A simple stroll through a city allows us to appreciate the presence of trees. They provide us with shade, shelter and feed a variety of insects and animals and, overall, beautify our cities. Yet these precious urban forests should not be taken for granted. Climate change, pest insects, severe weather, air pollution and urbanization are...
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“A lot of the time, the problems we’re dealing with are almost like a detective story,” says Daniel Stubbs, frontline support coordinator at Calcul Québec. Graduate students vying for a degree might not see the romance, however. Their research, involving huge amounts of data and complex calculations, might take months for a laptop to...
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Dr. Jabado doesn’t beat around the bush. “I treat patients who have these tumors,” she says. “And they are often lethal.” To defeat an enemy that appears seemingly out of nowhere in young healthy bodies, Dr. Jabado and her lab at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center must learn everything they can...
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Pierre-Olivier Quirion is the switchboard operator at the centre of a consortium working to track COVID-19 strains in Quebec. This Rube-Golberg-like operation starts when a sample is swabbed from inside your nose and ends when the government releases its latest recommendations. Quirion was also instrumental in making the data accessible to the general public as...
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Professor Nicolas Moitessier describes his task as “finding a key that fits the lock,” except he wants to block the keyhole. His McGill chemistry lab is now a vital cog in the wheel in the global effort to develop a drug against the novel coronavirus known as SARS-COV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. Moitessier is...
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Hussin’s group uses advanced research computing to answer biological questions. These days, they are looking for mutations in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease called COVID-19. “We took all the sequences showing up every week and looked at how they mutated from one generation to the next and from one country to another,” says...
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Can you tell us more about the COVID-19 Resources platform and how it came about? I was contacted by a colleague asking whether I could help them build an online tool to find and share reagents needed for COVID-19 research projects. Before building it, I decided to ask on Twitter if anybody was already working...
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Ichiro Fujinaga likens his life’s work and goal to something he nicknames “Google Scores.”. Like Google Books, his project aims to establish a huge database of musical scores that will be freely accessible to anyone who uses the search engine. “What I’ve been working on for the last 30 years is optical music recognition,” says...
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Reducing noise: a public health issue When Professor Stéphane Moreau takes a plane, he’s not like the other passengers. On board, he becomes alert to all of the noises around him. It’s a natural reflex for the University of Sherbrooke Research Chair in Aeroacoustics who has chosen to make the noise produced by these flying...
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Marc-André Légaré, who is finishing a Ph.D in chemistry at Université Laval, was one of the recipients of the Fonds de recherche du Québec’s Étudiants-chercheurs étoiles awards in October 2015. He received the award for an article published in the prestigious American publication Science regarding his research on metal-less catalysts. Complex molecular modelling computations are...
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