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Posted on behalf of Anadi Canepa, President of ARPICO:

Dear Cafe Scientifique Vancouver,

It is my pleasure to join the Board of Directors to announce the incorporation of the Society of Italian Researchers and Professionals in Western Canada (ARPICO).

The Society is non-profit and was founded by a group of researchers and professionals in Vancouver, British Columbia on January 17th, 2011. The aim of ARPICO is to provide a receptive atmosphere for debating new ideas, encourage and support networking, and becoming a beacon to local and visiting researchers, scholars and professionals of Italian descent or having an interest in the Italian arts and sciences. To this aim the Society adds its commitment to promote, advance, and protect the Italian culture.

We would be honored if You would join ARPICO (www.arpico.org).

I cordially invite You to the next Café Scientifique:

 “Greenest City Conservation Project: about engaging citizens in climate change issues”

 

Dr. J. Robinson, professor with UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability, and the Department of Geography; executive Director of the UBC Sustainability Initiative.

 

Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre

181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2W3

October 27th, 8:30 PM

See ARPICO Cafe poster attachment for more details.

Part I of the “Seeing is Believing” series

Please RSVP to nvohra@mail.ubc.ca by November 14, 2011

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

 

Our next café will happen on Tuesday September 27 at the Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir Street) at 7:30pm. Our speaker that evening will be Erika Eliason, an expert on Pacific salmon migration who has been featured on the UBC Public Affairs webpage. Her talk that evening will be:

 

Pacific Salmon and Climate Change

Every year, millions of Pacific salmon return from the ocean to the Fraser River to perform their upriver, adult spawning migration. Pacific salmon typically return to spawn in the same stream where they were born. This has resulted in many geographically and genetically distinct populations. In recent years, warm river temperatures have been associated with high mortality during the upriver spawning migration, raising clear conservation concerns. My research is focused on understanding why salmon die when the water gets too warm and how different populations vary in their susceptibility to warm temperatures.

 

We hope to see you there!

 

-Your Café Sci Vancouver Organizers (http://blogs.ubc.ca/cafesci/)

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

Our next café will happen on Tuesday Aug 30th, 7:30pm at the Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir St). We will be hosting Jacquelyn Cragg and Ward Plunet from the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD), and their topic will be:

 

From headlines to reality: How to be a smart consumer of scientific knowledge

 

We are bombarded with the latest discoveries from science … a cure for cancer? A cure for spinal cord injury? A cure for obesity? This talk will allow you to analyze science with a new, critical lens. We will discuss the role of the media in portraying scientific findings, the politics of research, and a few aspects of evidence based medicine. Join us for a lively discussion!

We hope to see you there!

- Your Café Sci Vancouver Organizers

 

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

 

Our next café will happen on Tuesday July 26th, 7:30pm at the Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir St). We will be hosting Agatha Jassem, from the Department of Pathology at UBC, and her talk will be:

 

Old Drugs, Bad Bugs: Antibiotic Treatment of Lung Infections in Cystic Fibrosis

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a fatal genetic disease that affects many Canadian children and young adults. Though CF is a multi-organ disease, chronic infection and inflammation of the lungs are particularly detrimental to health. Persons with CF can get infected with unusual bacteria that are hard to clear in part because they are, or become, highly resistant to antibiotics. Antibiotic treatment of airway infections in CF is further complicated by the fact that one class of antibiotics can cause resistance to another class, and some antibiotics can interfere with immune system processes. My research is focused on understanding how these “bad bugs” evade antibiotics, and the possible side-effects of chronic drug use.

 

We hope to see you there!

 

- Your Café Scientifique Organizers

 

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

Our next café will happen next Tuesday, June 28 at 7:30pm @ The Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir Street). That evening, we will host Gelareh Mazarei, a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics. Her talk that evening will be on Huntington’s disease:

Solving the Mystery of Huntington’s disease

Huntington’s disease (HD) is a devastating brain disorder that affects ~ 1 in 10,000 Canadians. Individuals with HD develop physical and mental disabilities that progress towards complete disability and eventual death. The part of the brain that predominantly gets affected in HD patients is the striatum, which controls our planning and abstract thinking. Currently, there are no treatments for HD due to the lack of understanding of the vulnerability of striatum in this debilitating brain disease. As a way to understand this, we study genes that get “turned on” only in the striatum, but nowhere else in the brain. We subsequently test these genes in a mouse model of HD to see if their ‘expression’ has changed . By knowing more about these newly described striatum-specific genes in this mouse model, we hope to open doors toward future therapies in HD.

