Introducing the world’s biggest science fest

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 4:03 PM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is covering the 2012 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, a gathering of some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science. On Feb. 16-20, Lunau will bring you a sneak peak of the latest research and findings, posting to Macleans.ca on anything from healthcare and climate change, to food security, and more. Follow her on Twitter: @Katelunau, #AAAS, #AAASmtg

Today is my last day in Toronto before I head to Vancouver for the AAAS Meeting, the annual conference of the biggest scientific society in the world (they publish the journal Science). All sorts of new research will be presented at this monster conference, which hasn’t been held outside the U.S. since 1981, when it was in Toronto. The program is a grab bag of amazing stuff: talks on the future of the ocean, the birth control pill, quantum computing, climate change, stem cells, the Arctic, the Large Hadron Collider, etc etc. It’s pretty overwhelming, and I know I’ll spend the next few days running around like crazy trying to fit in as much as I can.

A few of the session descriptions have left me really curious, like the one on “archaeoacoustics” (how ancient societies designed their ritual spaces to evoke emotion through sound), and another on fake meat, grown in a lab. There will be plenty of science stars in attendance, too, like RIM’s Mike Lazaridis, Carl Wieman from the White House, and Steve MacLean of the Canadian Space Agency.

Until Monday afternoon, when the meeting wraps up, I will be writing up sciency storm. You can find me @Katelunau and here, at Macleans.ca.

Mini’s massive storm

By Kate Lunau - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Radu Sigheti/Reuters

As of last week, a cold snap across Eastern Europe was responsible for at least 175 deaths. For BMW, the parent company of Mini Cooper, the bad weather had an unfortunate association. Hired to promote the Mini Cooper Roadster, an ad firm bought naming rights to the cold front before it wreaked havoc—and named it “Cooper,” after the car. (The ad agency and BMW have since apologized.) The Free University of Berlin’s meteorological institute sells naming rights to high- and low-pressure systems in Central Europe, which the ad firm must have hoped would raise awareness of the Cooper brand. “People take the same risk when they associate themselves with a cause or a sports team, or use a celebrity endorser,” says Kenneth Wong, a marketing professor at Queen’s School of Business. The problem is that the weather is more unpredictable than, say, Tiger Woods—and a bigger danger to others.

Thomas Reginald Joseph Irvine

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Ian Phillips

Thomas Reginald Joseph Irvine was born on Sept. 29, 1971, to Reg and Judy Irvine in the German city of Lahr. “I was in the infantry, a ground-pounder,” says Reg, who served in the Canadian Forces for almost four decades. His wife, Judy, was a homemaker, caring for Thomas and his brother Jeffrey, who was older by four years. “I told her when I married her, ‘You will never work. You will be a mother to my boys,’ ” Reg says. “She raised them with love.” While Reg was stationed in Germany, he and Judy would travel when they could to see more of Europe. “We went to Venice, to Amsterdam, to Italy, and to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower,” Reg says. “It was an education.” Thomas and Jeffrey were too young to remember these trips when they got older, but the family took photos “so we could show them, years later,” Reg says. “They couldn’t believe they’d been there.”

In 1976, Reg was stationed to Petawawa, Ont., and moved back to Canada with his family, “and that’s where the problems began.” At just five years old, Thomas’s weight was ballooning out of control. He was teased mercilessly everywhere he went: “in school, in restaurants, at the Ottawa Exhibition, at the War Museum,” Reg says. “I was never [home] that much. My wife spent hours talking to his teachers, and took him out of school. It was the worst a child could go through. You don’t know what it’s like, when somebody’s humiliated so bad—he’d come home crying, upset with the whole world. It was a scar on his mind, to be treated like that.”

In 1982, Reg was posted to the military base in Gagetown, N.B., and the family moved again. Even in their new home, Thomas was cruelly mocked and ostracized for his size. His weight had reached nearly 400 lb. “One day, when he was 11 or 12, I sat down with him, man to man,” Reg recalls. “I said, ‘We’re going to beat it.’ I said, ‘I’m in the army, and my job is physical training.’ So I took him down to the bottom of the hill. It’s a [steep] incline, and six miles from home. And I said, ‘I’ll see you at home, you know where it is.’ And when he arrived, two or three hours later, he was soaking wet from top to bottom. Of course, we were worried. And I said, ‘He ain’t gonna quit.’ And he never quit, he never did.”

Continue…

REVIEW: Heft

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:45 AM - 0 Comments

Arthur Opp is a morbidly obese recluse who dropped out of academia after a scandal, retreated to his Brooklyn home, and hasn’t been outside in 10 years. Kel Keller is a high school baseball star whose life seems perfect, but is really coming apart at the seams. Moore’s novel is narrated by these two characters, who are connected by Charlene, Kel’s mother and Arthur’s former student and friend.

Arthur’s peaceful if lonely existence is interrupted one day by a phone call from Charlene, with whom he’d lost touch. Charlene asks if he might tutor her son Kel to help him get into college, a request that makes Arthur deeply uncomfortable. Writing a letter to Charlene, he tells her: “The first thing you must know about me is that I am colossally fat,” thinking his deterioration after years alone in his house would shock her.

