From McGill University [Université McGill](CA): “How different were galaxies in the early universe?”

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA)

4.12.23
Shirley Cardenas
Media Relations, McGill University
shirley.cardenas@mcgill.ca
(514) 398-6751

Astronomers are one step closer to discovering the secrets of the cosmic dawn.

Dark Energy Camera Enables Astronomers a Glimpse at the Cosmic Dawn. Credit: The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (国立天文台](JP).

The University of California-Berkeley Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) SARAO SKA in the South African Karoo desert South Africa.

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.

“Over the last couple of decades, teams from around the world have worked towards a first detection of radio waves from the cosmic dawn. While such a detection remains elusive, HERA’s results represent the most precise pursuit to date,” says Adrian Liu, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics and the Trottier Space Institute at McGill University.

The array was already the most sensitive radio telescope in the world dedicated to exploring the cosmic dawn. Now the HERA team has improved its sensitivity by a factor of 2.1 for radio waves emitted about 650 million years after the Big Bang and 2.6 for radio waves emitted about 450 million years after the Big Bang. Their work is described in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal [below].

Although the scientists have yet to detect radio emissions from the end of the cosmic dark ages, their results provide clues about the composition of stars and galaxies in the early universe.

Dark Ages and Re-ionization of the Universe Credit: The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral][Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte](EU)(CL).

So far, their data suggest that early galaxies contained very few elements besides hydrogen and helium, unlike our galaxies today. Today’s stars, have a variety of elements, ranging from lithium to uranium, that are heavier than helium.

Ruling out some theories

When the radio dishes are fully online and calibrated, the team hopes to construct a 3D map of the bubbles of ionized and neutral hydrogen – markers for early galaxies – as they evolved from about 200 million years to around 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The map could tell us how early stars and galaxies differed from those we see around us today, and how the universe looked in its adolescence, say the researchers.

According to the researchers, the fact that the HERA team has not yet detected these signals rules out some theories of how stars evolved in the early universe. “Our data suggest that early galaxies were about 100 times more luminous in X-rays than today’s galaxies. The lore was that this would be the case, but now we have actual data that bolsters this hypothesis,” says Liu.

Waiting for a signal

The HERA team continues to improve the telescope’s calibration and data analysis in hopes of seeing those bubbles in the early universe. However, filtering out the local radio noise to see the signals from the early universe has not been easy. “If it’s Swiss cheese, the galaxies make the holes, and we’re looking for the cheese,” says David DeBoer, a research astronomer in University of California-Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory.

“HERA is continuing to improve and set better and better limits,” says Aaron Parsons, principal investigator for HERA and a University of California-Berkeley Associate Professor of astronomy. “The fact that we’re able to keep pushing through, and we have new techniques that are continuing to bear fruit for our telescope, is great.”

The HERA collaboration is led by University of California-Berkeley and includes scientists from across North America, Europe, and South Africa, with support in Canada from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies, and from the Trottier Space Institute at McGill University. The construction of the array is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, with key support from the government of South Africa and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO).

The Astrophysical Journal
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

All about
McGill University [Université McGill] (CA)

With some 300 buildings, more than 38,500 students and 250,000 living alumni, and a reputation for excellence that reaches around the globe, McGill has carved out a spot among the world’s greatest universities.

Founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1821, McGill University [Université McGill](CA) is a leading Canadian post-secondary institution. It has two campuses, 11 faculties, 11 professional schools, 300 programs of study and some 39,000 students, including more than 9,300 graduate students. McGill attracts students from over 150 countries around the world, its 8,200 international students making up 21 per cent of the student body.

McGill University is a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV, the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant whose bequest in 1813 formed the university’s precursor, University of McGill College (or simply, McGill College); the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885.

