PODCAST · society
McGill Podcasts » Cutting Edge Lectures
by McGill University
Episodes
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Cutting Edge 2015: Development of Personalized Treatments for Chronic Pain – Luda Diatchenko
Approximately 20 per cent of Canadians suffer from chronic pain, making it not only the number one reason that people seek health care, but also the number one concern of patients with long-term illnesses. Chronic pain drains more than $10-billion annually in lost productivity and health-care...
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Biological Invasions – The Ecological and Societal Impacts of Non-native Species
Dr. Anthony Ricciardi talks about “biological invasions” and how they can cause extinctions, disrupt ecosystems, alter natural resources, threaten human health, and even pose national security problems. He further discusses how ecologists are planning “assisted colonization” for species to rescue...
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Witnessing the Formation and Evolution of Galaxies
We live in a Universe of remarkable structure. From super-clusters of galaxies, tens of millions of light years across, to grand-design spiral galaxies and small rocky planets like Earth, structure exists on all scales. It wasn’t always this way: through the extraordinary advancements of...
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Christie Rowe: In Search of the Source of Earthquakes
Speaker: Christie Rowe (Assistant Professor, Dept. Earth and Planetary Sciences, McGill University) Earthquakes happen every day all over the world. Most are concentrated along the boundaries of tectonic plates, but occasionally, earthquakes happen where we don’t expect them. How do these events...
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Tim Geary: Medicines for Neglected Tropical Diseases: Reversing the Equation
More than a billion people, mostly in developing nations, still serve as hosts to roundworms. They are a source of diseases that often kill – yet medicines for these diseases have generally been adopted from veterinary use and have not been optimized for humans. This lecture provides an...
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André Costopoulos: A diversity / tolerance model of cultural evolution
Professor Costopoulos argues that while humans are probably selected to have a limited ability to make good decisions. Under the ‘diversity-tolerance’ model of cultural evolution, humans are smart enough to come up with a range of potential solutions to the problems we face but not very good at...
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Alan Evans: Non-invasive mapping of the human brain
As a specialist in three-dimensional modeling of the living brain, Alan Evans works to understand neurological pathologies inside-out: the natural history of a disease,” He asks: “What parts of the brain exhibit abnormal changes in cortical thickness, for example, over the duration of Alzheimer’s...
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Elena Bennett: Feeding the world without destroying the planet
By Elena Bennett (Natural Resource Sciences and McGill School of Environment, McGill) Agricultural landscapes can provide many different ecosystem services, including food, high quality freshwater, opportunities for recreation, and flood control. Yet we often focus narrowly on the production of...
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Colin Chapman: Primate conservation: Is the cup half empty or half full?
Of the nearly 600 species and subspecies of primates living today, approximately half are in danger of going extinct. In fact, one subspecies in West Africa, Miss Waldron’s red colobus, is likely extinct. Furthermore, the number of recognized threats to primate survival has increased dramatically...
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Elizabeth Jones: Blood Flow and Cardiovascular Development
Every tissue in the body requires blood flow to bring nutrients to the tissue. For this reason, there is significant therapeutic advantage to controlling when and where new blood vessels develop. If we could induce new blood vessels, we could improve wound healing. In situation likes cancer,...
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David Orrell: Perfect Model: Prediction, Science and Aesthetics
This talk takes an overview of the history and the challenges of prediction, from the oracle at Delphi, right up to the latest methods being developed in areas such as systems biology and economics — and argues that our search for the “perfect model” often reveals as much about our sense of...
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Gonzalo Cosa: Structure and dynamics of Supramolecular systems one molecule at a time
Advances in electronics, optics and nanotechnology have led to a tremendous progress in optical imaging over the past years. Gonzalo Cosa presents the specific case of fluorescence imaging, where the possibility of visualizing single fluorescent molecules with exquisite resolution gave rise to…
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Stan Boutin: Is there room for ecological conservation in the Oil Sands of Alberta?
The Oil Sands of Alberta present many environmental challenges. Stan Boutin focuses on how terrestrial ecosystems and their components can be conserved in this heavily industrialized landscape.
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Environmental change in Canada’s Arctic: how different is the present from the past?
