A late March 2026 SFU (Simon Fraser University) Café Scientifique notice announces two upcoming Vancouver area (Note: Burnaby is part of Metro Vancouver) talks related to Nobel prize winning research.(received via email and accessible here for a time), Note: Both events are free,
Ever wonder what people win Nobel Prizes for? We know this research is important, but what does it mean? Join SFU Science faculty members who are experts in the areas of research for each Nobel Prize in science as they break down what the award-winning research is about, and why it’s a big deal. After each speaker you will have an opportunity to ask questions and get answers from researchers who are doing similar work in their own labs on campus.
[from nobelprize.org,
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 was awarded jointly to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi “for the development of metal–organic frameworks
Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 was awarded jointly to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025 was awarded jointly to Mary E. Brunkow, Frederick J. Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi “for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance]
Extreme Light: Unlocking the Power of Superfast Lasers
March 27, 2026 6:30 – 9:00 pm SFU Harbour Centre Challenge Theatre [downtown Vancouver]
SFU and UBC Science Outreach invite you to an evening with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Donna Strickland at SFU Harbour Centre. This public event will include a presentation followed by a Q&A session.
With the invention of lasers, the intensity of a light wave was increased by orders of magnitude over what had been achieved with a light bulb or sunlight. This much higher intensity led to new phenomena being observed, such as violet light coming out when red light went into the material. This new understanding of laser-matter interactions, led to the development of new machining techniques that are used in laser eye surgery or micromachining of glass used in cell phones.
Daniel Leznoff, Department of Chemistry, for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Mani Larijani, Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology
Steve Dodge, Department or Physics, for the Nobel Prize in Physics
There’s more about the March 27, 2026 Extreme Light: Unlocking the Power of Superfast Lasers, from the event registration page,
Join us for a special public talk featuring Donna Strickland, Nobel Laureate in Physics.
Location Challenge Theatre, SFU Harbour Centre 515 West Hastings St., Vancouver
Date Friday, March 27
Schedule 6:30 PM – Doors open 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM – Presentation and Q&A
Overview SFU and UBC Science Outreach invites you to an evening with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Donna Strickland at SFU Harbour Centre. This public event will include a presentation followed by a Q&A session.
Venue SFU Harbour Centre 515 West Hastings St., Vancouver
Event inquiries sfuscienceoutreach@sfu.ca
Communications Officer position for UK’s Sense about Science
A March 24, 2026 email from Sense about Science discussed this opportunity,
We’re looking for someone who shares our passion for promoting the public interest in sound science and evidence to join our friendly London-based team.
Our new Communications Officer will be tech-savvy with a curiosity for digital performance and a creative flair for engaging audiences online. They’ll thrive working with our Head of Communications as part of a small, outcome-focused team, bringing strong organisational skills and flexibility to the role.
Here are more details about the position, from their Vacancies page (click on Communications Officer),
About us
Sense about Science is a unique campaigning charity that has turned the case for sound science and evidence into a popular cause. It has launched important initiatives to expand and protect open discussions of evidence, including Transparency of Evidence, to secure openness for the public about the evidence behind policy; the Maddox prize; AllTrials, a global campaign for the reporting of clinical trial results; and ‘Ask for Evidence’, to help people ask good questions on subjects such as risk and AI. We run Evidence Week in Parliament in the UK and have challenged practices and changed the behaviour of governments, media and corporations in the use of scientific evidence internationally.
What you’ll do
Reporting to the Head of Communications, you’ll be responsible for:
Maintaining our social presence, developing content and informing strategies that will build our profile and better communicate our mission and activities
Developing and publishing informative and engaging content for the Sense about Science
Writing clear, concise and eye-catching supporter communications and publicity messaging
Monitoring our inbox and responding to inquiries promptly and appropriately.
Producing a wide range of high-quality audiovisual content on request, including but not limited to video, audio and text, sometimes at short notice
About you
You are enthusiastic about Sense about Science’s popular vision for evidence and transparency in public life and want to make a difference.
You’re tech savvy with a curiosity about digital performance and a creative flair for engaging audiences online. You enjoy working as part of a small team that is outcome focused and are well organised and flexible.
What we offer
You’ll be part of a dynamic team that supports each other and celebrates success. We’ll help you grow as a communicator and public interest advocate, with hands-on responsibility from day one. We provide opportunities to learn from colleagues, professional training and on the job development of technical skills.
Our offices are close to Regents Park and Oxford Circus in a shared building with cycle, shower, and kitchen facilities and friendly staff.
Salary: £30k, with opportunity for rapid progression
Location: office based in Central London (W1); some travel and out of hours activity required.
What we’re looking for
Experience
Essential
Working with web CMS systems, ideally WordPress.
Creating and publishing professional comms on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky.
Writing engaging content in long and short form
Degree, preferably in a scientific discipline – or evidence of equivalent.
Desirable
Knowledge of and engagement with web and social analytics
Creating and delivering communications plans for always-on activities and special events.
Working within and implementing brand guidelines.
Masters in Science Communication.
Skills and attributes
Essential
A passion for Sense about Science’s mission, and an appetite for science news, public debate and current affairs.
Experience with standard office software including Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
Experience of using professional software to create, edit and schedule audiovisual social content.
Demonstrable understanding of analytics and optimisation for digital media.
Organised, with the ability to plan ahead and prioritise workload when needed.
Desirable
Either academic experience of scientific research or a broader understanding of the demands of research and communication.
If your CV doesn’t match all these requirements but you’re passionate about evidence in policy and transparency, and absolutely convinced you are right for us, then please make an application explaining why. There is great scope in this job to develop, get training and make the role your own. Candidates must have the right to work in the UK.