McGill’s main campus is on the slope of Mount Royal in downtown Montreal, with a second campus situated in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, also on Montreal Island, 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of the main campus. The university is one of two universities outside the United States which are members of The Association of American Universities, alongside the University of Toronto (CA), and it is the only Canadian member of the Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) within the World Economic Forum
McGill offers degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, with the highest average entering grades of any Canadian university. Most students are enrolled in the five largest faculties, namely Arts, Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Management. With a 32.2% international student body coming to McGill from over 150 countries, its student body is the most internationally diverse of any medical-doctoral research university in the country. Additionally, over 41% of students are born outside of Canada. In all major rankings, McGill consistently ranks in the top 50 universities in the world and among the top 3 universities in Canada. It has held the top position for the past 16 years in the annual Maclean’s Canadian University Rankings for medical-doctoral universities.

McGill counts among its alumni and faculty 12 Nobel laureates and 147 Rhodes Scholars, both the most of any university in Canada, as well as 13 billionaires, the current prime minister and two former prime ministers of Canada, a former Governor General of Canada, at least eight foreign leaders, 28 foreign ambassadors and more than 100 members of national legislatures. McGill alumni also include eight Academy Award winners, 10 Grammy Award winners, at least 13 Emmy Award winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and 121 Olympians with over 35 Olympic medals. The inventors of the game of basketball, modern organized ice hockey, and the pioneers of gridiron football, as well as the founders of several major universities and colleges are also graduates of the university.

Notable researchers include Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus and conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on the nature of radioactivity while working as Professor of Experimental Physics at the university. Other notable inventions by McGillians include the world’s first artificial cell, web search engine, and charge-couple device, among others.

McGill has the largest endowment per student in Canada. In 2019, it was the recipient of the largest single philanthropic gift in Canadian history, a $200 million donation to fund the creation of the McCall MacBain Scholarships programme.

Research

Research plays a critical role at McGill. McGill is affiliated with 12 Nobel Laureates and professors have won major teaching prizes. According to The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, “researchers at McGill are affiliated with about 75 major research centres and networks, and are engaged in an extensive array of research partnerships with other universities, government and industry in Quebec and Canada, throughout North America and in dozens of other countries.” In 2016, McGill had over $547 million of sponsored research income, the second highest in Canada, and a research intensity per faculty of $317,600, the third highest among full-service universities in Canada. McGill has one of the largest patent portfolios among Canadian universities. McGill’s researchers are supported by the McGill University Library, which comprises 13 branch libraries and holds over six million items.

Since 1926, McGill has been a member of The Association of American Universities, an organization of leading research universities in North America. McGill is a founding member of Universitas 21, an international network of leading research-intensive universities that work together to expand their global reach and advance their plans for internationalization. McGill is one of 26 members of the prestigious Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which acts as an intellectual community within The World Economic Forum to advise its leadership on matters relating to higher education and research. It is the only Canadian university member of GULF. McGill is also a member of the U15, a group of prominent research universities within Canada.

McGill-Queen’s University Press began as McGill in 1963 and amalgamated with Queen’s in 1969. McGill-Queen’s University Press focuses on Canadian studies and publishes the Canadian Public Administration Series.

McGill is perhaps best recognized for its research and discoveries in the health sciences. Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, and others made significant discoveries in medicine, neuroscience and psychology while working at McGill, many at the University’s Montreal Neurological Institute. The first hormone governing the Immune System (later christened the Cytokine ‘Interleukin-2’) was discovered at McGill in 1965 by Gordon & McLean.

The invention of the world’s first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang while an undergraduate student at the university. While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Alumnus Jack W. Szostak was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

William Chalmers invented Plexiglas while a graduate student at McGill. In computing, MUSIC/SP, software for mainframes once popular among universities and colleges around the world, was developed at McGill. A team also contributed to the development of Archie, a pre-WWW search engine. A 3270 terminal emulator developed at McGill was commercialized and later sold to Hummingbird Software. A team has developed digital musical instruments in the form of prosthesis, called Musical Prostheses.

Since 2017, McGill has partnered with the University of Montréal [Université de Montréal] (CA) on Mila (research institute), a community of professors, students, industrial partners and startups working in AI, with over 500 researchers making the institute the world’s largest academic research center in deep learning.

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA): “Astronomers capture radio signal from distant galaxy”

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA)

1.16.23

How do stars form in distant galaxies? Astronomers have long been trying to answer this question by detecting radio signals emitted by nearby galaxies. However, these signals become weaker the further away a galaxy is from Earth, making it difficult for current radio telescopes to pick up.