Charlene has problems of her own. Lonely and depressed, she’s become an alcoholic, and Kel bears the brunt of it. Spending his days juggling a teenager’s life and caring for his mother, Kel doesn’t want to go to college. He dreams of playing baseball for the Mets, his father’s favourite team, which he believes could bring the two of them closer together—his dad disappeared when he was a kid.

Moore’s style is light and engaging, if at times a bit too quirky. The best part of her book is Arthur, who comes to life as a sweet, vulnerable person whose voice is surprisingly relatable and wonderfully unique; Kel’s narration can sometimes seem flat by comparison. Even so, with Heft, Moore has managed to create a novel that’s uplifting despite its somewhat dark and heavy subject matter, just as its title suggests.

How two adventurers circumnavigated Ellesmere Island

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Eric Boomer

Jon Turk and Erik Boomer recently completed a circumnavigation of Ellesmere Island, in Nunavut—the first time this has ever been done, so far as published history tells us. It took them 104 days to complete the 2,400-km trip by ski, sea kayak and on foot. Boomer is a professional photographer; Turk is a science writer who’s lived in the North and now splits his time between Montana and British Columbia. Maclean’s spoke to Boomer, 26, in San Diego, Calf., and Turk, 66, in Fernie, B.C.

Q: Why Ellesmere Island?

JT: In 1988, I travelled there, and I totally fell in love with the place. Ellesmere is one of the most wild and pristine places on Earth. I thought, I would like to circumnavigate Ellesmere. I decided it was impossible, and shelved it. But something was nagging at me that I was just making excuses for myself, that it really was possible. Years went by.

Now I’m in my mid-sixties, and I said I have to go into the ice one more time. I was planning the trip with [professional kayaker] Tyler Bradt. He recommended we bring another person: his friend Erik Boomer. We plan the trip, ship food, get the boats, get the sponsors, and then Tyler breaks his back doing a waterfall jump in his kayak. [He has since recovered.] So it’s just me and Boomer. There was a big question: do we go or do we wait? And I say, I can’t wait. I’m pushing the age barrier, and if we push this off a couple of more years I’m out, so we’ve got to do it now.

EB: I wrote down the pros and cons—the worst case scenario of being rescued, starving, not making it, failure. I wrote out the pros and after looking at it, it was pretty obvious I wanted to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity I was given.

Q: How did the trip begin?

EB: We took off for Ellesmere Island at the beginning of May and headed out on the circumnavigation [leaving from Grise Fiord, Nunavut] May 7. We headed out on completely frozen sea ice, and we were pulling sea kayaks over that ice. Our kayaks were packed with all our gear: sleeping bag, stove, fuel, tent, water, lots of food. You’re skiing on cross-country skis, and pulling this 220-lb. kayak. You basically become a hauling machine.

The 24-hour Arctic sun was something I wasn’t used to, and allowed you to have really big, full days. Ellesmere Island has some of the highest mountains in the Arctic Circle. Along our right the whole way, there were these 3,000 to 6,000-ft. peaks reaching down into the ocean. It was quite amazing. At times, you’re weaving through this maze of these deep blue icebergs.

JT: It’s not flat ice. You have currents and wind and the ice starts to freeze, and then buckles. You have chunks of ice that can be two metres thick and 10 m high, and vertical, or near-vertical. It becomes very important to your mode of travel what the ice is like, and what the seascape is like—how smooth it is, how much you’re going to have to drag your boats over 10-m-high chunks of blue ice. The mountains were pretty background scenery, but I remember the intimate moment-by-moment structure of the ice.

Q: Did you have any close encounters with the wildlife you encountered?

JT: We had lots of beautiful moments with wildlife, and some intense ones. This one day, we were sleeping, and the wind was blowing, and the tent had a billowing motion in the wind. You learn to sleep with that; it’s soothing. All of a sudden there was a different motion. A polar bear had bitten a hole in our tent and stuck its face inside.

EB: When you encounter a bear, you’re such a foreign object that they’re extremely curious. I always had the gun ready when they were within attack range, just in case. And we would do everything in our power to let them know that we were a potential threat, and if they mess with us, they’re going to get hurt. When that bear put its head in our tent, we looked it in the eyes and yelled and screamed, and luckily we convinced him we were tougher than he was. I never thought I’d be tough-talking a polar bear.

Walruses are also really big and aggressive, and they know how to use their tusks. Another day, in the early morning, we were paddling through a really beautiful iceberg area, it was so serene and monotonous. Literally in the snap of a finger, this walrus exploded out of the water and I found myself bracing. It charged me multiple times and I couldn’t get away—it was incredibly scary, and I felt really vulnerable. I had about a 15- to 20-second struggle, and then, just as quick as it came, it was gone. It was almost like a dream.

JT: That was scarier than any of our polar bear encounters. With bears, you have time.

Q: How did the conditions change?

