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Jan 15, 2025 | 
shorturl.at | Bruce Grierson |Richard Littlemore |Tom Leslie
Did you know that Lunar New Year is celebrated by an estimated two billion people worldwide? That means that roughly one in four people will be ringing in the Year of the Snake come January 29!For many members of UBC’s Asian community, this holiday is of particular importance, so we decided to ask alumni to share with us their favourite ways of celebrating Lunar New Year and what makes this time special for them.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
shorturl.at | Anne Trafton |Richard Littlemore |Heather Gerrie
The discovery of a four-ring carbon molecule in a distant interstellar cloud may help to reveal how our own solar system formed. An asteroid has helped researchers discover the largest molecule ever detected by radioastronomy, and the third-largest identified in space. The discovery, published in Science, provides further clues to an astrochemical mystery: Where does carbon, the building block of life, come from and go to in the universe, including in our own solar system?
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
shorturl.at | Richard Littlemore |Heather Gerrie |Chris Cannon |Jared Downing
Celebrated by more than a billion people worldwide, Diwali is India’s biggest and most important holiday. If you’ve participated in or seen photos of Diwali celebrations, you’ll know that light — whether in the form of diyas (oil lamps), candles, lanterns, or fireworks — features prominently in the festivities.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
nationalobserver.com | Richard Littlemore |Chris Hatch |John Woodside |Andy Kubrin
What do you do when the only political party that might have slowed our headlong rush to climate catastrophe completely caves on the single issue that most threatens human habitability on planet Earth? I live on the fringe. Okay, not true. I live in a smallish condo in a prosperous Vancouver neighbourhood, the kind of place where a socially progressive politician might usually attract friendly smiles, but very few votes. I’m also a liberal — though, emphatically, not a Liberal.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
canada.citizensclimatelobby.org | James Hoggan |Richard Littlemore |Michael Mann |John Vaillant
Climate Action is a Matter of Fiscal ResponsibilityBy 2050, global annual damages are estimated to be around $38 trillion, with a likely range of $19-59 trillion by 2050. Researchers have found that even with drastic cuts to CO2 emissions starting today, the world economy is already set to lose 19% of its income by 2050 due to climate change.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
l8r.it | Richard Littlemore
It’s all about squiggles on a page. Even if you have never lain on an examination table while a technician stuck electrodes all over your chest—and then flicked on the switch!—you’re likely familiar with the image of an electrocardiogram (ECG): a page of graph paper covered in wavy lines. They’re unintelligible, or seem that way to the untrained eye.
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Aug 16, 2024 | 
shorturl.at | Craig Takeuchi |Richard Littlemore |Heather Gerrie |Chris Cannon
Demanding times call for adaptive measures. As the world faces escalating challenges, UBC researchers are thinking outside the box to develop sustainable solutions to global concerns. In doing so, these innovators are drawing upon organic materials that the average person might perceive as unrelated to the issues they’re being applied to.
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Jul 19, 2024 | 
shorturl.at | Reyhana Heatherington |Richard Littlemore |Heather Gerrie |Chris Cannon
For many people, summer is an opportunity to bring their exercise routine out of the gym and into the great outdoors. But as heat waves, wildfires, and smoke-choked skies become commonplace for more communities, it’s important to safely adjust your outdoor exercise to the new realities of climate change.
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
shorturl.at | Richard Littlemore |Heather Gerrie |Chris Cannon
A wet, cool spring and spraying for invasive insects may be the reasons behind a drop in butterfly sightings this year. iNaturalist, an online service where anyone can upload their pictures or observations of plants and animals, records about 400 observations of 22 species of butterflies in Metro Vancouver from April to June, down from about 1,000 in the same period in 2023.
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May 21, 2024 | 
nationalobserver.com | Richard Littlemore
It’s not exactly a secret that the federally owned Trans Mountain has started to fill its freshly completed 1,150-kilometre pipeline from Edmonton’s refinery row to the Westridge Marine export terminal on Burrard Inlet in Metro Vancouver. But given its scale, its impact and the danger of its diluted bitumen content, the pipeline’s inauguration on April 30 was announced awfully quietly — and somewhat inaccurately.
