Tag Archives: Surrey

Science events (Einstein, getting research to patients, sleep, and art/science) in Vancouver (Canada), Jan. 23 – 28, 2016

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There are five upcoming science events in seven days (Jan. 23 – 28, 2016) in the Vancouver area.

Einstein Centenary Series

The first is a Saturday morning, Jan. 23, 2016 lecture, the first for 2016 in a joint TRIUMF (Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics), UBC (University of British Columbia), and SFU (Simon Fraser University) series featuring Einstein’s  work and its implications. From the event brochure (pdf), which lists the entire series,

TRIUMF, UBC and SFU are proud to present the 2015-2016 Saturday morning lecture series on the frontiers of modern physics. These free lectures are a level appropriate for high school students and members of the general public.

Parallel lecture series will be held at TRIUMF on the UBC South Campus, and at SFU Surrey Campus.

Lectures start at 10:00 am and 11:10 am. Parking is available.

For information, registration and directions, see :
http://www.triumf.ca/saturday-lectures

January 23, 2016 TRIUMF Auditorium (UBC, Vancouver)
1. General Relativity – the theory (Jonathan Kozaczuk, TRIUMF)
2. Einstein and Light: stimulated emission, photoelectric effect and quantum theory (Mark Van Raamsdonk, UBC)

January 30, 2016 SFU Surrey Room 2740 (SFU, Surrey Campus)

1. General Relativity – the theory (Jonathan Kozaczuk, TRIUMF)
2. Einstein and Light: stimulated emission, photoelectric effect and quantum theory (Mark Van Raamsdonk, UBC)

I believe these lectures are free. One more note, they will be capping off this series with a special lecture by Kip Thorne (astrophysicist and consultant for the movie Interstellar) at Science World, on Thursday, April 14, 2016. More about that * at a closer date.

Café Scientifique

On Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at 7:30 pm in the back room of The Railway Club (2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. [at Seymour St.]), Café Scientifique will be hosting a talk about science and serving patients (from the Jan. 5, 2016 announcement),

Our speakers for the evening will be Dr. Millan Patel and Dr. Shirin Kalyan.  The title of their talk is:

Helping Science to Serve Patients

Science in general and biotechnology in particular are auto-catalytic. That is, they catalyze their own evolution and so generate breakthroughs at an exponentially increasing rate.  The experience of patients is not exponentially getting better, however.  This talk, with a medical geneticist and an immunologist who believe science can deliver far more for patients, will focus on structural and cultural impediments in our system and ways they and others have developed to either lower or leapfrog the barriers. We hope to engage the audience in a highly interactive discussion to share thoughts and perspectives on this important issue.

There is additional information about Dr. Millan Patel here and Dr. Shirin Kalyan here. It would appear both speakers are researchers and academics and while I find the emphasis on the patient and the acknowledgement that medical research benefits are not being delivered in quantity or quality to patients, it seems odd that they don’t have a clinician (a doctor who deals almost exclusively with patients as opposed to two researchers) to add to their perspective.

You may want to take a look at my Jan. 22, 2016 ‘open science’ and Montreal Neurological Institute posting for a look at how researchers there are responding to the issue.

Curiosity Collider

This is an art/science event from an organization that sprang into existence sometime during summer 2015 (my July 7, 2015 posting featuring Curiosity Collider).

When: 8:00pm on Wednesday, January 27, 2016. Door opens at 7:30pm.
Where: Café Deux Soleils. 2096 Commercial Drive, Vancouver, BC (Google Map).
Cost: $5.00 cover (sliding scale) at the door. Proceeds will be used to cover the cost of running this event, and to fund future Curiosity Collider events.

Part I. Speakers

Part II. Open Mic

  • 90 seconds to share your art-science ideas. Think they are “ridiculous”? Well, we think it could be ridiculously awesome – we are looking for creative ideas!
  • Don’t have an idea (yet)? Contribute by sharing your expertise.
  • Chat with other art-science enthusiasts, strike up a conversation to collaborate, all disciplines/backgrounds welcome.
  • Want to showcase your project in the future? Participate in our fall art-science competition (more to come)!

Follow updates on twitter via @ccollider or #CollideConquer

Good luck on the open mic (should you have a project)!

