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	<title><![CDATA[InnovationCanada.ca » Showcasing Research Excellence in Canada]]></title>
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	<link>http://innovationcanada.ca</link>
	<language>en</language>
	<lastBuildDate>Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:12:04 -0400</lastBuildDate> 
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    <title><![CDATA[Keeping phones focused]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[The transparent silicon wafer is smaller than a pencil’s eraser tip and as thin as a sheet of paper. But the LensVector autofocus camera lens — the world’s tiniest — has big prospects. And it may soon turn the cellular-phone industry on its ear. Developed by Tigran Galstian, a physics and engineering professor who works out of the Centre for Optics, Photonics and Laser Technology at Université Laval, the lens is designed for miniature cameras used in cellphones, smartphones, laptop computers and other mobile devices. Unlike conventional mechanical autofocus units, which move back and forth to bring objects into focus, the LensVector lens has no moving parts, does not require a motor and, at 4.5 millimetres square and less than 0.5 millimetre thick, is a fraction of the size. It is also cheaper to produce, consumes less power, makes no noise (which is ideal for video cameras) and is less likely to break. “The architecture of the lens itself is innovative,”...]]></description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 07 Jul 2010 05:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
    <link>http://innovationcanada.ca/en/articles/keeping-phones-focused</link>
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    <title><![CDATA[Songbird secrets]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[Talk about getting a bad rap. In the extensive scientific literature about songbirds, the purple martin has long been described as a leisurely migrant that takes its time each fall flying from breeding grounds in Canada and the northern United States to its winter home in Brazil or elsewhere in South America. But in fact, this charming and colourful member of the swallow family flies an impressive 400 to 500 kilometres a day until it reaches Central America. Then it makes a two-week pit stop to regain its strength before resuming the journey at the same blistering pace. And many other migratory songbirds travel at equally extraordinary speeds, according to groundbreaking fieldwork by York University biologist Bridget Stutchbury. A Canada Research Chair in Ecology and Conservation Biology, Stutchbury has published her findings in many scientific journals as well as a book released last spring, The Bird Detective: Investigating the Secret Lives of Birds, which has become a national best-seller. Stutchbury...]]></description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
    <link>http://innovationcanada.ca/en/articles/songbird-secrets</link>
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<item>
    <title><![CDATA[Playing with fire]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[As one of the world’s most powerful natural forces, fire holds many different meanings to everyone. To some, it’s an instrument of destruction — and a cause for worry. For others, it means warmth during chilly weather, or just a way to roast marshmallows. But for George Hadjisophocleous, a Carleton University professor of Civil Engineering, playing with fire is a way of life. As Industrial Research Chair in Fire-Safety Engineering, a position created by funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and FPInnovations, Hadjisophocleous uses fire experiments — both computer simulations and real-life scenarios — to help building designers improve fire safety. His research examines both the technical and human aspects. With the help of computer models, Hadjisophocleous looks at predicting the development and spread of fires and smoke in buildings and the performance of light-frame wood buildings in a fire situation. “People...]]></description>
    <pubDate>Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
    <link>http://innovationcanada.ca/en/articles/playing-with-fire</link>
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<item>
    <title><![CDATA[Painless parenting]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[Taking a child to the emergency room or to get a routine immunization is an experience most parents dread. Instinctively, they seek to soothe their children by telling them that everything will turn out fine. But Dalhousie University researchers Meghan McMurtry and Christine Chambers have some surprising advice for parents: you’re trying too hard. All that reassurance is having the opposite effect to what parents intend — it actually makes children more distressed. “The most common things that parents say when their children are having a painful medical experience is, ‘It will be over soon’ or ‘It’s OK,’” explains Chambers, a psychologist and Canada Research Chair in Pain and Child Health. “Consistently, these types of reassuring statements have been shown to increase children’s pain and distress.” Much of Chambers’ work, which centres around trying to reduce children’s pain during medical procedures,...]]></description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 18 Aug 2010 05:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
    <link>http://innovationcanada.ca/en/articles/painless-parenting</link>
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    <title><![CDATA[Barcoding life]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[Biologist Paul Hebert couldn’t believe his eyes when a colleague found a species of moth native to Mexico fluttering over the tundra at the fringes of Hudson Bay in Churchill, Man., one summer day in 2006. The huge black witch moth with a 20-centimetre wingspan had never before been found that far north. “I thought a Mexican colleague of mine had played a great stunt on me and brought the moth up to the tundra to give me the thrill of my life,” says Hebert, a Canada Research Chair in Molecular Biodiversity at the University of Guelph. But the migratory moth, which breeds in Mexico, had flown to the Arctic under its own power. And it is just one example of the hundreds of species that Hebert, his team from Guelph and colleagues from around the world have identified as part of an ambitious DNA bar-coding project that kicked off in Churchill in 2006. After taking a short, standard sequence of DNA from the moth’s genome, the team sequenced the sample, registered it...]]></description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 11 Aug 2010 05:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