Now researchers from Montreal and India have captured a radio signal [MNRAS (below)]from the most distant galaxy so far at a specific wavelength known as the 21 cm line, allowing astronomers to peer into the secrets of the early universe.
Figure 1.

The continuum image of the target field at 600 MHz, showing the central 3′ × 3′ area. The ellipse at the bottom left is the synthesized beam, with major and minor axes 4.5″ × 4.4″, and the position angle is 82°. The contour levels are at -4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10σ (negative contour is in dashed line) statistical significance, where σ = 8 μJy beam−1 is the RMS noise on the continuum image near the phase centre. We do not find anything at the −4σ level in this region.

Figure 2.

Fraction of flagging or lost data due to RFI mitigation as a function of frequency. The region bounded by the vertical black lines is being used for line–cube analysis.

With the help of the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India, this is the first time this type of radio signal has been detected at such a large distance.

Upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, an array of thirty telescopes, located near Pune in India.

“A galaxy emits different kinds of radio signals. Until now, it’s only been possible to capture this particular signal from a galaxy nearby, limiting our knowledge to those galaxies closer to Earth,” says Arnab Chakraborty, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at McGill University under the supervision of Professor Matt Dobbs.

“But thanks to the help of a naturally occurring phenomenon called gravitational lensing, we can capture a faint signal from a record-breaking distance.

Gravitational Lensing-L. Calçada/Spitzer Space Telescope The National Aeronautics and Space Agency /The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU)

This will help us understand the composition of galaxies at much greater distances from Earth,” he adds.

A look back in time to the early universe

For the first time, the researchers were able to detect the signal from a distant star-forming galaxy known as SDSSJ0826+5630 and measure its gas composition. The researchers observed the atomic mass of the gas content of this particular galaxy is almost twice the mass of the stars visible to us.

The signal detected by the team was emitted from this galaxy when the universe was only 4.9 billion years old, enabling the researchers to glimpse into the secrets of the early universe. “It’s the equivalent to a look-back in time of 8.8 billion years,” says Chakraborty, who studies cosmology at McGill’s Department of Physics.

Picking up the signal from a distant galaxy

“Gravitational lensing magnifies the signal coming from a distant object to help us peer into the early universe. In this specific case, the signal is bent by the presence of another massive body, another galaxy, between the target and the observer. This effectively results in the magnification of the signal by a factor of 30, allowing the telescope to pick it up,” says co-author Nirupam Roy, an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science.

According to the researchers, these results demonstrate the feasibility of observing faraway galaxies in similar situations with gravitational lensing. It also opens exciting new opportunities for probing the cosmic evolution of stars and galaxies with existing low-frequency radio telescopes.

Science paper:
MNRAS
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

All about
McGill University [Université McGill] (CA)

With some 300 buildings, more than 38,500 students and 250,000 living alumni, and a reputation for excellence that reaches around the globe, McGill has carved out a spot among the world’s greatest universities.

Founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1821, McGill University [Université McGill](CA) is a leading Canadian post-secondary institution. It has two campuses, 11 faculties, 11 professional schools, 300 programs of study and some 39,000 students, including more than 9,300 graduate students. McGill attracts students from over 150 countries around the world, its 8,200 international students making up 21 per cent of the student body.

McGill University is a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV, the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant whose bequest in 1813 formed the university’s precursor, University of McGill College (or simply, McGill College); the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885.

McGill’s main campus is on the slope of Mount Royal in downtown Montreal, with a second campus situated in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, also on Montreal Island, 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of the main campus. The university is one of two universities outside the United States which are members of The Association of American Universities, alongside the University of Toronto (CA), and it is the only Canadian member of the Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) within the World Economic Forum
McGill offers degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, with the highest average entering grades of any Canadian university. Most students are enrolled in the five largest faculties, namely Arts, Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Management. With a 32.2% international student body coming to McGill from over 150 countries, its student body is the most internationally diverse of any medical-doctoral research university in the country. Additionally, over 41% of students are born outside of Canada. In all major rankings, McGill consistently ranks in the top 50 universities in the world and among the top 3 universities in Canada. It has held the top position for the past 16 years in the annual Maclean’s Canadian University Rankings for medical-doctoral universities.

