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

Hello!

Our next event will be on October 26th. This time we will have Dr. Jennifer Jacquet, a Post-doctoral fellow at the UBC Fisheries Centre. I read a bit about about Dr. Jacquet’s research from an article published in UBC Public Affairs about seafood stewardship and I thought this would be an interesting topic to discuss (because seafood is delicious and we’ve got lots of it in BC!). If you are interested in doing some homework before the Café, click on the hyperlink to UBC Public Affairs.

The abstract and title for the event is below:

The Comedy of Guilt in the Tragedy of the Commons

A lot of conservation initiatives today target consumers and largely appeal to guilt – an individual’s willingness to do the right thing.  But working higher in the demand or pollution chain, with retailers, restaurants, and governments, is a more effective strategy and will likely require relying on shame, rather than guilt, as a tactic.  Highlighting some theoretical research as well as examples from the real world, this talk will explore the use of guilt and shame in evolutionary psychology and in environmental efforts, focusing on seafood as well as other common resources.

Until then!

Carolina