We hope to see you there!

- Your Café Scientifique Vancouver Organizers

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

Our next session will happen on Tuesday May 31, 7:30pm @ The Railway Club. We will be presenting AJung Moon, a mechanical engineering researcher at UBC. Her talk will be:

Roboethics – A discussion on how robots are impacting our society

 

From vacuuming houses to befriending older persons at care facilities, robots are starting to provide convenient and efficient solutions at homes, hospitals, and schools. For decades, numerous works in science fiction have imaginatively warned us that robots can bring catastrophic ethical, legal, and social issues into our society. But is today’s robotics technology advanced enough to the point that we should take these fictional speculations seriously? Roboticists, philosophers, and policymakers agree that we won’t see Terminator or Transformers type robots any time soon, but they also agree that the technology is bringing forth ethical issues needing serious discussions today. In this talk, we will highlight some of the ways robots are already impacting our society, and how the study of human-robot interaction can help put ethics into its design.

More more info on AJung, check out her website (http://profile.amoon.ca) and blog (http://www.RoboethicsDB.com)!

We hope to see you there!

- Your Café Scientifique Vancouver Organizers

Dear All: 

Life Sciences Institute’s next Café Scientifique is scheduled at 6:00 pm on May 17, 2011.  Please see below and attached for information.

“E-natomy – How digital anatomy has changed the way we teach and practice medicine.”

Great advances in field of medical imaging have made it possible to look inside the human body with great precision and diagnose pathologies that could not be seen before without surgical exploration.  Learning the human anatomy through X-ray, ultrasound, CT and MRI images is allowing physicians of tomorrow to learn the necessary skills required to effectively utilize imaging modalities and interpret clinical pathologies.  How is radiology changing the way we learn anatomy and the way we practice medicine?

Space is limited, please RSVP by May 13, 2011 to tlung@mail.ubc.ca

Date: Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Time: 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm

Location: Café Perugia, 2350 Health Sciences Mall, University of British Columbia

Digital anatomy in teaching

Dr. Claudia Krebs

Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences

University of British Columbia

Digital anatomy in practice

Dr. Savvas Nicolaou

Department of Radiology

University of British Columbia

Please also visit http://cafesci.lsi.ubc.ca/ or find us at the facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/LSI-Cafe-Scientifique/137261326292830?v=wall&ref=sgm

Dear Café Scientifiquers,
Our next café will happen on April 19th, 7:30pm @ Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir Street). The speaker for the evening will be Andrea Gutierrez, a PhD student working at the UBC’s TRIUMF, one of the world’s leading subatomic physics laboratories. Andrea is involved with a project that is ranked as the #1 breakthrough in 2010 by Physics World (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/44618), so don’t miss out on her talk:

Let’s trap antimatter! An overview of how it is done and its applications.

Our world is made of matter: protons, neutrons and electrons. Each of these particles has a “twin” particle (antiprotons, antineutrons and antielectrons) that looks just like a mirror image of it, with the same mass but opposite charge. When matter gets close enough to antimatter, they both disappear in a puff of energy. To trap antimatter it is fundamental to keep it away from matter, which is what makes it a really challenging task. Last November, we were able to catch cold antihydrogen for the first time (antiatoms composed of an antiproton and an antielectron) at ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus). In this talk, we will discuss how to produce, trap and detect antihydrogen!

We hope to see you there!

- Your Café Sci Vancouver Organizers

Dear Café Scientifiquers,

Our next café will happen on March 29th, 7:30pm @ Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir Street). The speaker for the evening will be Mark MacLachlan, an Associate Professor from the Chemistry Department at UBC. His talk that evening will be:

Biomimetic Materials … With a Twist!

Natural materials that have evolved in plants and animals often display spectacular mechanical and optical properties. For example, spider silk is as strong as steel and tougher than Kevlar, which is used in bullet-proof vests.  Inspired by nature, chemists are now synthesizing materials that mimic the structures and properties of shells, bones, muscle, leaves, feathers, and other natural materials. In this talk, I will discuss our recent discovery of a new type of coloured glass that is a mimic of beetle shells. These new materials have intriguing optical properties that arise from their twisted internal structure, and they may be useful for emerging applications.

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