Application process
To apply please submit a one-page letter and a two-page CV to recruitment@senseaboutscience.org with the subject line: “Communications Officer”.
Application deadline: 9 am Monday 13 April 2026. Shortlisted candidates will be notified by 17th April and interviews held w/b 20th April 2026.
For the first time, scientists have been able to weave a material at molecular level. The research is led by University of California Berkeley, in cooperation with Stockholm University. …
Weaving is a well-known way of making fabric, but has until now never been used at the molecular level. Scientists have now been able to weave organic threads into a three-dimensional material, using copper as a template. The new material is a COF, covalent organic framework, and is named COF-505. The copper ions can be removed and added without changing the underlying structure, and at the same time the elasticity can be reversibly changed.
– It almost looks like a molecular version of the Vikings chain-armour. The material is very flexible, says Peter Oleynikov, researcher at the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry at Stockholm University.
COF’s are like MOF’s porous three-dimensional crystals with a very large internal surface that can adsorb and store enormous quantities of molecules. A potential application is capture and storage of carbon dioxide, or using COF’s as a catalyst to make useful molecules from carbon dioxide.
Complex structure determined in Stockholm
The research is led by Professor Omar Yaghi at University of California Berkeley. At Stockholm University Professor Osamu Terasaki, PhD Student Yanhang Ma and Researcher Peter Oleynikov have contributed to determine the structure of COF-505 at atomic level from a nano-crystal, using electron crystallography methods.
– It is a difficult, complicated structure and it was very demanding to resolve. We’ve spent lot of time and efforts on the structure solution. Now we know exactly where the copper is and we can also replace the metal. This opens up many possibilities to make other materials, says Yanhang Ma, PhD Student at the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry at Stockholm University.
Another of the collaborating institutions, US Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory issued a Jan. 21, 2016 news release on EurekAlert, providing a different perspective and some additional details,
There are many different ways to make nanomaterials but weaving, the oldest and most enduring method of making fabrics, has not been one of them – until now. An international collaboration led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, has woven the first three-dimensional covalent organic frameworks (COFs) from helical organic threads. The woven COFs display significant advantages in structural flexibility, resiliency and reversibility over previous COFs – materials that are highly prized for their potential to capture and store carbon dioxide then convert it into valuable chemical products.
…
“Weaving in chemistry has been long sought after and is unknown in biology,” Yaghi says [Omar Yaghi, chemist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley’s Chemistry Department and is the co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute {Kavli-ENSI}]. “However, we have found a way of weaving organic threads that enables us to design and make complex two- and three-dimensional organic extended structures.”
…
COFs and their cousin materials, metal organic frameworks (MOFs), are porous three-dimensional crystals with extraordinarily large internal surface areas that can absorb and store enormous quantities of targeted molecules. Invented by Yaghi, COFs and MOFs consist of molecules (organics for COFs and metal-organics for MOFs) that are stitched into large and extended netlike frameworks whose structures are held together by strong chemical bonds. Such frameworks show great promise for, among other applications, carbon sequestration.
Through another technique developed by Yaghi, called “reticular chemistry,” these frameworks can also be embedded with catalysts to carry out desired functions: for example, reducing carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which serves as a primary building block for a wide range of chemical products including fuels, pharmaceuticals and plastics.
In this latest study, Yaghi and his collaborators used a copper(I) complex as a template for bringing threads of the organic compound “phenanthroline” into a woven pattern to produce an immine-based framework they dubbed COF-505. Through X-ray and electron diffraction characterizations, the researchers discovered that the copper(I) ions can be reversibly removed or restored to COF-505 without changing its woven structure. Demetalation of the COF resulted in a tenfold increase in its elasticity and remetalation restored the COF to its original stiffness.
“That our system can switch between two states of elasticity reversibly by a simple operation, the first such demonstration in an extended chemical structure, means that cycling between these states can be done repeatedly without degrading or altering the structure,” Yaghi says. “Based on these results, it is easy to imagine the creation of molecular cloths that combine unusual resiliency, strength, flexibility and chemical variability in one material.”
Yaghi says that MOFs can also be woven as can all structures based on netlike frameworks. In addition, these woven structures can also be made as nanoparticles or polymers, which means they can be fabricated into thin films and electronic devices.
“Our weaving technique allows long threads of covalently linked molecules to cross at regular intervals,” Yaghi says. “These crossings serve as points of registry, so that the threads have many degrees of freedom to move away from and back to such points without collapsing the overall structure, a boon to making materials with exceptional mechanical properties and dynamics.”
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This research was primarily supported by BASF (Germany) and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).
It’s unusual that neither Stockholm University not the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory list all of the institutions involved. To get a sense of this international collaboration’s size, I’m going to list them,
1Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
2Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden.
3Department of New Architectures in Materials Chemistry, Materials Science Institute of Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid 28049, Spain.
4Nanomaterials Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba 305-8565, Japan.
5NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC), University of California at Berkeley, 3112 Etcheverry Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
6Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
7King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology, Post Office Box 6086, Riyadh 11442, Saudi Arabia.
8Material Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
9School of Physical Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai 201210, China.
Given that some of the money came from a German company, I’m surprised not one German institution was involved.
Here’s a link to and citation for the paper,
Weaving of organic threads into a crystalline covalent organic framework by Yuzhong Liu, Yanhang Ma, Yingbo Zhao, Xixi Sun, Felipe Gándara, Hiroyasu Furukawa, Zheng Liu, Hanyu Zhu, Chenhui Zhu, Kazutomo Suenaga, Peter Oleynikov, Ahmad S. Alshammari, Xiang Zhang, Osamu Terasaki, Omar M. Yaghi. Science 22 Jan 2016: Vol. 351, Issue 6271, pp. 365-369 DOI: 10.1126/science.aad4011