McGill counts among its alumni and faculty 12 Nobel laureates and 147 Rhodes Scholars, both the most of any university in Canada, as well as 13 billionaires, the current prime minister and two former prime ministers of Canada, a former Governor General of Canada, at least eight foreign leaders, 28 foreign ambassadors and more than 100 members of national legislatures. McGill alumni also include eight Academy Award winners, 10 Grammy Award winners, at least 13 Emmy Award winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and 121 Olympians with over 35 Olympic medals. The inventors of the game of basketball, modern organized ice hockey, and the pioneers of gridiron football, as well as the founders of several major universities and colleges are also graduates of the university.

Notable researchers include Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus and conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on the nature of radioactivity while working as Professor of Experimental Physics at the university. Other notable inventions by McGillians include the world’s first artificial cell, web search engine, and charge-couple device, among others.

McGill has the largest endowment per student in Canada. In 2019, it was the recipient of the largest single philanthropic gift in Canadian history, a $200 million donation to fund the creation of the McCall MacBain Scholarships programme.

Research

Research plays a critical role at McGill. McGill is affiliated with 12 Nobel Laureates and professors have won major teaching prizes. According to The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, “researchers at McGill are affiliated with about 75 major research centres and networks, and are engaged in an extensive array of research partnerships with other universities, government and industry in Quebec and Canada, throughout North America and in dozens of other countries.” In 2016, McGill had over $547 million of sponsored research income, the second highest in Canada, and a research intensity per faculty of $317,600, the third highest among full-service universities in Canada. McGill has one of the largest patent portfolios among Canadian universities. McGill’s researchers are supported by the McGill University Library, which comprises 13 branch libraries and holds over six million items.

Since 1926, McGill has been a member of The Association of American Universities, an organization of leading research universities in North America. McGill is a founding member of Universitas 21, an international network of leading research-intensive universities that work together to expand their global reach and advance their plans for internationalization. McGill is one of 26 members of the prestigious Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which acts as an intellectual community within The World Economic Forum to advise its leadership on matters relating to higher education and research. It is the only Canadian university member of GULF. McGill is also a member of the U15, a group of prominent research universities within Canada.

McGill-Queen’s University Press began as McGill in 1963 and amalgamated with Queen’s in 1969. McGill-Queen’s University Press focuses on Canadian studies and publishes the Canadian Public Administration Series.

McGill is perhaps best recognized for its research and discoveries in the health sciences. Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, and others made significant discoveries in medicine, neuroscience and psychology while working at McGill, many at the University’s Montreal Neurological Institute. The first hormone governing the Immune System (later christened the Cytokine ‘Interleukin-2’) was discovered at McGill in 1965 by Gordon & McLean.

The invention of the world’s first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang while an undergraduate student at the university. While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Alumnus Jack W. Szostak was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

William Chalmers invented Plexiglas while a graduate student at McGill. In computing, MUSIC/SP, software for mainframes once popular among universities and colleges around the world, was developed at McGill. A team also contributed to the development of Archie, a pre-WWW search engine. A 3270 terminal emulator developed at McGill was commercialized and later sold to Hummingbird Software. A team has developed digital musical instruments in the form of prosthesis, called Musical Prostheses.

Since 2017, McGill has partnered with the University of Montréal [Université de Montréal] (CA) on Mila (research institute), a community of professors, students, industrial partners and startups working in AI, with over 500 researchers making the institute the world’s largest academic research center in deep learning.

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA) Via “phys.org” : “Proposing a new idea for spacecraft propulsion that involves dynamic soaring”

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA)

Via

“phys.org”

12.6.22
Bob Yirka

The trajectory of a vehicle performing “dynamic soaring” in wind shear on the slow and fast solar wind. Credit: Frontiers in Space Technologies (2022)

A team of researchers from McGill University and the Tau Zero Foundation is proposing a new idea for faster spacecraft propulsion that involves “dynamic soaring”. In their paper published in the journal Frontiers in Space Technology [below], the group outlines the idea of “dynamic soaring” as it applies to a speedy way to move through space and other possible uses for it.