Brain Talks

This particular Brain Talk event is taking place at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH; there is also another Brain Talks series which takes place at the University of British Columbia). Yes, members of the public can attend the VGH version; they didn’t throw me out the last time I was there. Here’s more about the next VGH Brain Talks,

Sleep: biological & pathological perspectives

Thursday, Jan 28, 6:00pm @ Paetzold Auditorium, Vancouver General Hospital

Speakers:

Peter Hamilton, Sleep technician ~ Sleep Architecture

Dr. Robert Comey, MD ~ Sleep Disorders

Dr. Maia Love, MD ~ Circadian Rhythms

Panel discussion and wine and cheese reception to follow!

Please RSVP here

You may want to keep in mind that the event is organized by people who don’t organize events often. Nice people but you may need to search for crackers for your cheese and your wine comes out of a box (and I think it might have been self-serve the time I attended).

What a fabulous week we have ahead of us—Happy Weekend!

*’when’ removed from the sentence on March 28, 2016.

First Canadian student team (Surrey’s Princess Margaret Secondary) wins NASA’s global space competition

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Third time lucky for Sumit (Bhupinder) Rathore, a third-year Simon Fraser University computer-engineering student,  and Joe Sihota, physics teacher, who both coached a team of students from Princess Margaret Secondary school on to a win at the annual International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC) at NASA’s (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas.  From the Aug. 19, 2013 Simon Fraser University news release,

Grumbo Aerospace, the winning team of the annual International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC) at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, is the first such team to include Canadian high school students. [emphases mine]

Thanks to the tutelage of Rathore and physics teacher Joe Sihota, 10 Princess Margaret Secondary School students in Surrey became the first Canadian semi-finalists to make it to the competition’s invitation-only final.

ISSDC organizers, who are allied with NASA, the Boeing Company and the aerospace industry, invited student teams from 20 schools worldwide to the final.

Finalists, who had submitted winning semi-final designs for a space colony, then formed four new teams that were given company names. The companies competed for the final prize — a trophy, gold medals and a coveted list of résumé references consisting of NASA astronauts and aerospace engineers.

The competition is organized so that teams of high school students apply and if the team is successful and win a berth to NASA, it is, once arrived in Texas, broken apart and new teams formed for the final competition. Here’s a better explanation from my July 3, 2013 posting where the team was raising $10,000 for airfares and accommodation,

The competition invites high school students who are mentored by teachers (and in this case, Rathore, a student) to design a space colony for 10,000-plus people according to set specifications.

Student teams submit 40-page, on-line entries, which are assessed by aerospace industry engineers and managers allied with the contest’s sponsors, including NASA and the Boeing Company.

ISSDC organizers select eight teams as finalists that compete in a live competition to design another colony at the NASA centre. Four more teams, deemed to have submitted stellar first-round entries, are also invited to witness the final competition.

The competing teams are broken up to create new teams comprised of students from different countries, who are coached by a mentor attached to one of the original teams.

The new teams engage in 43 hours of non-stop research to design their final space colonial submissions, which are assessed by ISSDC organizers and NASA astronauts and space engineers.

The Internet is out of bounds as a source of information for the final teams. They must rely on their mentors, NASA’s library and a panel of astronauts and aerospace engineers as resources to design and present their colonies.

The winning team takes home an Oscar-type trophy embedded with a genuine meteorite and an impressive list of NASA astronauts and aerospace engineers as résumé references.

This is the third time that Rathore and Sihota have coached a team of students to the semi-finals and it is the first time Princess Margaret students have won the top prize. More from the news release,

As members of the Grumbo Aerospace company/team, the Surrey students won the approval of the nine aerospace engineers and retired astronauts judging the four final teams’ designs for a 10,000-plus, person-settlement on Earth’s moon.

Rathore, along with Jack Bacon, a pioneering space-technology engineer dubbed the next Carl Sagan, helped coach Grumbo Aerospace to its final victory. Previously recognized by NASA as a gifted teacher, Rathore credits competition seasoning, time management and his personal passion for lunar life with transforming his Surrey protégés into third-time-lucky victors.

