External

Meetings with Books: Raymond Klibansky, Special Collections and the Library in the 21^st Century is a one-day symposium hosted by the McGill University Library taking place on March 20, 2013 at the Faculty Club Ballroom, 3450 McTavish. The event will bring together scholars and librarians to discuss the full and complex potential of special collections and rare books. The event includes a keynote lecture on curiosity by author Alberto Manguel.

How do we bridge the gap between the theory of human rights and the complex social, political and economic realities of a turbulent and interconnected world?

Syphilis is on the rise worldwide and there is an urgent need for reliable and rapid screening, particularly for people who live in areas where access to health care is limited. An international research team, led by scientists at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) in Montreal, has demonstrated that rapid and point-of-care tests (POC) for syphilis are as accurate as conventional laboratory tests. The findings, which were published in PLoS ONE, call for a major change in approach to syphilis testing and recommend replacing first-line laboratory tests with POC tests globally, especially in resource-limited settings.

(Michael Becker, a doctoral student at McGill University, was a scientific diver on an expedition to Lake Untersee in Antarctica): 

McGill University researchers are developing low-cost and high-performance electric engines for the next generation of electric vehicles, in collaboration with industrial partners Linamar, TM4, and Infolytica. They will be able to take advantage of the recent development of batteries with high energy densities to create optimal electric drivetrains for on-road electric cars. The drivetrain is the group of components in a motor vehicle that uses the energy stored in the battery to generate mechanical power and deliver it to the road surface.

Prof. Derek Gray, of the Department of Chemistry, and Prof. In-Ho Jung, of the Department of Mining and Materials Engineering, will each receive a Synergy Award for Innovation. These awards were launched by NSERC in 1995 to recognize partnerships between universities and industry in natural sciences and engineering research and development. Since their inception, the awards have honoured the most outstanding achievements of university-industry collaboration in the natural sciences and engineering. Each winner receives a $200,000 research grant.

“The Synergy Awards for Innovation recognize outstanding achievements that have resulted from partnerships between university researchers and industry,” says Suzanne Fortier, President of NSERC. “These awards honour collaboration as the foundation of achievement and highlight Canadian innovations.

While short-term weather is notoriously volatile, climate is thought to represent a kind of average weather pattern over a long period of time. This dichotomy provides the analytical framework for scientific thinking about atmospheric variability, including climate change.

(Op-ed by Arvind Sharma, professor in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill):