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Innovation now
September 2013, Vol. 2, No. 7
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At work for the economy |
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GRASS IS GREENER  A small company in Essex County in southwestern Ontario is using grass as a feedstock to produce biomaterials for the moulding industry. Using a formula developed at the University of Guelph, the company compounds the grass with recycled plastic to form a bio-composite which is used to make flowerpots and storage bins for sale to large retailers like Home Hardware. Read more…
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FREEDOM FROM INSULIN  University of Alberta researchers will soon begin clinical trials for a treatment that, if successful, would eliminate the need for patients with Type 1 diabetes to get insulin shots. To begin the trials, the team secured $26 million to build the first stem cell research facility in Western Canada which will play a vital role in transitioning basic research into a clinical setting. Read more…
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VIRTUAL HELP FOR REAL FEARS  To alleviate anxieties such as fear of flying or obsessive compulsive disorders, researchers at Université du Québec en Outaouais created a clinic that uses virtual reality to expose patients to the source of their fears gradually in a safe, 3-D environment. The clinic also provides psychotherapy clinics with virtual reality software to help treat some of the 12 percent of Canadians who suffer from anxiety disorder. Read more… |
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Spotlight on research |
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APPLES TO APPLES  Tucked near the back of the sprawling 200-hectare property that makes up the Atlantic Food and Horticulture Research Centre’s farm facility in Kentville, N.S., sits one of the world’s most unique orchards. It contains more than 1,000 newly planted apple trees, but unlike other orchards, each of the trees in Sean Myles’ plot is different from the rest — 1,113 distinct varieties of apples. Myles is a professor at Dalhousie University and a Canada Research Chair in Agricultural Genetic Diversity. He’s an expert in genomics, the science of decoding how sequences of DNA create the blueprints of everything from apples to elephants. Crossbreeding plants to enhance specific traits and create new varieties is a laborious hit-or-miss process. Myles uses science to speed up the task by cataloguing how genetics activates desirable traits in farm crops such as apples and grapes. It’s big business. The apple is Canada’s largest fruit crop, with more than 18,000 hectares of orchards planted across the country producing over 370,000 tonnes of the fruit annually, a value of $150 million. Read more…
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CFI-funded research in the news |
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DISCOVERY — Ottawa research team leading study that allows heart to heal itself (Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Ottawa Citizen, September 5, 2013) SANTÉ — Les symptômes classiques d'anxiété élevée chez certains écoliers peuvent être d'origine génétique. (L'Université de Montréal, Radio-Canada, le 10 septembre 2013) |
PHYSICS — Diagnosed with severe autism, 15 year old child is now one of the world’s most promising physicists (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Maclean’s magazine, September 1, 2013)
BRAIN — Université de Montréal neuroscientists discover brain activity in extreme comas (Calgary Herald, September 20, 2013) |
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