“This year I was fortunate enough to have some of the old members returning from my last year’s team,” notes Rathore. “They were very familiar with the stress and unexpected challenges of the final. They were more mentally prepared for the time management required to make on-the-fly creative decisions about the final settlement’s design.

“’The location of the final settlement design on the Earth’s moon worked in our favour. As a huge fan of the moon, I was familiar with most of its settlement design-challenges. I supplied our team with a lot of research to help design requested commercial and industrial ventures, such as a manufacturing base and a tourism centre.”

In citing Grumbo Aerospace as the winning team, the judges praised its attention to detail and creativity in including elements such as hiking and wedding opportunities and self-repairing exterior structures.

The team’s manufacturing base produced computer components, orbital-computing installations, spacesuits and spaceship modules. It included a processing unit to convert lunar raw ore into finished products for use in space-based construction.

The team’s tourism base featured a hotel with earthly and lunar views, special vehicles for tourism travel to all the Apollo landing sites, a spacesuit for tourists and many tourism-oriented lunar-based activities.

Congratulations!

Students raising $10,000 (CAD) to attend invitation-only International Space Settlement Design competition at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre

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A July 2, 2013 news release from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) describes the competition,

For the third consecutive year, Rathore [Bhupinder Rathore, a third year Simon Fraser University computer engineering student] is grooming a group of 15-to-19-year-olds at Princess Margaret Secondary in Surrey [Canada] for the finals in the annual International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC).

The competition invites high school students who are mentored by teachers (and in this case, Rathore, a student) to design a space colony for 10,000-plus people according to set specifications.

Student teams submit 40-page, on-line entries, which are assessed by aerospace industry engineers and managers allied with the contest’s sponsors, including NASA and the Boeing Company.

ISSDC organizers select eight teams as finalists that compete in a live competition to design another colony at the NASA centre. Four more teams, deemed to have submitted stellar first-round entries, are also invited to witness the final competition.

The competing teams are broken up to create new teams comprised of students from different countries, who are coached by a mentor attached to one of the original teams.

The new teams engage in 43 hours of non-stop research to design their final space colonial submissions, which are assessed by ISSDC organizers and NASA astronauts and space engineers.

The Internet is out of bounds as a source of information for the final teams. They must rely on their mentors, NASA’s library and a panel of astronauts and aerospace engineers as resources to design and present their colonies.

The winning team takes home an Oscar-type trophy embedded with a genuine meteorite and an impressive list of NASA astronauts and aerospace engineers as résumé references.

If the students are to participate, they will need money (from the news release),

They are working to raise the $10,000 needed for flights and accommodation to attend an elite, invitation-only competition at the NASA Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas from Aug. 2-5. They hope to leave July 30.

At least one person is feeling hopeful about the team’s chances this year (from the news release),

“I am feeling very confident about our chances this year,” says Rathore. “For the last two years, all my team members were new. The stress and competition levels of the finals are something they had never experienced before. This year I have five members who have already experienced those pressures and are more prepared than last year.”

If Rathore and his team ride to victory, it will be the first win for Canadians. Rathore and his original Princess Margaret Secondary team were the first Canadians to compete in the competition.

Here’s how you can donate,

Prospective team sponsors wishing to help with travel costs can send cheques payable to Princess Margaret Secondary School, re: Texas trip, 12870-72 Ave., Surrey, B.C., V3W 2M9. [emphasis mine]

The International Space Settlement Design Competition home page provides more information about this year’s competition,

Welcome to the Twentieth Annual International Space Settlement Design Competition!

This contest puts high school students in the shoes of aerospace industry engineers designing a city in space that will be a home for over 10,000 people. Student engineers demonstrate creativity, technical competence, management skills, space environment knowledge, teamwork, and presentation techniques to conquer the problems inherent in siting and designing a Space Settlement (aka Space Colony).

Each year the Competition organizers develop a new design scenario with its own special requirements. Contest teams work together to create a 40-page report (see samples from index) that addresses the issues and communicates their ideas and designs.

The prize: Twelve finalist teams from around the world are selected to compete with a new scenario in a live Competition at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, with real engineers sharing their knowledge and experience in both engineering and management.

This seems like a ‘win-win’ situation. The students, regardless of the final outcome of the competition, get to work with professional engineers at NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration)!