JT: We started out on solid ice. And then went to melting ice, where there’s meltwater on top and you’re pulling through slush. When we got to the northeast corner, where Ellesmere and Greenland are just 12 miles apart, it was early July, and summer is progressing, and the ice starts to break up. To the north there’s no more land, it’s just the North Pole ice cap. And you have this old, multi-year, roughed-up, banged-up ice flowing down from an ocean full of ice, pushed into a strait that’s 12 miles across, smashing into these cliffs. This is the kind of compression that sunk many, many ships. You get into that kind of compression and it breaks things. Certainly it will kill a kayaker.

We get here and go, ‘How are we going to get through this?’ By working the tides and momentary lapses in the wind, staying very close to shore, we eked along the coast about 17 miles in 17 days, going really short distances, working really hard. Sometimes we paddled at high tide, and then a big chunk of ice would come in and leave us a channel, and we’ll paddle a few hundred yards to a mile. Sometimes we unloaded our boats and carried them on land to the next spot. During that time period, we were getting frustrated because we weren’t getting anywhere. One day we said, this is crazy, we have to make a move. So we went out on the ice floe.

EB: We went out to the ice and hopped on, and literally sailed a massive ice chunk through the channel. We had our GPS out, and we’re moving one mile an hour south, feeling like we’re on a huge cruise ship, and we’re about to get around this point we’d not yet been around. So we set up tent [on the ice floe] and decided to let her go. We were startled to wake up in the middle of the night to find we’re going three miles an hour, and when we checked our heading, we were going three miles an hour north, and we were blown into the ocean from where we’d begun this ice journey.

Q: What happened?

EB: We were once again humbled and scared by the power of nature and the power of the ice. We hightailed it back to shore in this lull period between tides when the water doesn’t move much for an hour. We had to work our way back up the coast to get back where we were. It wasn’t until the wind blew from the southwest, which didn’t happen that often, that it pulled the ice off and created a channel for us to paddle through.

JT: The ice seemed to be dispersing. So we got up at nine in the morning, we paddled out, looked at the ice, got terrified, and ran back to camp. We went out again in the late afternoon, and the same thing happened. And then, at nine at night, it really seemed like the wind was holding the ice off, and we had room to paddle in. So we paddled out, looked at each other and said, we’ve got to go for it.

Q: How was the finish?

JT: The last two days of the trip were easy paddling. We had a good time of it. We cruised in. But my body had been fighting so hard to stay functional that once it was no longer imperative to function, it let its guard down. Thirty-nine hours after completing the trip, I went into total metabolic shutdown. It was really scary. The clinic in Grise Fiord contacted the global rescue we had an insurance policy through, who contacted a medical team at Johns Hopkins University. They said, ‘Go get him, he’s dying.’ They flew me to Ottawa General hospital. I was met there by a team of nine doctors. And they whipped me back into shape. I just needed to be jump-started.

EB: It was really amazing that it didn’t happen out on the land, where it would take even longer to get him evacuated.

Q: How did it feel to complete a circumnavigation of Ellesmere Island, something that had never been done?

EB: I just feel honoured and lucky I was able to be a part of it. The most powerful thing out there is this overwhelming sense of freedom, and a sense of knowing you could kind of go anywhere. And there’s nothing out there to distract you.

JT: This is something that’s been on my mind since 1988 and I’ve completed it. But that sense of accomplishment is the least of my feelings. I’ve had a lifetime of adventuring, and I set out to go into the ice, and to live in this landscape one last time. It’s not like I’m going to retire and never go outside again, but I’m never going to push my body this hard again. And so for me, there was this wonderful feeling of accomplishing this goal, and also this, not really a sadness, just it is what it is. You get old. This is what happens. But just the fond reminiscing of this life I’ve lived, and to realize that I’m not going to go there again.

L.L. Bean celebrates 100 years with a Bootmobile

By Kate Lunau - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Newscom

American clothing company L.L. Bean—best known for selling outdoor apparel, like fleece jackets and its iconic “duck” boots—recently joined an exclusive club. This year, it turns 100, a rare achievement in the corporate world that puts the Freeport, Maine-based company on a list next to giants like IBM, General Electric and Chevron. The first product ever sold by L.L. Bean was the Maine Hunting Shoe, designed by outdoorsman Leon Leonwood Bean, who crafted a model with a rubber sole and shell and sold it by mail. Part of L.L. Bean’s success stems from the fact that it hasn’t strayed too far from its roots (this year it expects to sell half a million pairs of duck boots). A little marketing savvy helps too. To celebrate its anniversary, the company created a “Bootmobile,” a 20-foot-long truck that looks like a boot, which will drive around the country drumming up goodwill (and more sales).

