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Web Features
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| Don’t Touch That Coffee | Night-shift workers and students pulling all-nighters take note: looking for that extra caffeine fix to get you through the night will strongly hurt your ability to recuperate the next day. |
| MAD Lab Investigates Tree Rings | Dendrochronology, or tree ring analysis, allows NSERC grantee Dr. Colin Laroque and his team at Mount Allison University to travel back in time. |
| Under the Mistletoe | This Christmas, as you lean in to kiss under the mistletoe, take a minute to think about the fate of the plant that has inspired so many lip-locks. |
| Ice Wine |
During the holidays, you may well decide to toast the New Year with a glass of champagne or drink some wine with your turkey, but how about sipping some ice wine with your fruitcake? |
| Santa Claus May Have a New Tool to Plan His Christmas Route | Imagine a screen that shows the globe, as seen from space. With the touch of a button you can zoom in, watching continents flash by and cities slowly materialize. Move near the surface, and suddenly you’re skimming over mountains and hovering just above the ground, seeing the terrain in exquisite detail. |
| New Security Feature for Personal Documents | Dr. Eugenia Kumacheva has found a new and inexpensive way to stop counterfeiting. |
| Globetrotting Pollutants Turn Up on Toronto Street | Researchers at the University of Toronto have detected migratory pollutants from a forest fire in Quebec and even particles from a sandstorm in the Sahara in Toronto air, findings that could someday give regulatory agencies an idea of who is contributing to the pollutants found in urban air. |
| Fall Detection System Gets Help to Seniors Faster | A push-button system worn on a bracelet or around the neck is currently the best way a senior citizen can call an operator for help if they fall or get sick. Unfortunately, if the patient is unconscious or forgets to wear the system, help may not come fast enough. |
| Reducing Background Noise | A busy office with simultaneous conversations, phones ringing and printers humming can wreak havoc with voice recognition software. |
| Secret Squirrel Language Documented for the First Time | Richardson’s ground squirrels, otherwise known in the Prairies simply as gophers, use an ultrasonic sound to warn others of impending danger. |
| Fighting Fungi With Fungi | Canadian research is helping turn the tables on fungal crop pests. |
| Canadian Researcher’s Findings Help Identify New Geological Period | It’s been over 120 years since a new geological period was named. |
| Canadian Researcher’s Findings Help Identify New Geological Period | It’s been over 120 years since a new geological period was named. |
| Testing for Cow Doping | It’s not just Olympic officials who have to worry about illegal performance enhancement. Now judges at cattle shows are on the lookout for cow doping. |
| Quantum Computing – Bringing the Dream Closer to Reality | A Canadian physicist has gained national and international attention for helping pave the way to the creation of the world's first quantum computer, and doing the work while a graduate student. |
| Fly the (Environmentally) Friendly Skies | Research into hybrid cars, fuel cells, and wind or solar energy sources are all underway to help reduce harm to the environment. NSERC researcher Dr. David Zingg hopes that when we take to the skies in the future that airplanes will also be environmentally safer. |
| Self-Cleaning Windows | Dirty, streaky windows may soon be a thing of the past if Dr. Alidad Amirfazli’s research catches on. The NSERC-funded University of Alberta engineer is designing so-called “superhydrophobic” surfaces that force water to bead up and run off instead of spreading out. |
| Meteor Flipped Earth’s Crust Inside-out | About 1.8 billion years ago a huge meteorite crashed into what is now Sudbury, Ontario. The impact was so violent that it flipped parts of the earth’s crust inside out, spewing melted rock and a scattering of precious metals from deep inside the ground around the top of the impact site, according to research by a University of Toronto professor. |
| Shedding Light on Metamaterials | Dr. George Eleftheriades' Web site contains a quote from the Greek philosopher Plato, which, roughly paraphrased, says that great ideas come from hard work and are born "as light that is kindled by a leaping spark." |
| Earth-shaking Discovery | A Simon Fraser University researcher has come up with an earth-shaking theory about where seismic activity is likely to pop up on the West Coast. |
| Bringing Smartness to Drugs Through Inhalers | Spraying drugs into your mouth doesn’t sound very appealing. Until you discover the work of Dr. Warren Finlay. |
| An Atlas for the Web | Just try using a search engine to find a picture of yourself on the Web. You’ll be surprised at all of the results you’ll get. |
| The Magic of Flow | As a young boy growing up in Strasbourg, France, the son of a working-class Moroccan family, Mosto Bousmina was enraptured by magic. He knew that he was watching an illusion, but he revelled in the arrival of the seemingly impossible. |
| Accelerated Climate Change? | Permafrost melting in northern Canada may be adding to the greenhouse gas problem responsible for climate change. |
| Evolution Through Eating | The notion that large-scale evolutionary change occurs through gradual adaptations is part of biology's bread and butter. Animals and plants don't suddenly alter fundamental characteristics from one generation to the next. There aren't big genetic jumps. Certainly not burps. Or are there? |
| SARAH – The Next Canadian in Space | She’s only twice the size of your hand, but SARAH aims to be in space by 2008. |
| The Science Behind the Sixth Sense | Ever walk into a room and have a feeling that something has changed, but you can't quite put your finger on what's different? |