    <link>http://innovationcanada.ca/en/articles/barcoding-life</link>
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    <title><![CDATA[Building smarts]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[]]></description>
    <pubDate>Thu, 05 Aug 2010 05:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
    <link>http://innovationcanada.ca/en/articles/building-smarts</link>
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    <title><![CDATA[Send in the bacteria]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[The video clip is the stuff of science fiction: a swarm of 5,000 bacteria lift microscopic epoxy bricks and assemble them one by one to form a pyramid, as if they were building a tower of blocks. A computer directs their movement by controlling magnetic fields.But for Sylvain Martel and his team of researchers at École Polytechnique de Montréal, the first scientists to “train” living bacteria to build a structure, this feat is no futuristic science experiment. It holds real promise as a miraculous tool in the fight against cancer. “Our primary goal is to use bacteria to carry drugs directly to tumours,” says Martel, director and founder of the NanoRobotics Laboratory and a professor in the department of computer and software engineering and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering. “It’s hard for people to believe that we can control bacteria using a computer. We had to demonstrate that we could control them and make them move blocks in...]]></description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 28 Jul 2010 05:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
    <link>http://innovationcanada.ca/en/articles/send-in-the-bacteria</link>
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    <title><![CDATA[Seeing red]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[Ram Krishna of Toronto has had type 2 diabetes for almost 25 years, but he only started taking insulin a couple of years ago to help better control it. Since the insulin regimen began, he has had to test his blood glucose level more regularly — about three to five times a week. To do so, he does what most of the two million to three million Canadians with diabetes do — he uses a blood glucose meter. Jabbing his finger with a spring-loaded lancet, he transfers a drop of blood to a very small test strip and inserts it into the meter, which delivers a glucose-level reading within seconds. Although the testing isn’t difficult, it is inconvenient, particularly for people with diabetes who have to test often — some up to 10 times a day — and can be expensive, with each test strip costing about $1. “I don’t have private insurance, so I’m careful,” says Krishna, “and I compromise on how often I test.” Test strips may eventually...]]></description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
    <link>http://innovationcanada.ca/en/articles/seeing-red</link>
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    <title><![CDATA[Making (brain) waves]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[(Courtesy of Carleton University) Imagine your brain as a bustling city. The grey matter in your head could be compared to a dense network of mixed-use buildings, with snaking utility lines and connecting sidewalks throughout. Steam delivers heat through pipes out of the main utility centre, lights blink on and off, and information zooms around at a blazing speed. Cranks turn to keep everything motoring along. That's a plausible visual for what's happening as we process information, cues and signals. Those cues can be ever so slight: the intonation at the end of a sentence (in English, lilting up for a question, for example) fires up a signal in one part of the brain, but another part lights up when we hear a sentence spoken in a bored monotone, like, maybe, in the classroom of a tired lecturer. While subtleties of speech have different effects on the brain, age is a factor, as well. Brain function in a child is markedly different from that in a fully grown person. In test material given...]]></description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 14 Jul 2010 05:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
    <link>http://innovationcanada.ca/en/articles/making-brain-waves</link>
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    <title><![CDATA[Fertilizer from the sea]]></title>
    <description><![CDATA[When the first European settlers arrived to scratch out a living on the thin soils across Atlantic Canada, they quickly made use of the seaweed on the beaches around them as a plentiful source of crop fertilizer. This age-old European practice continues in the region to this day, and now a Nova Scotia-based scientist wants to find out why. Balakrishnan Prithiviraj, an associate professor of marine bioproducts at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro, is studying the molecular properties of common seaweed to find out how they interact with terrestrial plants. In particular, he wants to isolate the chemical compounds in seaweed that promote healthy growth in land crops. Prithiviraj is studying how seaweed affects Arabidopsis thaliana — a small flowering plant in the cabbage and mustard family and the first plant ever to have its entire genome sequenced. In his greenhouse laboratory, he adds seaweed bio-products to the plants to see how they affect plant growth. In particular,...]]></description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
    <link>http://innovationcanada.ca/en/articles/fertilizer-from-the-sea</link>
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