Please join the Mac Community in congratulating Professor Chris Buddle on his new appointment as Dean of Students, McGill University.
Since 2014, Professor Buddle has served the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences as Associate Dean of Student Affairs. In this role, he oversaw recruitment activities for the Faculty, promoted academic integrity, was a champion of student rights, and worked extensively on supporting the overall wellbeing of the Macdonald Campus community.
The Quebec government has the intention to prohibit all accessory fees in health care. (La Presse)
"Prince, the superstar American singer-songwriter known for his incredible musicianship, diverse appeal across multiple genres and cavalcade of award-winning hits, has died at age 57." (CBC)
"In a broad proclamation on family life, Pope Francis on Friday called for the Roman Catholic Church to be more welcoming and less judgmental, and he seemingly signaled a pastoral path for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive holy communion.'" (The New York Times)
Prescriptions for dangerous alternatives to OxyContin are soaring, showing that a crackdown on the popular painkiller has failed to curb Canada’s opioid crisis.
"The first direct detection of gravitational waves is now widely expected to be announced on 11 February by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Using LIGO's twin giant detectors — one in Livingston, Louisiana, and the other in Hanford, Washington — researchers are said to have measured ripples in space-time produced by a collision between two black holes." (Nature News)
Twenty-five outstanding McGill researchers are being awarded Canada Research Chairs (CRC), as announced today by the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, at the University of British Columbia.
The U.S. central bank began raising interest rates Dec. 16 from record lows, as it hiked its benchmark rate by a quarter of a percentage point. (Source: CBC)
“Increases in the policy interest rate in the United States will reflect the data showing that the U.S.
Economy is really strengthening, after years of a sluggish recovery.
"Nearly 2,400 Montreal blue collar workers including union leadership will face sanctions for leaving work to attend a union meeting last week after they were ordered to remain on the job. " (Source: CBC)
"The borough of Outremont has overwhelmingly adopted a controversial bylaw banning new places of worship on Bernard and Laurier avenues." (Source: CBC)
The largest population genome sequencing effort to date is published today in Nature. Based on data collected by the UK10K project, the study was designed to explore the contribution of rare genetic variants to human disease and its impact on risk factors. Rare genetic variants are changes in DNA that are carried only by relatively few people in a population.
A Canadian research team at the IRCM in Montréal, led by molecular virologist Éric A. Cohen, PhD, made a significant discovery on how HIV escapes the body’s antiviral responses. The team uncovered how an HIV viral protein known as Vpu tricks the immune system by using its own regulatory process to evade the host’s first line of defence. This breakthrough was published yesterday in the scientific journal PLoS Pathogens and will be presented at the upcoming IAS 2015 conference in Vancouver. The findings pave the way for future HIV prevention or cure strategies.
The group released a 600-page report with 82 recommendations that call for sweeping reforms to the current set of laws for unmarried couples. Among them is a mandatory parental regime which would set out obligations towards children born during a common-law union as well as between parents following a split -- to a certain point.