Arctic regions are experiencing high degrees of environmental change, including thinning of arctic sea ice, increased deposition of airborne pollutants, as well as evidence of a longer growing season. Marianne Douglas uses examples from our research on lakes and ponds in the Canadian High Arctic…
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How Might Global Warming affect the Variable Hydroclimate of Western Canada?
Canada’s western interior has one of the world’s most variable climates, with severe drought and torrential rainstorms experienced in recent years. The extreme climate events in this region have been some of the most costly natural disasters in Canada history. Climate models suggest that this...
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From Embryos to Adults: The Life and Times of a Dinosaur
Dinosaurs have undergone a remarkable renaissance in recent decades. Far from being sluggish reptilian monsters doomed to extinction, new discoveries and new methods of scientific investigation have revealed dinosaurs as complex, highly active animals capable of sophisticated behaviors and as one...
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Inflammation — the fuel of cancer: extinguishing the fire to stop the disease
Maya Saleh discusses what we have recently learned on the role of our innate immune response in inflammatory diseases and cancer, with a focus on intestinal pathologies, including inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) and colorectal cancer.
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Dissecting the components of animal behaviour as a window into the human mind
Yogita Chudasama discusses how neuroscientists have been able to successfully exploit a conceptual framework, derived from research in human experimental psychology, which decomposes cognition into its basic building blocks.
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Materials Make Light Work
What do butterfly wings, Venus flower baskets and healthy doses of elements from the Periodic Table have to do with conveying digital data, music, voice and video by light? They can all be designed to make “light work”.
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The First Stars and the End of the Dark Ages
In the history of the universe, there is a period which is extremely difficult for us to see because there were no sources of light. These cosmic “dark ages” ended when the first stars turned on, providing the first view of the somewhat evolved universe.
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Climate Change, Ecosystem Collapse and Cascading Regime Shifts in the Canadian Arctic
Warwick Vincent explains how global climate change will be increasingly accompanied by discontinuous shifts in aquatic ecosystem structue and function.
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Save Our Sea(horses)
Almost mythical creatures, seahorses have the potential to capture the public imagination and inspire action for marine conservation.
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Can we erase memories for therapeutic benefits?
If we could functionally erase a memory to make someone’s life better would that be acceptable? What if the memory was of a trauma that has incapacitated someone for decades? Why do we need memories if they keep us down? In a very playful manner, Dr. Karim Nader addresses some of the science that...
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Quilts as Mathematical Objects
The connection between textiles and mathematics is intimate but not often explored, possibly because textiles and fiber arts have traditionally been the domain of women while mathematics was viewed as a male endeavour. How times have changed! Today, textiles and mathematics, like art and science,...
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The Siren Song of Cancer Cells
The treatment of complex diseases like cancer may lie in grasping their mechanisms at all levels of biological hierarchy. Most research focuses on understanding how genes cause cancer from within a cell, but much can be learned from intercell interaction. In this regard, cancer cells are not only...
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Mother Nature as a Green Materials Engineer
In this installation of “The Cutting Edge”, chemistry professor Christopher Barrett describes an emerging new guiding principle for materials development at McGill, based on bio-mimicry and self-assembly as an inspiration and a toolbox.
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Energy and Climate Change
Dr. Andrew D. Miall (Professor of Geology at the Geology Department, University of Toronto) presents six popular myths that complicate the development of good public policies, though they may make the arguments for protecting our environment stronger. This lecture was recorded as part of the…
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Bonding With Bugs
As part of the Royal Society of Canada’s “The Cutting Edge” series, Nathalie Tufenkji from the Department of Chemical Engineering discusses her work aimed at preventing the binding of infectious organisms to medical devices and to mammalian cell surfaces using an active component of cranberries....
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The Cutting Edge: Nanophotonics
Dr. Andrew Kirk of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering describes some of the current research being done as to the applications of nanophotonics in the future of telecommunications and also in the field of biosensing. This lecture was recorded as part of the Royal Society of...
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The Effect of Environment on Genes
Dr. Stephen Suomi, Chair of the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, speaks on risk, resilience, and gene X environment interactions in rhesus monkeys and other primates.
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