The touch-screen classroom

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Courtesy of Michelle Lui

At Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ont., students are banned from using their cellphones in the hallways. In Eric Moccio’s classroom, it’s a different story. Moccio, who teaches music and media arts, employs his students’ phones as a teaching tool: he recently had them vote via text message on the topic of an upcoming video project. Moccio projected a live chart to the front of the class, which “readjusted to show numbers as votes came in, American Idol-style,” he says. Another time, he ran a scavenger hunt, texting clues to students as they searched through the school. (That day, he got special permission from administration, and each student carried a signed note of permission to use their phone.) Today’s smartphones can do much more than just make calls; “they’re computers,” Moccio says, and with so many students carrying powerful devices in their pockets these days, “we’d be fools not to use them.”

Despite the technology-rich environment that surrounds kids outside school walls, most classrooms are lagging. Administrators worry that the use of phones, iPods and tablets could cause distractions, promote the rise of cyberbullying and other bad behaviour, and maybe erode literacy skills, fretting that students might start including textisms like “CUL8R” in their essays. While some school boards have resorted to bans on some technologies, not all educators agree that’s a good idea. In September, the Toronto District School Board, Canada’s largest, reversed a rule that personal devices should be turned off and out of sight within its schools, after trustees recognized that smartphones and other devices might actually enhance student learning. Now, teachers like Moccio are experimenting with new ways to use not only smartphones but tablet computers and interactive whiteboards. Indeed, proponents say that, at its best, technology can change virtually any place into a classroom—or transform a classroom into somewhere as remote and different as a Borneo rainforest.

Perhaps no school board has embraced the smartphone’s potential like the one in St. Mary’s City, Ohio, which offers a glimpse of how lessons might be taught in the future: through what’s called “mobile learning.” There, the board buys smartphones and distributes them to kids in Grades 3 to 5. (Calling and texting are disabled, and the Internet is filtered.) These phones come equipped with specialized software, including an animation program and PiCoMap, a brainstorming tool, and each one has a slide-out keyboard.

Continue…

Bidding adieu to “mademoiselle”

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

In the town of Cesson-Sévigné, in western France, unmarried women will no longer be referred to as “mademoiselle”—as of Jan. 1, the title (which means “miss”) has been banned from official forms, and all women are to be referred to as “madame.” The move is an attempt to get rid of “anything that could be seen as discriminatory or indiscreet,” a statement from town hall said.

Across France, a growing number insist a woman’s title shouldn’t be defined by her marital status. Two feminist groups have mounted a campaign to get rid of the word “mademoiselle” from official documents, and with it the suggestion that an unwed woman is either a young girl, or a spinster. “Some women appreciate being called ‘mademoiselle,’ and find it flattering,” their website says, while insisting that it’s “nothing less than sexism. It seems that only marriage, and a husband, can confer legitimate social status.”

The French aren’t alone in moving away from this distinction: in Germany, “fräulein” fell out of use as a title for unmarried women in 1972. But even “madame” implies that a woman is married. Proponents of the switch might look for a French equivalent of “Ms.,” doing away altogether with female titles that imply a marital status.

Italian ovens are hot, hot, hot

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

When lifelong friends John Dawson and Todd Vestby decided to open an Italian restaurant in Toronto, they figured they’d need a wood-burning oven. So they imported one from Italy made from special heat-absorbent clay. “It came in six pieces,” says Dawson, sipping coffee at F’Amelia’s butcher board-topped bar on a recent morning. “It took eight guys just to unload it from the truck.” Two days later, the oven was assembled; after, “we fired it for seven days to dry the clay slowly, starting with a small fire and doubling it every day.” The oven turns out delicate Neapolitan-style pizzas, blasted for just 90 seconds in intense 650° F heat; it sits behind the bar, where diners can watch the flames inside.

F’Amelia is just the latest to install a wood-burning oven, which have been popping up in restaurants, parks, and backyards across the country. Of course, local builders are perfectly capable of making them, but for some restaurateurs, only Italian-made will do. Transporting one of these monsters across the Atlantic isn’t for the faint of heart. F’Amelia’s competition, Pizzeria Libretto, has brought over three for its two locations; unlike the oven at F’Amelia, theirs were assembled in Naples. “The last time we shipped two ovens over, they got to Montreal, and we were randomly chosen to search for weapons and drugs and pornography,” says owner Max Rimaldi. “That held us up a couple weeks.” When the ovens finally arrived they were a bit banged up, so Rimaldi flew in the man who built them to do the repairs.

Olivier Reynaud, who owns Rouge Restaurant in Calgary, emigrated to Canada in 1999. He used to have a restaurant in Andorra (between France and Spain) with a wood-burning oven, and making pizzas was one of its many jobs. “At the end of the night, I would let the oven cool down and, just before leaving, I’d put in an iron pot of cassoulet and leave it overnight,” he says. “It would be done in the morning, with a nice smoky flavour.” Reynaud doesn’t have a wood-burning oven at Rouge, known for its upscale French food, but he installed an Italian-made one in his backyard. “I cooked a 20-lb. Thanksgiving turkey in it,” he says. “We had it brine overnight,” then cooked it at a low temperature, covered in foil. “It was very juicy, and not at all dry.” F’Amelia uses its oven to bake bread, too.

