Professor Arun K. Misra recently received the Dirk Brouwer Award "for his outstanding and lasting contributions to astrodynamics of tethered satellite systems, flexible spacecraft, spacecraft orbiting asteroids, robotics for orbital assembly and debris capture." The Dirk Brouwer Award was established by the American Astronautical Society to honour significant technical contributions to space flight mechanics and astrodynamics. Professor Misra is the winner of this award for 2017. Dirk Brouwer Award.
Professor Marco Amabili has been elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. This is an important achievement; until now the European Academy of Sciences and Arts included only nine Canadian members, including John Polyani, winner of the 1986 Nobel prize for Chemistry. Read more.
The School of Continuing Studies is hosting its second annual Job Fair, exclusive to current students and recent alumni! This event is uniquely targeted to our students and will include employers who value your experience and drive.
At this event, you will have the opportunity to:
Océane Marescal outlined how science students can improve their writing skills in The McGill Tribune. The McGill Writing Center offers several courses that greatly benefit those who wish to make writing one of their strengths. The article outlines relevant courses to science majors.
Read an interview with McGill School of Continuing Studies' former director of Translation Studies, James Archibald, in Métro. The flexibility of the program, along with the internship component and use of innovative software, was highlighted.
The article is available in French only. Click here to read the article.
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that musical training helps people hear speech syllables in loud environments, and has shown how this happens. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers Yi Du and Robert Zatorre monitored brain function as musicians and non-musicians listened to speech fragments and varying background noise levels.
Fatty liver is among the most frequent causes of liver disease in Canada and in Western countries and is one of the main indications for liver transplant. For some time, researchers have suspected that people living with HIV could be at higher risk of developing liver disease, which, as a result of longer life expectancy thanks to antiretroviral therapy, has become the major cause of their mortality in North America.
New research by McGill University biologists shows that milder winters have led to physical alterations in two species of mice in southern Quebec in the past 50 years – providing a textbook example of the consequences of climate change for small mammals.
The findings also reveal a stark reversal in the proportions of the two mice populations present in the area, adding to evidence that warming temperatures are driving wildlife north.
Can mindfulness training help overweight people shed pounds and keep them off? McGill University researchers surveyed the growing body of studies investigating that question, and came away encouraged.
Kimberly Carrière, Bärbel Knäuper and Bassam Khoury examined 19 studies conducted over the past decade. Mindfulness interventions in these studies involved either formal meditation, informal mindfulness strategies that focused on eating activity, or some combination of these two approaches.
The researchers found that:
Montreal, with its multilingual, multiethnic population, is an ideal living laboratory for researchers and students from the city’s four universities and many specialized research centres. How can Montreal be designed to better accommodate the needs of its children? What measures need to be put in place to accommodate people of different cultures and religions living in close proximity? How is the city’s nighttime economy different from that of the daytime and what are the implications?
Research has already shown that women who develop either diabetes or high blood pressure during pregnancy are at risk of getting type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease years later. Now, a new study from a team at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and McGill University shows that the risk of developing those conditions post pregnancy is drastically higher if the women had both diabetes and high blood pressure during pregnancy. The study, published today in the American Journal of Epidemiology, doesn’t end with the mother’s risks.
Early flowering, early fruiting: Anecdotal evidence of climate change is popping up as quickly as spring crocuses, but is it coincidence or confirmation that plants’ timing is shifting in response to warming temperatures?
By Chris Chipello
McGill University researchers have discovered a cellular mechanism that may contribute to the breakdown of communication between neurons in Alzheimer’s disease.
By Shawn Hayward
Whether it is dancing or just tapping one foot to the beat, we all experience how auditory signals like music can induce movement. Now new research suggests that motor signals in the brain actually sharpen sound perception, and this effect is increased when we move in rhythm with the sound.
By Julie Robert