiliated with the University of Montreal, has discovered that the resistance to insulin seen in type 2 diabetics is caused partly by the lack of a protein that has not previously been associated with diabetes. This breakthrough could potentially help to prevent diabetes. "We discovered that Neu1, a protein nicknamed after "neuraminidase 1", turns the absorption of sugar "on" or "off" in body cells, by regulating the amount of sialic acid on the surface of cells", Dr. Pshezhetsky explains. "We are now trying to find a way to restore Neu1 levels and function in diabetes. If we can remove sialic acid residues from the cell surface, this will force the insulin receptor do its job of absorbing blood sugar properly. This could give doctors an opportunity to reduce the use of insulin therapy, and might help to reduce the diabetes epidemic, says Dr. Pshezhetsky. The results of his study done on cells and mice were published this month in the journal Diabetes. Dr Pshezhetsky and his team are now testing...

Read More........→July 22, 2013

Global warming – an impeding catastrophe or a new stage of evolution?

.. Scientists have discovered that in the last 30 years, there has been an increase in the number and size of different plant species in the Arctic tundra. Besides, a bigger area is now covered with plants. The conclusion made by the scientists is that the summers in the Arctic are becoming warmer. Moreover, the process is interdependent – the warming of the climate encourages the growth of plants, which, in turn, encourages changes in a number of natural processes, which cause the Earth’s climate to become warmer. This research was conducted by an international group of scientists, headed by Sarah Elmendorf from the University of British Columbia, based in Vancouver, Canada. The scientists studied the data supplied by 50 research stations, situated in various areas of the Arctic. In all these areas, the picture was virtually the same – dwarf shrub and the grass become taller and spread over increasingly greater areas in Alaska, on Spitsbergen, in Iceland, Greenland, in Canada’s arctic zone and in Scandinavia. The increased plants growth is caused, of course, by global warming. The ice which stayed frozen for many years, if not centuries, is now melting, and, after a while, plants will appear in its place. Scientists even believe that leaf-losing plants, which are more heat-loving that the ‘traditional’ dwarf trees growing...

Read More........→March 13, 2013

Does Probability Come From Quantum Physics?

Credit: Wikipedia Ever since Austrian scientist Erwin Schrodinger put his  unfortunate  cat  in  a  box, his  fellow physicists have been using something called quantum theory to explain and understand the nature of waves and particles. Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other. But a new paper by physics professor Andreas Albrecht and graduate student Dan Phillips at the University of California, Davis, makes the case that these quantum fluctuations actually are responsible for the probability of all actions, with far-reaching implications for theories of the universe. Quantum theory is a branch of theoretical physics that strives to understand and predict the properties and behavior of atoms and particles. Without it, we would not be able to build transistors...

Read More........→February 07, 2013

Nemesis Star: How The Planets Would Be Affected By Binary System

Credit; Wikipedia A binary star is a star system consisting of two stars orbiting around their common center of mass. Binary stars are often detected optically, in which case they are called visual binaries. Many visual binaries have long orbital periods of several centuries or millennia and therefore have orbits which are uncertain or poorly known An international team of astrophysicists has shown that planetary systems with very distant binary stars are particularly susceptible to violent disruptions, more so than if they had stellar companions with tighter orbits around them. Unlike the Sun, many stars are members of binary star systems – where two stars orbit one another – and these stars' planetary systems can be altered by the gravity of their companion stars. The orbits of very distant or wide stellar companions often become very eccentric – ie. less circular – over time, driving the once-distant star into a plunging orbit that passes very close to the planets once per orbital period. The gravity of this close-passing companion can then wreak havoc on planetary systems, triggering planetary scatterings and even ejections. A simulated example of a binary star, where two bodies with similar mass orbit around a common barycenter in elliptic orbits This movie shows two simulations of planetary system...

Read More........→January 09, 2013

Virtual Women Reveal More Skin, Regardless Of Body Proportions

Credit: Second Life Unrelated to traditional measures of physical attractiveness, female avatars in Second Life expose more skin In the virtual world of Second Life, female avatars expose substantially more skin than males, independent of their virtual body proportions, according to research published December 26 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Matthieu Guitton and colleagues from Laval University, Canada. The human tendency to cover up stems from climatic, environmental, physical and cultural constraints, so measuring people's propensity to reveal skin can be difficult in the real world. To study human behavior free of at least some of these constraints, the researchers analyzed how male and female avatars in the virtual, 3- dimensional world of Second Life dressed. Second Life offers users options to choose the gender, appearance and attire of their virtual avatars, and users can select clothing from several items created in this virtual world, rather than being restricted to a predefined costume. They found that out of over 400 virtual people studied, 71% of male avatars covered between 75-100% of their skin, while only 5% of females did. In contrast, 47% of the virtual females they studied covered between 25-49% of their skin, compared to 9% of males. The amount of skin covered was independent of...

Read More........→December 30, 2012

Chasing Ice: new film dramatically documents shrinking glaciers

Chasing Ice is a new documentary that chronicles the struggles of photographer James Balog as he set out to complete the Extreme Ice Survey. The survey was designed to monitor the movement of glaciers existing today under the threat of climate changes, in particular the increase in temperatures that are resulting in glaciers melting at phenomenal rates. Filming glaciers and other ice formations in Alaska and Montana in the U.S.; Greenland, Iceland and the Alps in Europe; Canada and even Bolivia, Balog used a variety of cameras to  conduct time lapse photography, usually taking one picture per hour all through the daylight hours. When placed in sequence the work of many months and even years could be seen in a few seconds and the results were startling. With warming air, ground, and water temperatures, ice formations are being attacked from all angles. While glaciers have experienced back and forth ebbs and flow, nothing in the historical record  compares to the rapid disappearance that they are experiencing today. What might seem gradual, even imperceptible, to most people is happening in the blink of an eye in geological terms. And Balog's work captures it most dramatically. While the underlying message of Chasing Ice is the destructive power of climate change as seen in the ice formations, the...

Read More........→December 09, 2012

Diet quality key to survival of whales, dolphins: study

The survival of whales and dolphins depends on the quality of their diet and this plays an important role in conservation, according to a new study. The study, published in the online journal PLOS ONE, was conducted by researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada and University of La Rochelle (ULR) in France. "The conventional wisdom is that marine mammals can eat anything," said co-author Andrew Trites, a marine mammal expert at UBC. "However, we found that some species of whales and dolphins require calorie rich diet to survive while others are built to live off low quality prey." The researchers compared the diet of 11 species of whales, dolphins and porpoises in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean, and found differences in the qualities of prey consumed that could not be explained by the different body sizes of the predators. The key to understanding the differences in their diet was to look at their muscle performance, as high energy prey tend to be more mobile, and require their predators to spend more energy to catch them, according to the researchers. The researchers believe the findings will help better assess the impact of resource changes to marine mammals. "Species with high energy needs are more sensitive to depletion of their primary prey," said Jerome Spitz, first...

Read More........→December 08, 2012

Are 'Yetis' migrating North?

As it seems, a very hot Siberian summer has made the Kuzbass Yetis, which are often referred to as Abominable Snowmen, to migrate to Mountain Shoria (Gornaya Shoriya) in Southern Siberia. The Yetis have appeared more than once in the upper reaches of the Mras-Su River that runs in the Mountain Shoria in the southern part of the Kemerovo Region, north of the Azas Cave, which journalists call the “home of the Yetis”. To believe this or not people decide for themselves. The fishermen of the taiga Village of Toz said that they had seen 2 Yetis drinking water on the bank of the Mras-Su River. They did not answer our greeting, one of the eye-witnesses, Vitaly Vershinin, said. Hominologists believe that the heat might have served as a reson for the migration of the Yetis north of the Azas Cave that was considered to be their home. The Director of the International Centre of Hominology in Moscow Igor Burtsev has been studying the Yetis for nearly half a century now. He has been cooperating with thousands of volunteer researchers all over the world: as you know, there is an opinion that there is no such science as hominologyin the world today. The Yetis live everywhere but most of them live in Mountain Shoria, Igor Burtsev says. "We have come to the conclusion that a Yeti is actually a human being since it can talk...

Read More........→November 16, 2012

Genetic markers hope for new brain tumor treatments

Researchers at The University of Nottingham have identified three sets of genetic markers that could potentially pave the way for new diagnostic tools for a deadly type of brain tumour that mainly targets children. The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Lancet Oncology, was led by Professor Richard Grundy at the University's Children's Brain Tumour Research Centre and Dr Suzanne Miller, a post doctoral research fellow in the Centre. It focuses on a rare and aggressive cancer called Central Nervous System primitive neuro-ectodermal brain tumours. Patients with CNS PNET have a very poor prognosis and current treatments, including high dose chemotherapy and cranio-spinal radiotherapy are relatively unsuccessful and have severe lifelong side-effects. This is particularly the case in very young children. Despite the need for new and more effective treatments, little research has been done to examine the underlying causes of CNS PNET, partly due to their rarity. The Nottingham study aimed to identify molecular markers as a first step to improving the treatments and therapies available to fight the cancer. The Nottingham team collaborated with researchers at the Hospital for Sick Kids in Toronto, Canada, to perform an International study collecting 142 CNS PNET samples from 20 institutions in nine...

Read More........→November 14, 2012

Magic finger points the way to universal interfaces

Scientists at Autodesk Research of the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto are developing a “Magic Finger” that allows any surface to detect touch input by shifting the touch technology from the surface to the wearer’s finger. Magic finger pairs a standard high speed sensor for movement tracking,much like that found in an optical mouse, with a high resolution camera able to detect 32 surface textures with 98% accuracy. Check out this demo video from Autodesk. Source: InAVat...

Read More........→October 30, 2012