Continue…

Driveway cash flow

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

On his way to see the San Francisco Giants play, Anthony Eskinazi was looking for somewhere to park close to the stadium, when he noticed an empty spot in front of a house nearby. Most people would have just kept circling the block, but he sensed a business opportunity. Eskinazi is the founder of ParkatmyHouse.com, an online service that helps drivers rent spaces from people who don’t need them. Available in the U.K. since 2006, it’s expanding into North America.

ParkatmyHouse.com, which calls itself the “world’s largest online parking marketplace,” helps home and business owners looking for some extra cash to rent out unused parking spaces to drivers who need the convenience; the site handles the booking process. With an investment from German carmaker BMW (through BMW i Ventures, its investment arm), the company is moving into major U.S. cities, like New York and Washington. No Canadian cities are available yet, but as any urban driver can attest, we could use the extra spots.

Brave, new livable worlds

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 7:49 PM - 0 Comments

Asking for an outbreak of preventable diseases

By Kate Lunau and Martin Patriquin - Monday, January 9, 2012 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph By Andrew Tolson

On April 8, Pierre Lavallée took a call from Quebec’s public health office. Lavallée was into his fifth and last year as principal at Marie-Rivier high school in Drummondville, a town of about 67,000 an hour’s drive east of Montreal. He learned that a school employee had gone to the emergency room with a fever and rash the day before. Doctors quickly isolated the woman and rushed her to intensive care, where she was diagnosed with measles, a highly contagious and potentially deadly virus. According to the World Health Organization, measles was eradicated from the Americas in 2002.

Later, just after four o’clock, Lavallée received a fax from Dr. Danièle Samson, the director of infectious diseases for the region. “The staff and students at Marie-Rivier were in contact with a person very likely suffering from measles,” it began. The letter was to be forwarded to 1,475 students and staff, but most had already left for the weekend, so it was only circulated the following Monday. “I actually had measles when I was six or seven years old,” says Lavallée. “It was 40 years since I’d even heard of it popping up.”

Thus began what the Quebec government calls by far the worst measles outbreak in the Americas in 20 years. Over the next eight months, 763 cases were reported in the province, the vast majority in Mauricie and Centre-du-Quebec, a region that includes Drummondville. Roughly 11 per cent of those who were infected were hospitalized. Even a few who were inoculated as children caught the virus. “I didn’t think I could get it,” says Pascal Tarakdjian, 38, a science teacher at Marie-Rivier and the second confirmed case at the school. “I went to the hospital and told the staff that I might have measles symptoms, but they didn’t react because they didn’t know.”

Continue…

The enduring stereotype of the male nurse

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Todd Korol

One recent November day, Tyler Hume, a 20-year-old nursing student, was at work in the maternity ward of Calgary’s Foothills Medical Centre. Tending to a patient who’d just given birth, he listened to her heart and checked other vital signs, then moved on to her new baby. Being a male nurse in a maternity unit can be tricky, he says—but as one of just a handful of men in the University of Calgary’s entire faculty of nursing, Hume is used to feeling like the odd man out sometimes. “It’s unconscious things, like when [an instructor] is talking about a nursing action, and always refers to the nurse as ‘she,’ ” he says. To create a resource for men in the program, he co-founded the Nursing Guys’ Group, a club for male nursing students.

This fall, 13 per cent of the high school students admitted to the University of Calgary’s nursing program were male, an all-time high. Across the country, the number of male nurses has doubled in the past decade, according to the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), and now sits at roughly six per cent. But, compared to other professions that suffer from a gender imbalance, nursing is still incredibly skewed. Consider the fact that about 19 per cent of Canadian police officers are female, or that upwards of 30 per cent of elementary school teachers are male. The CNA predicts we’ll be short about 60,000 nurses by 2015, but there are no national strategies to attract more men into the profession. Calgary’s Nursing Guys’ Club is one of the few supports that’s been set up specifically for male nurses, who still face what Hume calls a “societal stigma.”

Male nurses have long been viewed as “less masculine,” notes a study in the American Journal of Men’s Health in November that attempts to put this stereotype to bed. Researchers took a survey of male and female nursing students across the U.S., scoring them based on certain personality traits. It concluded that the nursing profession attracts “males who hold a high degree of masculinity.” The fact that researchers bother to study questions like this might seem surprising, but gender-driven clichés about the nursing profession go back generations: for women, it’s “Hot Lips” Houlihan, or the “sexy nurse” Halloween costume. If female nurses are over-sexualized, male nurses are just the opposite, like Ben Stiller’s goofy character in Meet the Parents. On the TV show Scrubs, one of the main characters (a female doctor) finds herself attracted to a “murse,” despite her initial aversion to his profession.

Continue…

Revenge of the nerd stocks

By Kate Lunau - Monday, December 19, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

On Dec. 6, Alec Baldwin was booted off an American Airlines flight after he refused to stop playing Words With Friends, an addictive Scrabble-like game from Zynga Inc., which makes free online games. Famous for its Facebook offerings like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, Zynga enjoyed a publicity boost that couldn’t have been better timed: it’s going public this week, in what observers say is the largest initial public offering (IPO) from a U.S. Internet company since Google Inc., in 2004. Zynga isn’t the only free online games maker causing an investor frenzy. Last week, Asian rival Nexon Corp. set the price for its $1.2-billion IPO, said to be Japan’s biggest all year.

