News
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Predicting how plants will fare in the heat is not so easy
June 24, 2025
Anticipating how plants will respond to rising temperatures is critical—not just for plants, but for whole ecosystems. How organisms respond to heat is often studied at small scales—such the behavior of a single leaf or branch—and then extrapolated to predict what might happen across whole… read more
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How kids can keep their maths skills sharp this summer
June 23, 2025
Parents may be looking for fun ways for their kids to avoid a summer slump and keep vital math skills razor sharp after school ends in June.Dr. Melania Alvarez (she/her), outreach and education coordinator at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences and the UBC department of mathematics,… read more
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Wildfires could be harming our oceans and disrupting their carbon storage
June 17, 2025
Wildfires pollute waterways and could affect their ability to sequester carbon, new University of British Columbia research shows. Dr. Brian Hunt, professor in the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF), and Emily Brown, IOF research scientist, discuss how wildfires affect our waters and… read more
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How to listen for the building blocks of life in space
June 16, 2025
Can chemical ingredients for life evolve in space and transfer to forming planets? UBC astrochemists are mimicking the cold confines of deep space in the lab. read more
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New major looks to break data science out of the silo
June 10, 2025
UBC’s departments of statistics and computer science have joined forces to create a new undergraduate, interdisciplinary data science program.This new major, which kicks off this fall at UBC Vancouver, joins the existing data science minor and master’s offerings on campus. “We are… read more
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Nearly five million seized seahorses just ‘tip of the iceberg’ in global wildlife smuggling
May 27, 2025
Close to five million smuggled seahorses worth an estimated CAD$29 million were seized by authorities over a 10-year span, according to a new study that warns the scale of the trade is far larger than current data suggest.Published today in Conservation Biology, the study analyzed online seizure… read more
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Rapid bedside test predicts sepsis with over 90 per cent accuracy
May 26, 2025
Canadian scientists have developed a blood test and portable device that can determine the onset of sepsis faster and more accurately than existing methods.Published today in Nature Communications, the test is more than 90 per cent accurate at identifying those at high risk of developing sepsis and… read more
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UBC chemist awarded 2025 West Coast teaching award
May 14, 2025
Dr. Anka Lekhi—a UBC professor focused on making the transition into first-year chemistry more accessible—has won a West Coast Teaching Excellence Award. read more
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First chromosome that cheats in both sexes identified in fruit flies
May 9, 2025
Some genes just don’t play fair.Researchers have uncovered a ‘selfish’ X chromosome in the fruit fly Drosophila testacea that manages to distort inheritance in both sperm and eggs. “Researchers have known about these selfish genes in males for nearly 100 years, and they've become textbook… read more
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A digestive ‘treasure chest’ shows promise for targeted drug treatment in the gut
May 1, 2025
A new approach to drug design can deliver medicine directly to the gut in mice at significantly lower doses than current inflammatory bowel disease treatments.The proof-of-concept study, published today in Science, introduced a mechanism called ‘GlycoCaging’ that releases medicine exclusively to… read more