On September 28th between 9 am and 4 pm, join McGill鈥檚 Office of Science Outreach, STEMM Diversity @ McGill, the Trottier Space Institute and McGill Physics Outreach, for free science activities for families. Activities will be held both indoors and outdoors at the downtown campus and are intended for children ages 6 and up.
Registration is required for some activities.
For more details and the full schedule, visit this link.
Imagine being middle aged and starting to feel that you are off balance a lot and that you are having a hard time coordinating your movements. Those are among the symptoms of Spinocerebellar ataxia type 6, known as SCA6, a rare neurodegenerative disease which typically appears in adulthood and worsens over time. Over time, other problems such as slurred speech and difficulty seeing or seeing double, may also appear. It is estimated that fewer than 5,000 people in the US have the condition, which is the result of genetic mutations in the cerebellum.
Forty-five undergraduate students at McGill participated in new Climate Crisis and Climate Actions course
The COVID-19 pandemic slowed down almost everything. For聽Diane Dechief, PhD, and聽Marcy Slapcoff聽of the Office of Science Education (OSE), the two leads of the new Faculty of Science course聽FSCI198: Climate Crisis and Climate Actions, there was a positive aspect to the delays.
The 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference of the Parties (COP15) was held in Montreal on December 7-19, 2022. The conference鈥檚 outcome agreement, known as 鈥�30脳30鈥� means the protection of 30 per cent of land and oceans by 2030.
How much wetland we should protect or restore is not a simple question, such that conservation targets are often set according to political agendas, then standardized globally. However, given their key regulating hydrological functions, wetlands represent nature-based solutions to the anticipated, exacerbating effect of climate change on drought and flood events, which will vary at the regional scale.聽
As Montreal prepares to host UN Biodiversity Conference, McGill professor Andrew Gonzalez discusses how cities can help protect nature and human health.
Global urban populations are projected to increase to nearly five billion by 2030. This ever-expanding urbanization threatens our world鈥檚 plant and animal biodiversity and degrades ecosystems through the loss of habitat, biomass and carbon storage. As noted during the recent COP27 climate conference, biodiversity loss is as critical to our planet鈥檚 health as the climate crisis.
Join five current Biology students as they share their stories of finding their place and pursuing diverse paths within the discipline in this new video:聽. To learn more about the inspiration for this video, read聽.
If you鈥檝e ever seen a starling peck open a garbage bag or a grackle steal your dog pellets, you get a sense that some birds have learned to take advantage of new feeding opportunities 鈥� a clear sign of their intelligence. Scientists have long wondered why certain species of birds are more innovative than others, and whether these capacities stem from larger brains (which intuitively seems likely) or from a greater number of neurons in specific areas of the brain.
For the generations who grew up watching Finding Nemo, it might not come as a surprise that the North American West Coast has its own version of the underwater ocean highway 鈥� the California Current marine ecosystem (CCME). The CCME extends from the southernmost tip of California up through Washington. Seasonal upward currents of cold, nutrient-rich water are the backbone to a larger food web of krill, squid, fish, seabirds and marine mammals. However, climate change and subsequent changes in ocean pH, temperature and oxygen levels are altering the CCME 鈥� and not in a good way.