These companies might offer their games for free, but both have found ways to get people to spend real money once they’re playing. In Nexon’s popular MapleStory, for example, couples who wish to get “married” have to fork over $25 for the wedding package. (About three-quarters end in divorce and after 10 days players can remarry.) Only three per cent of Zynga’s 227 million monthly users are paying players, chief executive Mark Pincus told potential investors last week. Even so, that didn’t stop its IPO from being worth almost $1 billion.

A 19th-century canine mystery solved

By Kate Lunau - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 4:15 PM - 0 Comments

Oral tradition suggests that blankets, robes and other textiles made by the Coast Salish—a First Nations people from southern B.C. and northern Washington state—were made with dog hair, although some researchers doubted these claims. Historical accounts told of a small “Pomeranian-type dog” bred for its woolly coat until the mid-19th century, says Susan Heald, senior textile conservator at the Smithsonian Institution; the breed disappeared after contact with Europeans. Maybe because it was lost, “some people had their doubts about whether they really used dog hair,” she says, or whether that was simply a legend. Now modern science has put the debate to rest. Using cutting-edge equipment, researchers have confirmed dog hair was indeed used in Coast Salish weaving.

A team led by Caroline Solazzo of the University of York studied 25 different samples, mostly dating from the early to mid-19th century, extracting proteins to pinpoint distinct sequences of amino acids. “Each species has a unique sequence,” says Solazzo, reached over the phone from Paris. They found dog hair in all the textiles produced before 1862, often blended with goat hair, suggesting it might have been used as a bulking material. Sheep wool was incorporated after contact with European traders increased and commercial products became more available.

Coast Salish weaving is an “active tradition,” which is enjoying a resurgence today, says Heald, who collaborated with Solazzo on the study. While weavers don’t use dog hair in their textiles anymore, this research is important, she says, because it confirms a part of the community’s history. As for the dog itself, no photographic records exist, she adds, but it was depicted in paintings and described in explorers’ accounts. According to Heald, “it looked like a small, woolly white dog with its tail curling up.”

Bragging their way to the top

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

There’s a serious lack of women in the top ranks of business, but maybe that’s because men are better braggers, says a new study. U.S. and Spanish researchers asked M.B.A. students to do math problems, finding that men and women performed about the same. But when they were asked to recall how well they scored over a year later, the men ranked their performance 30 per cent better than it actually was; for women, it was 15 per cent.

Participants were then asked to do the math problems in groups, with each group picking a leader. Cash was offered to whichever team won, making sure teams picked a leader they felt was strongest; some leaders got cash incentives, too, adding a reason to boast about their past results. Both men and women were willing to lie, they found, but men exaggerated their abilities more. Women were selected one-third less often as leaders.

Researchers chalked it up to “honest overconfidence,” since men seem to unconsciously inflate their abilities, and warned employers not to mistake this for true performance. “It’s not just a matter of telling men not to lie,” says co-author Ernesto Reuben of Columbia Business School, since men seem to honestly believe their skills are that good—a finding likely to induce some eye-rolling among female counterparts.

Entrances: She’s the one to watch

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Stephen Fernandez / Splash News

TAVI GEVINSON

Since starting her blog Style Rookie at the tender age of 11, the now-15-year-old has taken the fashion world by storm: she’s inspired a line of designer duds from Rodarte, snagged a spot in the front row at runway shows and reviewed collections for Harper’s Bazaar. Now she’s conquering publishing, too. Working with established editors like Jane Pratt of Sassy, Gevinson launched Rookie, an online magazine for teen girls. Even the Grey Lady took notice: the young media mogul’s launch was covered in the New York Times.

HEATHER RUSSELL

Like him or not, razor-tongued tastemaker Simon Cowell knows talent when he sees it. So when he signed a deal with the 10-year-old Toronto singer, she was anointed the next big thing. Like Justin Bieber, Russell’s singing attracted thousands of views on YouTube, where she can be seen performing You’re Beautiful, a song she wrote when she was all of eight; her voice, which sounds mature beyond her years, has fans comparing her to Mariah Carey. If Cowell has his way, Russell will be the next Canadian Idol.

Continue…

Young, divorced and stigmatized

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Denise Truscello/WireImage

Wedding season can be demanding, no matter how great the parties or how happy the couples. For Malik, a 26-year-old from Oshawa, Ont., who attended three weddings this summer, it was especially tough because he was keeping a secret from his friends. At an age when many of them are settling down, he’s in the process of separating from his wife. Soon, he’ll be divorced. “It is really isolating. I still haven’t told everybody,” says Malik, who asked that his real name not be used so friends wouldn’t learn of the split in Maclean’s. “I’m going to a wedding at the end of November for one of my closest friends. I don’t have the heart to tell him, ‘I’m going through a divorce, but congratulations.’ ”

A glut of books, movies and magazine stories suggests Malik’s situation isn’t unique: consider the recent, impossible-to-avoid breakups of stars Zooey Deschanel and Kim Kardashian after two years and 72 days of marriage, respectively. (Kardashian’s divorce attracted nearly as much attention as her over-the-top wedding, minus the televised special.)

