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Dear Café Scientifiquers,

 

Our May café will happen on Tuesday May 22th, 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speaker for the evening will be Andrew Holding, a research scientist who is currently employed by the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK. He has worked on many Science outreach projects including founding and organising Skeptics in the Pub in Cambridge, which holds monthly talks by various speakers with the aim of highlighting the application of critical thinking and scientific method. His talk will be:

 

Forgotten Knowledge: The discovery and loss of a cure for scurvy

 

Of all the slang names for the British, none is more iconic than ’Limey’. While the the term provokes majestic images of the Golden Age of Sail, scurvy cost countless sailors and seamen their lives. It was once not unheard of for nine out of every ten members of a ship’s crew to have succumbed to scurvy by the time it returned to port. The results of James Lind’s work on the HMS Salisbury in 1747, which led to a cure, without doubt saved innumerable lives. Yet in Cherry-Garrard’s account of Robert Falcon Scott’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole, he writes: “There was little scurvy in Nelson’s days; but the reason is not clear, since, according to modern research, lime-juice only helps to prevent it.” So why did Lind’s results get forgotten?

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

 

Our next café will happen next Tuesday April 24th, 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Rosie Redfield, the biologist from UBC who was recently named one of the “Ten People Who Mattered” in 2011 by Nature magazine. (http://www.nature.com/news/365-days-nature-s-10-1.9678 ).

 

The title and abstract for her café is:

 

#arseniclife and Open Science

The #arseniclife story started with a bang in late 2010, when NASA proudly announced the discovery that some bacteria could synthesize their DNA with arsenic in the backbone in place of phosphorus. But within a few days it all fell apart, as scientists used blogs and Twitter to conduct impromptu ‘post-publication peer review’. (‘#arseniclife’ is the Twitter hashtag used to identify relevant tweets.) Working with collaborators at Princeton, my lab has now shown that the key results cannot be replicated. This debacle has implications for many aspects of science, from how personal biases and funding sources affect scientific judgment to the increasing roles of social media in both the practice and public communication of science.

 

 

We hope to see you there!

 

- Your Cafe Sci Vancouver Organizers

Posted on behalf of Sarah Chow

ScienceOnlineVancouver is a monthly discussion series exploring how online communication and social media impact current scientific research and how the general public learns about it. ScienceOnlineVancouver is an ongoing discussion about online science, including science communication and available research tools, not a lecture series where scientists talk about their work. Follow the conversation on Twitter at @ScioVan, hashtag is #SoVan.

 

It begins Thursday April 19 at 7pm at Science World. Find information about this event at www.ScienceOnlineVancouver.com. Please register and set up a profile so you can get the latest news on upcoming events and see who else is coming.

 

The concept of these monthly meetings originated in New York with SoNYC @S_O_NYC, brought to life by Lou Woodley (@LouWoodley, Communities Specialist at Nature.com) and John Timmer (@j_timmer, Science Editor at Ars Technica). With the success of that discussion series, participation in Scio2012, and the 2012 annual meeting of the AAAS in Vancouver, Catherine Anderson, Sarah Chow, and Peter Newbury were inspired to bring it closer to home, leading to the beginning of ScienceOnlineVancouver.

 

ScienceOnlineVancouver is part of the ScienceOnlineNOW community that includes ScienceOnlineBayArea (@sciobayarea) and ScienceOnlineSeattle (@scioSEA). Thanks to Brian Glanz of the Open Science Federation and SciFund Challenge and thanks to Science World for a great venue.

 

We hope you can join the conversations!

 

Regards,

ScienceOnlineVancouver team

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

 

Our next café will happen next Tuesday March 27th, 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Bruce Archibald, a paleontologist from Simon Fraser University. His café will be:

 

How are global patterns of biodiversity affected by climate? The view from a fossil fly’s eye.

 

Understanding the way that large-scale patterns of biodiversity are affected by climate has been among the greatest outstanding problems in ecology. Why are there more species in the tropics? The answer isn’t as simple as it might seem at first, as some possible controlling factors change together with latitude, and so their individual affects are difficult to evaluate. This Gordian knot might be cut, though, by looking in deep time, when global climates followed different patterns than today. So, comparing both modern and fossil communities in their environmental contexts allows a novel view of this problem. Why do the species compositions of communities change differently across mountainous landscapes in the tropics than in the Temperate Zones? An intriguing hypothesis proposed by Dan Janzen in 1967 can be examined by this system. Fossil insect communities from our regions may provide answers to understanding some basic ways of how life in the modern world is organized.

