Canadian researchers “starved” for cash
According to the Toronto Star, the “everyday researchers” are starved for funds for their projects. Even as the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo received $76 million, the claim is that the bulk of the researchers, particularly the young and upcoming ones, are not getting enough funds.
Other projects included the University of Saskatchewan, which received $78 million for flood and drought prediction, McGill University received $84 million for brain research, Université de Montréal received $94 million for “big data,” and two of Alberta’s biggest universities received $75 million for clean energy.
13 major “centres of higher learning,” divvied a total of $900 million in grants from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF). The CFREF was designed to be assistive in the development of the post-secondary institutions in Canada into “global research leaders.”
NASA mission onward to discover origin of life
There will be a spacecraft sent to an asteroid to gather samples from its surface, according to a report by CBC News: Technology & Science. The launch begins on Thursday and will take a total of 7 years to complete the roundtrip to the Asteroid, Bennu, and back.
This is done by NASA. It is the “organization’s first send-and-return mission to an asteroid,” which has potential implications for discovering the “origins of life on Earth.” The spacecraft is call OSIRIS-Rex, also known as the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer.
Dante Lauretta, the lead of the mission, said, “We’re going to Bennu because it’s a time capsule from the earliest stages of solar system formation.” The asteroid is spherical and roughly 500 meters in diameter with an orbit akin to Earth’s. Its day is only 4 hours, which helps OSIRIS-Rex do its mission.
Biggest Science Literacy Week
According to Phys Org, the only Canadian-led experiment through the operations of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland has produced its first set of results. The Canadian initiative is called MoEDAL (the Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC).
MoEDAL is a collaboration between 26 institutions represented by 70 physicists. Dr. James Pinfold, Professor at the University of Alberta, is leading the organization. The first paper published from the results in the research will be in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
In the search for magnetic monopoles, which are hypothetical elementary particles, this Canadian-led research “marks a significant milestone in the search for magnetic monopoles. Pinfold said, “In a sense, the magnetic monopole is the brother of the electron?.”
A native British Columbian, Scott Douglas Jacobsen is an AU undergrad and AUSU Councillor. He researches and runs In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, and In-Sight Publishing.