But even if the celebrity cycle and the Eat Pray Love juggernaut would suggest that marriages are fizzing out in record numbers, that’s actually far from true. Four in 10 of the Canadian couples who married in 2008 will be divorced by 2035, according to a report from the Vanier Institute of the Family, an Ottawa-based think tank, and the rate has been relatively stable for more than a decade. That year, there were 70,229 divorces across the country, a four per cent drop from the year before—and a full 27 per cent lower than in 1987, the year after amendments to the Divorce Act made breaking up easier, legally speaking.

Continue…

The next man on the moon may well be Chinese

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Qin Xian’an/Xinhua/Corbis

On Sept. 29, at a remote location in the Gobi Desert, China launched its Tiangong-1 space module into the night sky. With President Hu Jintao and other dignitaries looking on, China’s Long March rocket blasted off just after 9 p.m.; 10 minutes later, Tiangong-1 (the name translates as “Heavenly Palace”) broke away from the rocket, deploying solar panels for power, and continued into orbit.

In terms of technology, Tiangong-1 isn’t a major step forward. The Chinese spacelab, currently unmanned, has a small compartment where up to three astronauts can stay for short periods; it’s been compared to NASA’s Skylab, launched in 1973, or Russia’s first space station, launched in 1971. But China isn’t dallying: since its manned space program was approved in 1992, it has moved at breathtaking speed. China launched an astronaut into space in 2003, becoming one of just three nations with its own human space flight capabilities (the U.S. and Russia are the other two). Last year, for the first time, it launched more satellites than the U.S., and it’s the only country building a space station by itself. After 2020, China hopes to put a man on the moon. “They’re trying to place themselves in the category of superpower,” says Swansea University’s Michael Sheenan, who studies international space politics. “The Tiangong-1 launch is a step in that direction.”

What China’s space program lacks in technology and experience, it makes up for in financial resources and political will. “It’s very hard to do manned space flight in democracies,” says Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. The Chinese space program is closely linked to its government, which—without an electorate to worry about—has been able to push ahead with its ambitious goals.

Continue…

Where the clinic hits the road

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Nayan Sthankiya

At home and in her job, Jodi Spence has to deal with other people’s health problems—major and minor—on a nearly daily basis. She’s the mother of four kids, all under eight, one of whom has a heart rhythm disorder. She’s also director of a daycare centre located inside a Saskatoon high school that watches over the babies of adolescent moms while they’re in class. So, whether it’s a baby’s rash, a teen who needs birth control, or her daughter requiring a medication refill for her heart condition, “I probably [go for medical attention] once a week,” says Spence, 32. Instead of visiting an overcrowded emergency room or her family doctor, who’s often booked solid for the day, Spence goes to the Health Bus—Saskatoon’s walk-in clinic on wheels.

A retrofitted 1976 RV that launched in 2008, the Saskatoon Health Bus parks at different spots around Saskatoon’s inner-city neighbourhoods—outside a Giant Tiger store, the Safeway or a Shell station, for example—seven days a week, year round, seeing an average of 12 to 14 clients a day. A nurse practitioner and paramedic are on the bus, offering medical attention to anyone who stops by, whether they have a health card with them or not. Known as the “Magic Bus,” it’s been so successful that, on Nov. 24, the rickety old RV will be replaced with a new model.

The Health Bus was created as a way to reach out to Saskatoon’s Aboriginal population, newcomers, children, the elderly and others who might not have regular access to a doctor, says Sheila Achilles, director of primary health and chronic disease management at Saskatoon Regional Health, which oversees the program. “There are family physicians in the area, but people aren’t going to see them,” Achilles says. And unlike patients who visit a series of walk-in clinics and emergency rooms, those who come back to the Health Bus get some continuity of care. “People who visit feel very safe,” Achilles says, and because it’s mobile, it can reach different people in different parts of the city.

Continue…

Long trip to nowhere

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

Oleg Voloshin/AFP/Getty Images

On Nov. 4, six figures emerged pale and blinking from a windowless module stationed in a Moscow parking lot. These men—three Russians, one Chinese, a Frenchman and an Italian—spent 520 days locked up inside, simulating a flight to Mars and back, an experiment run by Russia’s Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency. Upon emerging, French crew member Romain Charles said the Earth-based mission proves that “a human journey to the red planet is possible”—or, at least, that surviving the isolation of long-distance space travel could be.

To kill time, the crew performed experiments and stayed in touch with loved ones, although communications were delayed, like on an actual mission. August was the toughest, says a blog post from Charles; family and friends were on holiday, and the best food had been consumed. But the men, who were paid about $100,000 each (China didn’t reveal a price), came out undeterred. As Charles said, “We’re ready to embark on the next spaceship going there.”