| Canadian Researchers Form International Collaboration to Win Prestigious Award | Two NSERC researchers have teamed with a French colleague to win the prestigious Young Investigators Award from the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP). |
| The Master of Antimatter | First, use a particle accelerator to produce hundreds of thousands of antiprotons careening at near the speed of light. Add equal numbers of antielectrons from the radioactive decay of sodium-22. Slow all down to a relative standstill by cooling them to four degrees Kelvin (or -269oC) – just a smidgen above absolute zero. Apply electric and magnetic fields to hold these antimatter building blocks in place in a particle trap. |
| A Pesticide’s Journey Around the World | It took 20 years for the pesticide alpha-Hexachlorocyclohexane (alpha-HCH) to migrate from Asia to Newfoundland. It stayed there because of the weather. |
| What Was That You Said? | Ventilation systems, computers, overhead projectors, and even fluorescent lights are creating a racket in the classroom. Add student activity and outside noises such as traffic and now you have a learning barrier. |
| Reach Out and Touch the World! | Run your hand quickly over a new $5 bill and you will feel a patch with a raised texture. |
| Revealing the Secrets of the Web | You wouldn’t want to spill your coffee on a seatbelt made of spider silk. It would immediately supercontract. |
| One of These Things Is Not Like the Other | “For most people, it's easy to recognize a range of faces, even under various lighting conditions and from different views. But when those faces are turned upside-down, we experience problems,” says NSERC grantee Dr. Allison Sekuler. |
| A Master’s Student Meets eIF4E and Nature Calls | When NSERC PGS Abba Malina heard he would be published in Nature, he was ecstatic. “It’s always nice to be in a big name journal. And now I’m working hard to live up to that,” says the second-year McGill master’s student. |
| Mathematics and Cardiology Meet to Create Beautiful Rhythms | “Cardiac arrhythmias have interesting mathematical properties,” says NSERC researcher Dr. Leon Glass, who is an expert at applying models from the field of mathematics known as nonlinear dynamics to irregular patterns. |
| Ultrafast Photography | Faster than a speeding bullet? Big deal, says theoretical physicist Dr. Thomas Brabec. That kind of speed doesn't even register on his notion of fast. Brabec is in the vanguard of a brand of physics that promises the unimaginable: an atomic-level camera that uses ultrafast pulses of light to produce freeze-action images of nuclear and electron processes. |
| The Mathematics of the Universe | In the recent PBS TV special The Elegant Universe, renowned Princeton University physicist Edward Witten is asked to explain his M-theory, which posits an 11-dimension Universe. |
| Millions of dollars in Research Flows Through Western ‘Irrefutable Truth of the Quality of Their Work’ | Cynthia Dunning is a biomechanical, biomedical engineer and assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario. She is one of many recipients of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) funding. Over the past few years she has been using her funding money to develop better joint replacements. |
| Canada’s Number One Chemist to the Arts | As a young girl growing up in Ottawa, Alison Murray was fascinated by visits to the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the National Gallery of Canada. “I loved art history and archaeology, but I became more and more interested in science in high school.” |
| Every Archaeologist Should Have One! | …to which Dr. Eduard Reinhardt’s response is a heartfelt groan: “Oh no, not more work.” |
| Quantum Dots Light the Way | Three researchers from diverse fields have joined forces to develop a next-generation “microscope” for better understanding the important roles that proteins play in diseases such as cancer. |
| Safety, Science and “Buildings With Feelings” | If Dr. Ian Smith had been working with the three little pigs, chances are the pig in the wooden house wouldn't have ended up as pork chops. And Dr. Smith, who's building Canada's first experimental “feeling” building wired with force-sensing devices, has a message for today's builders to keep the allegorical wolf away: add science to the art of building construction. |
| Civil Engineer and Applied Mathematician Receives the Max Planck Research Prize | Dr. Patrick Selvadurai, Professor of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics at McGill University, received The Max Planck Research Award in Engineering Sciences for 2003. Dr. Selvadurai is the first faculty member at McGill University to receive the Award and the first Canadian engineer and theoretical mechanicist to receive the Max Planck Award. |
| This Bird Is No Airhead: Scientist | Parrots are renowned for their smarts, and now research shows they also have brains to crow about. In fact, relative to body weight these colourful birds have brain sizes that are on par with chimpanzees and orangutans. |
| WAZZUP? | A team of York University scientists is giving new meaning to the question, “What's up?” They mean it, literally. And, using a unique, Canadian virtual reality facility, they've shown that when it comes to our perception of up from down, we can't always trust our eyes. |
| Genetic Boost Sends Insects Packing – and Maybe Controversy Too | A team of University of Guelph and Brock University scientists have shown that genetically boosting a plant's natural defences can be a formidable weapon against pests. |
| Extreme Life as a Geological Force | The search for traces of ancient life in Martian meteorites is getting a major boost from Canadian geologists studying hot springs. |
| The Snowball That Never Was | It's a very cool idea that for years has sent shivers through the scientific community. But according to a group of Canadian geologists the popular Snowball Earth hypothesis deserves the deep freeze itself. |
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