Over the past several decades, as human-built space vehicles have made their way to many of the planets and moons in our solar system, it has become clear that a means is required for creating spacecraft that can get to distant destinations in space much faster.

Not only would faster vehicles allow for better study of relatively close destinations, such as planets, moons, asteroids and comets in our solar system, it would allow for venturing further out into space within a reasonable study period.

In this new effort, the researchers note that several new approaches to faster space travel, such as solar sails, are currently under study. More recently, some in the field have proposed the idea of magnetic, electric and plasma magnet sails, each with its own positives and negatives. In this new effort, the researchers look at the possibility of creating and using “dynamic soaring” sails as a way to power a space vehicle.

The idea of “dynamic soaring” is not new; birds have been using it for millions of years. At its essence, it is a flying technique whereby a bird takes advantage of energy gains by repeatedly crossing the boundaries of masses of air moving at different velocities.

Applying the concept to space travel involves building a vehicle that is capable of making use of the termination shock that occurs in turbulent zones of contrasting stellar winds. Of course, to get to such a zone (such as the one at the edge of the solar system) another form of energy is required.

The researchers suggest the most logical is a directional plasma wave antenna. Using both technologies, the researchers suggest, could result in a craft able to reach a destination such as Jupiter in months, rather than years.

Science paper:
Frontiers in Space Technology
See the science paper for instructive material with images and pertinent mathematics.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

All about
McGill University [Université McGill] (CA)

With some 300 buildings, more than 38,500 students and 250,000 living alumni, and a reputation for excellence that reaches around the globe, McGill has carved out a spot among the world’s greatest universities.

Founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1821, McGill University [Université McGill](CA) is a leading Canadian post-secondary institution. It has two campuses, 11 faculties, 11 professional schools, 300 programs of study and some 39,000 students, including more than 9,300 graduate students. McGill attracts students from over 150 countries around the world, its 8,200 international students making up 21 per cent of the student body.

McGill University is a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV, the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant whose bequest in 1813 formed the university’s precursor, University of McGill College (or simply, McGill College); the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885.

McGill’s main campus is on the slope of Mount Royal in downtown Montreal, with a second campus situated in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, also on Montreal Island, 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of the main campus. The university is one of two universities outside the United States which are members of The Association of American Universities, alongside the University of Toronto (CA), and it is the only Canadian member of the Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) within the World Economic Forum.

McGill offers degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, with the highest average entering grades of any Canadian university. Most students are enrolled in the five largest faculties, namely Arts, Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Management. With a 32.2% international student body coming to McGill from over 150 countries, its student body is the most internationally diverse of any medical-doctoral research university in the country. Additionally, over 41% of students are born outside of Canada. In all major rankings, McGill consistently ranks in the top 50 universities in the world and among the top 3 universities in Canada. It has held the top position for the past 16 years in the annual Maclean’s Canadian University Rankings for medical-doctoral universities.

McGill counts among its alumni and faculty 12 Nobel laureates and 147 Rhodes Scholars, both the most of any university in Canada, as well as 13 billionaires, the current prime minister and two former prime ministers of Canada, a former Governor General of Canada, at least eight foreign leaders, 28 foreign ambassadors and more than 100 members of national legislatures. McGill alumni also include eight Academy Award winners, 10 Grammy Award winners, at least 13 Emmy Award winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and 121 Olympians with over 35 Olympic medals. The inventors of the game of basketball, modern organized ice hockey, and the pioneers of gridiron football, as well as the founders of several major universities and colleges are also graduates of the university.

Notable researchers include Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus and conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on the nature of radioactivity while working as Professor of Experimental Physics at the university. Other notable inventions by McGillians include the world’s first artificial cell, web search engine, and charge-couple device, among others.

McGill has the largest endowment per student in Canada. In 2019, it was the recipient of the largest single philanthropic gift in Canadian history, a $200 million donation to fund the creation of the McCall MacBain Scholarships programme.

