Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates – 27 October 2026

Khalifa Foundation has announced a five-year, US$12.8 million partnership with Canada's McGill University to strengthen education and human capacity development internationally.

McGill researchers have developed a new way to study why the same heart-failure treatment can help some patients recover while others continue to get worse.

Combining “heart-in-a-dish” technology with advanced microscopy, the approach makes it possible to identify differences between patients that would probably be missed using conventional methods.

A remarkably diverse fossil ecosystem in central Colombia that preserves an unusual overlap between survivors of older Jurassic groups and newer Cretaceous lineages has led researchers at McGill University and the Centro de Investigaciones Paleontológicas (CIP) to recognize a new pattern of large-scale evolutionary transition, one that does not include mass extinctions.  

McGill University researchers have identified "universal" vocal patterns across hundreds of bird species and found that many of the same patterns also appear in human song and speech from cultures around the world. The patterns include small pitch intervals, regular and predictable rhythms, and phrase-final elongation, in which the last utterance in a phrase tends to be longer than the others.

Over the past 50 years, Canadian English has become more uniform across regions and has adopted many American terms and pronunciations, while the use of Canadian spellings has gained in popularity.

These are the key results of a large-scale study by McGill researchers to update the Survey of Canadian English, initially done in 1972.

Adding darolutamide to standard treatment for aggressive prostate cancer reduced the risk of the disease spreading in an international Phase 3 trial.

A single brain signal may help explain a range of seemingly unrelated schizophrenia symptoms, a new study has found.

Schizophrenia is often described as a list of separate problems. People may perceive the world differently, act on their surroundings differently, or speak in ways that are hard to follow.

Farming, dams and agricultural runoff are the biggest threats to freshwater biodiversity globally, with Europe and Northwest Africa the hardest-hit regions, McGill researchers have found.  

Applying a mapping methodology previously used to study terrestrial species, the researchers identified where freshwater species are under threat, and which human activity seems to be responsible.  

Their study could help conservationists prioritize where interventions are most urgently needed, they said. 

When Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) urged Montrealers to limit outdoor activity during Canada’s worst wildfire smoke episodes, the city’s travel patterns shifted – but far less than public health officials might have hoped, according to a new McGill University study.

Immune cells that normally protect the body from infection can also drive the progression of some early breast cancers, McGill University researchers have found.

The discovery points to a potential way of distinguishing relatively harmless cases of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) from those most likely to become invasive, one of the biggest challenges in breast cancer care.

DCIS is an early form of breast cancer that accounts for roughly one-fifth to one-third of cancers detected through screening.

The gas orbiting Sagittarius A (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, is rich in metals, researchers at McGill University’s Trottier Space Institute have found. The metal enrichment probably resulted from stars that exploded and released material into the black hole's surroundings over time, they said.  

The team also learned this gas is similar in composition to many of the stars in the black hole’s orbit, suggesting the gas and stars may have formed together.  

A new genetic atlas is helping scientists trace the DNA changes that transformed a shared primate ancestor into modern humans.

For the first time, researchers can systematically test which genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees affect gene activity.

The study, published in Nature, grew out of a collaboration among researchers at McGill University, Kyoto University and the Weizmann Institute of Science.

The Gault Nature Reserve of McGill University has completed work aimed at protecting and enhancing the shoreline of Lake Hertel.  

This project, with an estimated value of $67,520, received financial support of $49,300 from the Fondation pour la biodiversité et la faune du Québec and its financial partner, Hydro-Québec, through the Programme Hydro-Québec pour la mise en valeur des milieux naturels.  

Researchers at McGill University have found that urbanization is weakening one of Earth's most enduring ecological patterns: the tendency for biodiversity to increase toward the tropics, a pattern known as the latitudinal diversity gradient.  

Analyzing bird populations worldwide, they found that on average, urban areas near the equator contained 42 per cent fewer species than nearby natural areas, while the comparable global figure was 32 per cent fewer, and 12 per cent fewer at 65 degrees of latitude.  

A surprising feature of how the brain stores memories could help explain why harmless situations can sometimes quickly feel threatening, a hallmark of anxiety and trauma disorders.

Scientists have long believed that fear helps the brain draw a clearer line between danger and safety. The new study from researchers at the Douglas Research Centre at McGill University and the University of Toronto-Scarborough, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggests the opposite.

People experience the steepest increases in pain before age 55, rather than in later life as might be expected, a new study led by McGill University researchers has found.

Published in Nature Medicine, the study analyzed self-reported pain data from more than 6.1 million people across 118 countries and territories.

To the surprise of researchers, certain diets often considered “unhealthy” or “fattening” were associated with better responses to a type of cancer immunotherapy.

"There is a synergistic relationship between the bacteria that reside in our GI tract, and the food we eat,” said Daniela Quail, Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Principal Investigator at the Rosalind & Morris Goodman Cancer Institute.

More than a century after legendary ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky penned a diary in a state of psychosis, McGill University researchers have mined the pages to learn more about how mental illness can affect language.

Nijinsky was once considered among the world's greatest dancers, but his career ended abruptly after the onset of psychosis in 1918. A diary he filled with intensely personal reflections was saved by his wife and initially published in an edited form. Only recently did a version much closer to the original become available.

McGill researchers have created and validated a virtual coaching program that helps parents of preschoolers with developmental delays navigate the maze of assessments, appointments and decisions with which they can be faced.

BRIGHT Coaching provides one-on-one support from a trained coach, offering practical guidance and information for concerns ranging from speech and language delays to autism and cerebral palsy. Coaches also guide parents on how to promote healthy child development and family resilience while they wait for services.

By comparing variations in the colour of the coats of the eastern grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) in Montreal city parks, researchers found that hyper-local conditions appear to play a bigger role in determining wildlife traits than had been thought.