Also, check out Bruce’s bio here: http://www.brucearchibald.com/.

We hope to see you there!

- Your Cafe Sci Vancouver Organizers

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

“Something’s the Matter with Anti-Matter: There’s not enough of it”

 

About 13.7 billion years ago, our Universe was born in a Big Bang. That early universe was a big steaming stew of radiation and exactly equal numbers of particles and antiparticles. But somehow, a symmetry was broken, and a lopsided-ness arose, leaving a very small excess of matter over antimatter. And by the time the universe was less than a second old, essentially all the antimatter had annihilated with matter in bursts of light/energy, leaving a small residual excess of matter – which is all the matter we see in our universe; this is the matter we’re all made of.

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics was given to three particle physicists whose theory can explain how this lopsided universe evolved as having unequal parts matter and anti-matter, as predicted in the simplest Big Bang models.

The Standard Model of Particle Physics has been a triumph of particle physics – many thousands of experiments have confirmed predictions of this simple and elegant model. But it has at least 2 severe shortcomings: while it has been shown to accommodate matter-antimatter asymmetry, it can only do so at a level orders of magnitude too small to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of our universe. The other shortcoming is that it predicts a Higgs Boson, which has not yet been observed.

We’ll discuss the experimental program which has observed and studied the decays of hundreds of millions of B mesons (“beautiful mesons”), testing the Standard Model of Particle Physics to great precision. An overview of the experiment and results will be presented.

The Life Sciences Institute is having a Cafe Scientifique on February 13th (see attached poster). The title of the presentation is:

“Flights of Fancy: using Fruit Flies to Shed Light on Health and Disease”.

Hope you can attend!

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

 

Our next café will happen on Tuesday January 31st, 7:30PM at the Railway Club. The speaker for the evening will be Simon Donner, an Assistant Professor in the UBC Department of Geography who is interested in why the climate matters. His talk will be on:

 

Beyond Nemo: Coral reefs in a warming world

 

Coral reefs, often called the rainforests of the ocean, are thought to be more sensitive to climate change than any other ecosystem on the planet. Drawing on his research in the Central Equatorial Pacific nation of Kiribati, Simon Donner will talk about the effects of changes in climate and ocean chemistry on tropical corals and the potential for adaptation.

 

We hope to see you there!

 

- Café Scientifique Vancouver Organizers

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

 

Our next café will happen on Tuesday November 29th, 7:30PM at the Railway Club. The speaker for the evening will be Dr. Richard Moore, a scientist at the world-renowned Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. His talk will be on:

 

Cancer Metagenomics: Microbes and Cancer

 

Greater than 20% of all cancers are known to be caused by microbes (viruses and bacteria) including cervical cancer, liver cancer and gastric cancer. I will describe how we are using the latest sequencing technologies to discover novel associations between microbes and cancer. I will highlight our recent discovery of Fusobactium nucleatum overabundance in colorectal cancer.

 

For a news piece on the team led by Richard and their recent discovery, check out http://www.genomebc.ca/media/news-releases/2011/bc-researchers-investigate-link-between-cancers-and-viruses/

 

We hope to see you there!

 

Sam Lee & Carolina Chanis

Café Scientifique Vancouver Organizers

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

 

Our next café will happen on Tuesday October 25th, 7:30PM at the Railway Club, and the speaker for the evening will be Jenna Capyk (PhD candidate from UBC’s Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department). Her talk will be on:

 

Tuberculosis and Cholesterol: Growth of a biochemical field

 

Tuberculosis may be an ancient disease, but it is also one that still represents a major global health concern. With about 1/3 of all people carrying the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, bacterium that causes TB, and drug resistance becoming a more serious problem every year, research into this bacterium has intensified over the past decade. Our knowledge of exactly what factors allow the bacteria to survive and cause disease, however, is very limited. A discovery made a few years ago has opened doors to a new research field on cholesterol degradation by M. tuberculosis. I’d like to talk about my biochemical research into how and why this bacterium uses cholesterol, and how this work fits into our understanding of the bacterium and the disease. I would also like to put this work in the context of research community building a new field, and use it as an example to explore the limitations and progression of biochemical research.

 

We hope to see you there!

 

- Your Café Sci Vancouver Organizers

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