News
September 9, 2013
UBC zoologist Sarah Otto is using the second installment of a MacArthur 'genius grant' to help connect young research talent with agencies tackling conservation and biodiversity-related issues.
Otto’s gift of $100,000 will launch an endowment to provide on-going support for the university’s...
August 29, 2013
UBC astronomers have discovered the first Trojan asteroid sharing the orbit of Uranus, and believe 2011 QF99 is part of a larger-than-expected population of transient objects temporarily trapped by the gravitational pull of the Solar System’s giant planets.
Trojans are asteroids that share the...
August 6, 2013
Marine species are migrating toward the poles as much as 12 times faster than land-based species as a result of the warming climate, according to a new study by an international team of scientists.
The study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows marine species...
July 25, 2013
University of British Columbia researchers have apprehended tiny, elusive parasites that have plagued oysters from British Columbia to California.
First reported in 1960, Denman Island disease is caused by Mikrocytos mackini, a parasite that infects mainly Pacific oysters, and leads to unsightly...
July 18, 2013
Today at the prestigious European Physical Society meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, a new breakthrough in our understanding of neutrinos, nature’s most elusive particle, was announced. The T2K collaboration, which consists of scientists from Canada, Japan, and nine other nations, confirmed definitive...
July 18, 2013
UBC astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to track the orbital motion of 33,000 stars in one of the Galaxy’s oldest globular clusters, offering new insights into the formation of the Milky Way.
The careful examination of ‘cosmic choreography’ enabled researchers, for the first time,...
July 14, 2013
A landmark single-cell genomic study of microorgansims from sites across the globe is underscoring British Columbia's role as an 'oasis' of biodiversity. The findings, to be published Sunday in Nature, could also prompt scientists to redefine how the tree of life represents relationships among and...
July 9, 2013
UBC zoologists have developed a vaccine that may halt the spread of West Nile Virus (WNV) among common and endangered bird species.
WNV, a mosquito borne pathogen, arrived in North America in 1999 and is now endemic across the continent. In 2012 alone, WNV killed 286 people in the United States,...
July 5, 2013
Pieter Cullis, professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, has been appointed as the new Director of the UBC Life Sciences Institute.
As director, Cullis will work to nurture, expand and coordinate the work of the LSI's nine research groups and their scientists, and to raise...
July 3, 2013
The discovery of the Higgs boson was without doubt the most important of its kind in recent years. Finding the subatomic particle at the Large Haldron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss-French border made international news earlier this year—and for good reason.
It affirmed 40 years of physics in support...
