Approximately 20 per cent of Canadians suffer from chronic pain, making it not only the number one reason that people seek health care, but also the number one concern of patients with long-term illnesses.  Chronic pain drains more than $10-billion annually in lost productivity and health-care services from the Canadian economy, which is more than [...]

Dr. Anthony Ricciardi talks about “biological invasions” and how they can cause extinctions, disrupt ecosystems, alter natural resources, threaten human health, and even pose national security problems. He further discusses how ecologists are planning “assisted colonization” for species to rescue species threatened by climate change.  

We live in a Universe of remarkable structure. From super-clusters of galaxies, tens of millions of light years across, to grand-design spiral galaxies and  small rocky planets like Earth,  structure exists on all scales.   It wasn’t always this way: through the extraordinary advancements of observational cosmology of the last several decades,   we now [...]

Speaker: Christie Rowe (Assistant Professor, Dept. Earth and Planetary Sciences, McGill University) Earthquakes happen every day all over the world.  Most are concentrated along the boundaries of tectonic plates, but occasionally, earthquakes happen where we don’t expect them.  How do these events start? What controls the location of earthquakes?  And what happens to all the [...]

More than a billion people, mostly in developing nations, still serve as hosts to roundworms. They are a source of diseases that often kill – yet medicines for these diseases have generally been adopted from veterinary use and have not been optimized for humans. This lecture provides an introduction to parasitic diseases of poverty and [...]

Professor Costopoulos argues that while humans are probably selected to have a limited ability to make good decisions. Under the ‘diversity-tolerance’ model of cultural evolution, humans are smart enough to come up with a range of potential solutions to the problems we face but not very good at determining which solution is the best.

As a specialist in three-dimensional modeling of the living brain, Alan Evans works to understand neurological pathologies inside-out: the natural history of a disease,” He asks: “What parts of the brain exhibit abnormal changes in cortical thickness, for example, over the duration of Alzheimer’s disease? How does that brain map relate to behaviours, such as [...]

By Elena Bennett (Natural Resource Sciences and McGill School of Environment, McGill) Agricultural landscapes can provide many different ecosystem services, including food, high quality freshwater, opportunities for recreation, and flood control. Yet we often focus narrowly on the production of food, which can unintentionally undermine provision of other key services.  The idea of managing for [...]

Of the nearly 600 species and subspecies of primates living today, approximately half are in danger of going extinct.  In fact, one subspecies in West Africa, Miss Waldron’s red colobus, is likely extinct.  Furthermore, the number of recognized threats to primate survival has increased dramatically over the last decade.  A decade ago, disease was not [...]

Every tissue in the body requires blood flow to bring nutrients to the tissue. For this reason, there is significant therapeutic advantage to controlling when and where new blood vessels develop. If we could induce new blood vessels, we could improve wound healing. In situation likes cancer, inhibiting blood vessels from growing into a tumour [...]