/research/taxonomy/term/206/all en /research/article/future-ready-spinal-tap <p>Have you ever wondered what the future really looks like? Or wondered what it would be like to be able to touch it? Faculty of Engineering Professor <a href="/mecheng/people/staff/mark-driscoll">Mark Driscoll</a> does so on a regular basis. In fact, there is a machine in his lab in the Macdonald Engineering building that lets you do just that.</p> Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:03:07 +0000 Junji Nishihata 727 at /research /research/article/future-ready-authentic-educator <p>In the summer of 2012, in Queens, New York, a 12-year-old boy dove for a basketball at school and cut his arm. He awoke the next morning with a high fever, vomiting, mottled skin and low blood pressure. His pediatrician diagnosed him with stomach flu and sent the boy to hospital to get re-hydrated. The emergency room doctors gave him fluids, ran blood tests and sent him home with instructions to take Tylenol.</p> Wed, 21 Dec 2022 23:43:53 +0000 Mark Witten 721 at /research /research/article/future-ready-translation-trailblazer <p>As a boy in Jaffa, Israel, Nahum Sonenberg walked regularly with his father to the Old Protestant cemetery on a hill overlooking the harbour. His father showed him the gravestone of Thomas Hodgkin, the British pathologist who first described Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the 1800s. Sonenberg recalls them standing on the hilltop, looking over the Mediterranean: “I asked my father, what’s beyond the water? ‘That’s America,’ he said, ‘where everything is possible.’ I was only four and thought I should go there one day.”</p> Wed, 21 Dec 2022 22:39:05 +0000 Mark Witten 717 at /research /research/article/future-ready-giant-nano-scale <p>Marta Cerruti talks glowingly of the colourized photos her students recently made. Most researchers would reserve what’s under their microscope for purely scientific inquiry. But while the Associate Professor of Materials Engineering works on ways to grow bones and reduce mineral build-up in arteries, she likes to also look at what’s going on aesthetically. A water colour painter, she recently encouraged her students to make colloidal dispersions, cells and extracellular matrix grown on scaffolds into pieces to admire. “They’re really, really pretty structures.”</p> Thu, 22 Dec 2022 23:01:24 +0000 Philip Fine 750 at /research /research/article/future-ready-advocate-better-anthropocene <p>When you think of the Earth 50 years from now, what do you see? Do you imagine desolate cities, scorched forests, dead oceans, lost biodiversity? Elena Bennett wants you to know the future doesn’t have to be bleak.</p> <p>“We can achieve a good Anthropocene — a future that is more just, prosperous, and sustainable than our current world,” says Bennett, an ecosystem ecologist jointly appointed to the McGill School of Environment and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences in McGill’s Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.</p> Thu, 22 Dec 2022 22:16:27 +0000 Allyson Rowley 737 at /research /research/futurereadylaporte <p>Drug discovery is a high-stakes business. The cost of developing a new prescription medicine that gains marketing approval from regulators is about $3.5 billion – and 7 out of 8 new drug candidates in clinical development fail, according to a <i>Journal of Health Economics </i>study.</p> Tue, 20 Dec 2022 21:57:33 +0000 Mark Witten 711 at /research /research/article/future-ready-graphene-innovators <p>What is a million times thinner than a human hair, yet 200 times stronger than steel? What is lighter than paper, yet stretches up to 20% of its length?</p> Tue, 20 Dec 2022 21:40:03 +0000 Mark Witten 707 at /research /research/articles/future-ready-professor-sabrina-leslie <p>In a cavernous space in Professor Sabrina Leslie’s lab, recent PhD graduate Dr. Daniel Berard is analyzing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3U1BTFxuBU&feature=youtu.be">live videos of fluctuating single oligonucleotides</a>—short molecules of DNA—as they are trapped in three-micron-wide "wells”. To the untrained eye, the images he is inspecting on the computer screen look much like static on antiquated television sets, yet he perceives the entire trajectory of the molecules as they search for and bind to a target.</p> Tue, 20 Dec 2022 21:10:12 +0000 Meaghan Thurston 706 at /research