The Council of Canadian Academies was asked by the federal Minister of Natural Resources to assess the challenges for an acceptable operational extraction of gas hydrates in Canada in terms of: economic impact, social acceptability, and accessibility? As a result, the Expert Panel on Gas Hydrates was appointed by the Council to address the question and provide an account of the science and technology relevant to the safe extraction and use of gas hydrates in Canada.

The expert panel, chaired by John Grace (FRSC, FCAE), held its first meeting on May 8 and 9, 2007 to discuss the question with the sponsoring department (Natural Resources Canada); to agree on an outline for the assessment report; and to coordinate research and writing tasks. The question addressed by the panel is as follows: “What are the challenges for an acceptable operational extraction of gas hydrates in Canada in terms of: economic impact, social acceptability, and accessibility?”

UBC Members of the Expert Panel include

John Grace, Chair
Professor, Chemical and Biological Engineering and Canada Research Chair in Clean Energy Processes, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC)

Peter Englezos
Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC)

The Report in Focus is now available with the Full Report to be released in August 2008 from the Council of Canadian Academies website.

Dr. Tom Pedersen has co-authored an interesting editorial published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin looking at natural sewage treatment as it relates to the city of Victoria’s current policy of discharging screened sewage into the ocean environment.

“Despite scientific evidence that there are no major environmental or human health impacts, this discharge of ‘untreated’ sewage has been a constant irritation to the city’s US neighbours and to environmental groups, has resulted in a large number of lay opinions in the popular media (radio, television, newspapers, magazines), and finally resulted (July 2006) in the British Columbia Minister of the Environment directing the CRD to move to secondary sewage treatment.”

For more on this topic, have a look at Peter Chapman’s editorial Science, politics and ideology – The Victoria (BC, Canada) sewage issue.

Dr. Tom Pederson is a professor in UBC’s Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

UBC Department of Physics and Astronomy professor Dr. Ian Affleck has been recognized by the American Physical Society’s as one of their Outstanding Referees.

“The Outstanding Referee program was instituted in 2008. The highly selective award program recognizes scientists who have been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for publication in the APS journals. The program will annually recognize approximately 130 of the 42,000 currently active referees, but in the inaugural year a larger group of 534 referees has been selected for the Outstanding Referee designation. Like Fellowship in the APS, this is a lifetime award. By initiating the program, APS expresses its appreciation to all referees, whose efforts in peer review not only keep the standards of the journals at a high level, but in many cases also help authors to improve the quality and readability of their articles—even those that are not published by APS.”

Click here to read the full article.

A team of physicists at the Californian Institute of Technology has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

Dr Adrienne Erickcek, and colleagues from the California Institute for Technology (Caltech), now believes these fluctuations contain hints that our Universe “bubbled off” from a previous one.

Their data comes from Nasa’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been studying the Cosmic Microwage Background since its launch in 2001.

Their model suggests that new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. From inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular.

Click here to read the full BBC news article

The preprint version of the article submitted to Physical Review Letters, A Hemispherical Power Asymmetry from Inflation is available at arxiv.org.

There is a UBC connection to this research. Dr. Mark Halpern from UBC’s Department of Physics and Astronomy is directly involved in
WMAP Research and is a member of the WMAP Science Team.

New types of journal metrics grow more influential in the scientific community

AT ONE POINT in his career, Nobel Laureate Sir Harold W. Kroto was the second most highly cited chemist in Britain—topped only by the University of Southampton’s Martin Fleischmann, one of the proponents of cold fusion.

Kroto, who codiscovered C60 and is currently a chemistry professor at Florida State University, declines to draw any conclusions from that experience. But given the ultimate fate of cold fusion, the anecdote suggests that citation statistics aren’t always a good indicator of scientific excellence.

Read the full article at Chemical & Engineering News

As part of the UBC Library’s mandate to archive undergraduate research, two honors theses have just been added to the Physics and Astronomy Community in cIRcle – UBC’s Information Repository.

Measurement of Upsilon (1S) Production at BaBar
by Rocky So.

A Deformation Induced Quantum Dot by Daniel
Woodsworth.

If you are interested in contributing your undergraduate thesis to cIRcle, please contact me directly kevin.lindstrom@ubc.ca.

