Posts from the ‘commentary’ category

The Art of Science – The Science of Art?

We started a new unit in my grade 12 biology class yesterday, on the mechanisms of inheritance. I wanted to impress on my students how the…

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UBC’ers: What’s your guilty pleasure?

O.K. now that the talk is finished, I can relax a bit now. Organizing these Terry talks is a bit akin to being a wedding planner,…

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What’s Your Anthrome? or “If you Can’t Save Them, Name Them After Yourself”

Humanity has greater impact on global environment than “natural” forces Say goodbye to those old cliche, “pristine” environmental biomes embraced by our misguided ecology brethren of…

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Maldives 3: Return from the island paradise

Although it barely made a blip in world news, a conference of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) was held in the Maldives approximately 10…

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Contemplating Humanity’s Carbon Use Efficiency

A Little Science… I’ve spent today thinking about efficiency, namely, iron (Fe) use efficiency by phytoplankton (single celled photosynthetic organisms). Iron is primarily involved in a…

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The Way Forward in Canada’s Intervention Policy.

In the wake of complex multidimensional conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq, the principle of humanitarian intervention as an effective and robust doctrine is under threat. The…

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A Terry Science Experiment

This weekend, I attended Future Directions in Science Journalism, a unique collection of scientists, journalists, and a few others that were just interested in the future…

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My favourite Superheroes: the Judges of the Supreme Court of Pakistan

Liminal: at a boundary or transitional point between two conditions, stages in a process, or ways of life. Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan declared a…

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Is Good Scientific Journalism Possible?

I have spent the better half of the past six months trying to understand one thing: how can you effectively present primary scientific literature to the…

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A Paradigm Shift

Political science is not the only way to understand the world. It seems like a simple statement, but when I first entered the Faculty of Arts…

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