For years, pollinator declines have been a pressing issue for ecosystem health and food security in the face of climate change and human impacts on the environment. Even in their sleep, pollinating insects cannot catch a break – for fear they’ll be taken down by a small, but mighty predator: the candy-striped spider. Research published in Ecology took a closer look into this spider’s behaviour and found that the result of their stealth attacks could have substantial impacts on ecosystems.
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Published on: 19 Apr 2023
Nurses exposed to 40 minutes of bright light before their night shifts feel less fatigued and make fewer errors at work, according to a study led by McGill University. The nurses also slept better after their shifts.
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Published on: 19 Apr 2023
Thirty students from 10 countries will form the first global cohort of McCall MacBain Scholars at McGill University, arriving in September 2023.
Designed to encourage purposeful leadership, the scholarships are the result of a landmark $200 million gift in 2019 by John and Marcy McCall MacBain, the second-largest single donation in Canadian history.
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Published on: 18 Apr 2023
Killer whales (also known as orcas) are intelligent predators. While it’s known that killer whales in the Pacific Northwest exploit widely different food types, even within the same region, we know much less about the feeding habits of those found throughout the North Atlantic. Thanks to a new technique developed by a research team led by McGill University, it is now possible to quantify, for the first time, the proportion of different prey that killer whales in the North Atlantic are eating by studying the fatty acid patterns in their blubber.
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Published on: 14 Apr 2023
An array of 350 radio telescopes in the Karoo desert of South Africa is getting closer to detecting the “cosmic dawn” — the era after the Big Bang when stars first ignited and galaxies began to bloom.
A team of scientists from across North America, Europe, and South Africa has doubled the sensitivity of a radio telescope called the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA). With this breakthrough, they hope to peer into the secrets of the early universe.
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Published on: 12 Apr 2023
Teens in North America are spending several hours per day on screens, and there’s growing concern over how social media may affect their mental health.
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Published on: 5 Apr 2023
At the recent COP 15 conference in Montreal, Canada committed to protecting 30% of its land by 2030, but which areas are most crucial to protect for at-risk species such as the spotted turtles? In a new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, McGill University researchers overlayed maps of species at risk to find hotspots where many species live together. They found that hotspots often overlap.
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Published on: 5 Apr 2023
McGill University is pleased to announce the winners and runners-up of the 2023 Principal’s Prize for Public Engagement through Media. The Prize was created to recognize outstanding achievement among those who share their knowledge on a vast range of subjects with the public and the media. This year, there were applicants from 10 of the 11 faculties, a sign that sharing knowledge and a love of learning is becoming increasingly embedded in the McGill DNA.
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Published on: 29 Mar 2023
Many people who oppose immigration say that it increases crime. But does immigration really affect crime? Studying a country whose proportion of migrants has tripled in less than ten years, researchers find immigration significantly impacts people’s perceptions of crime but has no effect on actual crime.
The research, led by Nicolas Ajzenman, a professor of economics at McGill University, shows that while migrants don’t cause crime rates to increase, false perceptions endure anyway.
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Published on: 29 Mar 2023
Scientists have gained new insights into the part of the brain that gives us a sense of direction, by tracking neural activity with the latest advances in brain imaging techniques. The findings shed light on how the brain orients itself in changing environments – and even the processes that can go wrong with degenerative diseases like dementia, that leave people feeling lost and confused.
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Published on: 22 Mar 2023
When natural habitats are cleared to make way for cities, roads and agriculture, this often leaves behind “islands” of fragmented habitat that can place species at risk of extinction. Species are at risk when they find it hard to move among habitat patches to find resources and reproduce.
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Published on: 22 Mar 2023
Steps were taken in Canada to reduce the use of Bisphenol A (BPA), a toxic chemical linked to prostate and breast cancer, commonly found in plastics, the lining of food cans, water bottles, and paper receipts. But in many cases, it has been replaced with similar hormone disrupting chemicals, like Bisphenol S (BPS). A new study from McGill University shows that every day Canadians are exposed to BPS in the fresh foods they eat, as chemicals migrate from labels on the packaging materials into the food.
Published on: 16 Mar 2023
A large majority of Nunavik Inuit report Inuktitut as their first language. In their work in Puvirnituq, McGill University ophthalmologist Dr. Christian El-Hadad and his colleague Shaan Bhambra, a recent graduate of McGill’s medical school, noticed that many patients either read only, or mainly, Inuktitut. This made visual acuity testing using the standard Latin alphabet chart difficult for some patients.
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Published on: 14 Mar 2023
Headlines about severe climate events can make the future seem bleak.
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Published on: 14 Mar 2023
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Published on: 14 Mar 2023
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