Dr. Erich Vogt
In addition to an outstanding career as a top researcher and scientist in the field of nuclear physics, Dr. Erich Vogt was one of the founders of the TRIUMF project at the University of British Columbia, the largest university-based scientific laboratory in Canada for particle and nuclear physics.

Dr. Vogt is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of British Columbia, where he has taught thousands of students who have excelled under his enthusiastic mentorship and influence. Dr. Vogt has also served on many high-level advisory committees in the field of nuclear and accelerator science in various world-class institutes. He is an internationally renowned scholar, and has published many research papers on theoretical physics

For more information, go to Day of Celebration in Honour of Dr. Erich W. Vogt.

Tentative Program

Sunday, May 4, 2008

12:30 – VOGT SYMPOSIUM – Hebb Theatre
12:30 Hon. Stan Hagen (MLA, Comox Valley) – Introduction
13:00 Nigel Lockyer “The Future of TRIUMF: Building on the Past Successes”
13:40 Art McDonald “TRIUMF and UBC in the SNO experiment”
14:20 BREAK
14:40 Carlo Rubbia “Beta beams and ion cooling: the future of accelerator driven neutrino oscillations?”
15:20 Walter Kohn “Density and Density Functional Theory of Nuclei and Other Self-bound Fermi Systems”
16:00 Erich Vogt Summary
16:30 – RECEPTION – SUB Party Room
16:30 Semi-Open Microphone (sign up in advance)

Biotechnology for Biofuels is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal featuring high-quality studies describing technological and operational advances in the production of biofuels from biomass.

www.biotechnologyforbiofuels.com

We are pleased to announce a new open-access journal, Biotechnology for Biofuels [1], published online by BioMed Central. Biotechnology for Biofuels will emphasize the research and application of biotechnology and synergistic operations to improve plant and biological conversion systems for the production of fuels from lignocellulosic biomass, and any related economic, environmental and policy issues.

The need for this journal is evident: the recent explosion in research on the production and subsequent use of biofuels has huge implications for science and future policy directions, yet Biotechnology for Biofuels is the first open-access journal featuring research dedicated to this exciting and expanding field, thereby filling a vacant niche. We are convinced that a communication will facilitate scientific progress in this extremely important area, and will also help to promote informed public debate. Biotechnology for Biofuels will ensure public availability of high-caliber peer-reviewed research, reviews and commentaries on all aspects of biofuels research and any related political, economic, and environmental issues.

The benefits of publishing in an open access journal are manifold: open access enables free and universal access to articles online, at no cost to the reader, allowing research to be disseminated by as wide an audience as possible. Submitted manuscripts undergo rapid peer review by internationally renowned experts, drawn in part from our Editorial Board [2]. Articles are published immediately upon acceptance and, soon after, listed in PubMed [3]; the communication of research is therefore not postponed until the collation of an ‘issue’.

The interdisciplinary nature of biofuels research makes the benefits of open access particularly attractive, as it ensures that biologists, chemists, engineers, genomicists, and biotechnologists (to name just some of those involved) all have shared access to the latest biofuels research in each of these areas.

UBC’s Dr. Mark Halpern gave a presentation on Thursday April 17 about WMAP and some of the results from their five years with of data.

The audio and pdf presentation is available at
http://hdl.handle.net/2429/730

Abstract:

We have released maps and data for five years of observation of the cosmic microwave background with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and I will review the main results in this talk. A simple 6 parameter cosmological model continues to be an excellent fit to the CMB data and to our data in conjunction with other astrophysical measurements. In particular a running spectral index is not supported by the data, and constraints that the Universe is spatially flat have increased in precision. Increased sensitivity and improvements in our understanding of the instrumental beam shape have allowed us to measure for the first time a cosmic neutrino background. Neutrinos de-coupled from other matter earlier than photons did. While they are expected to have a 2 Kelvin thermal distribution today, they comprised 10% of the energy density of the Universe at the epoch of photon de-coupling. The data also allow tighter constraints on the shape of the inflationary potential via the amplitude of a gravitational wave background new constraints on features of cosmic axions. Recorded at TRIUMF on Thursday April 17, 2008.