The end of blood samples?

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

When Virginia Commonwealth University’s first-year students arrived on campus this fall, they received a seemingly bizarre invitation—to “Spit for Science.” A team of researchers at VCU, which is based in Richmond, is looking into whether genes might predispose some individuals to struggle with drug and alcohol use, or emotional problems. To accomplish this, they asked students to take part in a confidential survey: first they had to fill out an online questionnaire about their moods, their behaviour and relationships, and then provide a saliva sample, which is rich in DNA. These samples were collected with a unique device created by DNA Genotek, an Ottawa-based company that corners the market on high-tech spittoons.

As much as 70 per cent of the cells in saliva are white blood cells, which contain DNA, says company president Ian Curry. With this product, “you spit into a tube, and the device releases the DNA from inside the cells,” he says. It’s much less invasive than a blood sample, which makes it popular with scientists: instead of summoning study participants into a clinic to provide blood, health researchers can actually send out these devices by regular mail, have them provide a saliva sample, and then mail it back to the lab for testing. Unsurprisingly, Curry notes that participants in a lab study are much more likely to provide a saliva sample than blood.

“Spit for Science” is just one example of the many ways this sampler is being used. DNA Genotek (which was acquired by Pennsylvania-based OraSure Technologies in August) has thousands of clients around the world, according to Curry, and scientists are using the device to study everything from obesity to tropical disease. “Just two millilitres of saliva,” he says, “gives a researcher enough DNA to study for a decade.”

Is Canada ready for human trials on stem cell therapy?

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Colin O'Connor

Before his accident, Mike Kowalski loved fast motorcycles. At 26, he rode his bike from his home in Markham, Ont., three hours north to Haliburton—it has “nice roads and less cops,” he says—when he took a turn too fast. Hitting a gravel patch, Kowalski lost control. His first and only motorcycle crash left him paralyzed from the chest down. Devastated, he tried to be optimistic: rapid advances in stem cells seemed to suggest powerful new treatments on the horizon. “I was mentally prepared for five years,” Kowalski says. “Not to be back where I was, but that I’d be using a cane instead of a wheelchair.”

Kowalski kept up with the latest research, attending conferences and chatting with scientists about their work in stem cells. As time went by, and treatments failed to materialize in North America, he got increasingly frustrated. Two years after his accident, he went to Taiwan, where an experimental “nerve cocktail” was injected into his spine. Five years later, he went to Beijing and received an embryonic stem cell transplant. Neither treatment, which cost about $20,000 each, made much of a difference, he says. He kept waiting. “Five years came and went, and then 10.” It’s now been 11 years, and Kowalski still uses a wheelchair. “It seems incomprehensible that we can fix rats in a lab and fly rovers to Mars,” he says, “but we can’t regenerate some nerves in my spine.”

Stem cells, which can grow into any cell type in the body, have been touted as a potential cure for everything from type 1 diabetes to stroke. They aren’t without controversy—embryonic stem cells come from discarded human embryos—but they hold huge promise, too. This is certainly true when it comes to spinal cord injury, a devastating condition that affects about 86,000 Canadians. Unlike muscles, organs, skin and blood, the central nervous system can’t repair itself; despite huge advances in treatment and rehabilitation for this type of injury, the damage is often permanent. In theory, stem cells could be injected into a damaged spinal cord to promote repair. Now one influential Toronto neurosurgeon says it’s time to take stem cells out of the lab and into the clinic.

Continue…

The space race is quickly becoming a commercial endeavour

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

Dennis Van Tine/AP

On Aug. 24, an unmanned Russian cargo spaceship bound for the International Space Station (ISS) crashed in eastern Russia, sent down by engine failure in its Soyuz carrier rocket. Russia temporarily grounded all launches to the ISS to investigate, but the crash underlined a pressing problem: since the U.S. retired its aging fleet of space shuttles in July, any astronaut or cargo heading to the space station has no choice but to hitch a ride with Russia. For a ride on the Soyuz, NASA pays about $56 million per seat—and the cost will go up to $62.7 million in 2014.

It must be a blow to American pride. The U.S. doesn’t want to rely on Russian rockets forever, and other nations like China are pushing ahead with ambitious space programs. But NASA doesn’t plan on building more shuttles. The U.S. space agency is shifting its focus to deep space exploration, and intends to buy rides into low Earth orbit (where the space station is) from private companies instead.

Like a commercial airline, these companies will sell rides not only to NASA, but to academics, businesses, and the curious public, too. A handful of ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs are backing some of the most ambitious ventures in space travel. SpaceX was launched by Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal and is CEO of Tesla Motors; Blue Origin comes from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos; and Virgin Galactic is an offshoot of Virgin Group, founded by Sir Richard Branson. New Mexico is completing a taxpayer-financed commercial space terminal, Spaceport America, with Virgin Galactic as its anchor tenant.

Continue…