August in Canadian science

August’s SIN newsletter, covering science and technology news in Canada, is out! Click here to download the PDF version. If you would like to be added to the mailing list and receive it automatically in your inbox, leave a comment below or send us an e-mail. Some highlights from August’s news are:

Hundreds of jobs cut at Environment Canada | The federal government has announced that it will cut or reassign 750 jobs at Environment Canada, which represents around 10 % of the workforce. Since other departments will not face such swingeing cuts, the announcement was widely seen as a Conservative move to undermine environmental protection.

Canadian and British scientists create multimillion-dollar partnership to fight antibiotic resistance | Four Canadian and five British universities have assembled an international team to research antibiotic resistance. Funded by the CIHR and the MRC, the aim is to develop new drugs and methods to fight bacterial infections.

Scientists retrofit MRI scanner with particle accelerator to perform image-guided radiotherapy | Edmonton’s Cross Cancer Institute has developed a combination imaging (MRI) and radiotherapy (accelerator) instrument. This will allow doctors to target tumours in real time, avoiding any problems associated with the patient moving.

White-nose syndrome reaches Nova Scotia, scientists struggle to help | Canadian and American researchers are scrambling to document and fight white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that has decimated bat populations everywhere it has been found. There is no treatment, and recovery (if it happens at all) could take decades.

Reforestation policy and practices may be lagging behind climate change | A University of Alberta study shows that Canadian forestry practices have not kept pace with climate change, leading to a loss in productivity as newly-planted trees are mismatched with their environment.

Beyond space-time: Welcome to phase space | A radical claim from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics would have us augment the Einsteinian concept of four-dimensional space-time with four more dimensions of “momentum space” to give “phase space”. This bolts dimensions of energy and momentum onto our familar dimensions of space and time.

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