Month: January 2015

Dear Café Scientifiquers, our next café will happen on Tuesday February 24th, 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Kyle Demes, a Hakai Postdoctoral Fellow in the Coastal Marine Ecology and Conservation lab at SFU.  The title of his talk is:

Inland Oil Sands and Coastal Ecology

Rising overseas oil demand has contributed to a series of proposed pipeline expansion and construction projects to move bitumen from areas of extraction in the interior of Canada to the coast, where it can be loaded onto tankers for shipment. These proposals represent a focal point of controversy in discussions around energy development, climate change and policy across North America and are one of the largest environmental concerns facing British Columbians. I will discuss the ways in which bitumen extraction, transport and shipment influence coastal marine ecosystems, identifying both potential and certain environmental impacts linked with the acceleration of oil sands operations to our coast. I will also review how well we understand each of these environmental impacts, emphasizing key uncertainties in our knowledge and how these gaps affect our ability to make informed decisions on these controversial proposals.

Dear Café Scientifiquers, our next café will happen on Tuesday January 27th, 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Chris Muir, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia.  The title of his talk is:

More than salad: the inner lives of leaves

To most of us, leaves are the green things in a salad or the emblem on our flag. To a biologist, leaves are the critical interface between a plant and its environment. I will talk about some of the remarkable ways that leaves adapt plants to their environment. First, I will cover some basic functions that leaves perform for a plant: How do plants eat? How do plants avoid being eaten? What goes on inside a leaf? Next, I will talk about some of the unorthodox ways that leaves help plants make a living: How do plants without roots get water? Why do leaves track the sun? How did the Swiss Cheese Plant get its holes? The close connection between a leaf’s form and its function to the plant attests to the relentless action of natural selection in adapting organisms to their environment.