Research

Research plays a critical role at McGill. McGill is affiliated with 12 Nobel Laureates and professors have won major teaching prizes. According to The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, “researchers at McGill are affiliated with about 75 major research centres and networks, and are engaged in an extensive array of research partnerships with other universities, government and industry in Quebec and Canada, throughout North America and in dozens of other countries.” In 2016, McGill had over $547 million of sponsored research income, the second highest in Canada, and a research intensity per faculty of $317,600, the third highest among full-service universities in Canada. McGill has one of the largest patent portfolios among Canadian universities. McGill’s researchers are supported by the McGill University Library, which comprises 13 branch libraries and holds over six million items.

Since 1926, McGill has been a member of The Association of American Universities , an organization of leading research universities in North America. McGill is a founding member of Universitas 21, an international network of leading research-intensive universities that work together to expand their global reach and advance their plans for internationalization. McGill is one of 26 members of the prestigious Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which acts as an intellectual community within The World Economic Forum to advise its leadership on matters relating to higher education and research. It is the only Canadian university member of GULF. McGill is also a member of the U15, a group of prominent research universities within Canada.

McGill-Queen’s University Press began as McGill in 1963 and amalgamated with Queen’s in 1969. McGill-Queen’s University Press focuses on Canadian studies and publishes the Canadian Public Administration Series.

McGill is perhaps best recognized for its research and discoveries in the health sciences. Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, and others made significant discoveries in medicine, neuroscience and psychology while working at McGill, many at the University’s Montreal Neurological Institute. The first hormone governing the Immune System (later christened the Cytokine ‘Interleukin-2’) was discovered at McGill in 1965 by Gordon & McLean.

The invention of the world’s first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang while an undergraduate student at the university. While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Alumnus Jack W. Szostak was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

William Chalmers invented Plexiglas while a graduate student at McGill. In computing, MUSIC/SP, software for mainframes once popular among universities and colleges around the world, was developed at McGill. A team also contributed to the development of Archie, a pre-WWW search engine. A 3270 terminal emulator developed at McGill was commercialized and later sold to Hummingbird Software. A team has developed digital musical instruments in the form of prosthesis, called Musical Prostheses.

Since 2017, McGill has partnered with the University of Montréal [Université de Montréal] (CA) on Mila (research institute), a community of professors, students, industrial partners and startups working in AI, with over 500 researchers making the institute the world’s largest academic research center in deep learning.

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA): “Advancing climate research thanks to new satellite mission co-led by McGill University”

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA)

10.18.22
Contact Information

Katherine Gombay
Media Relations Office
katherine.gombay@mcgill.ca
Office(514) 398-2189
Mobile(514) 717-2289

Canadian scientists will contribute to assessing and addressing climate change thanks to a new satellite mission that has received more than $200 million from the Canadian federal government. This is Canada’s contribution to a major multi-satellite mission led by NASA, the Atmosphere Observing System (AOS) mission, and will improve extreme weather prediction, climate modelling, and the monitoring of disasters.

NASA Atmosphere Observing System (AOS) mission satellite depiction.

Canada’s contribution to the larger AOS mission is the High-altitude Aerosols, Water vapour and Clouds (HAWC) mission. It consists of two Canadian instruments on a Canadian satellite and a third instrument on a NASA satellite, all planned for launch in 2031. These innovative instruments will provide critical data, enabling Canadian climate scientists and weather forecasters to better understand and predict extreme events, like severe storms, floods, droughts, and poor air quality conditions. HAWC and AOS data will be fully accessible.

Improving our understanding of the atmosphere

McGill University researchers have made critical contributions to the development of HAWC satellite mission by identifying ways to use future HAWC measurements to improve our understanding of the Earth radiation budget, especially the energy in the far-infrared spectrum, and the impacts of deep convection on the atmospheric water vapor distribution.

“Canada has always played a key role in international space programs, helping to find solutions to global challenges. Today’s more than $200 million announcement builds on those successes with our participation in NASA’s AOS program,” said The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. “It also speaks to our commitment to harnessing science and research to address climate change, natural disasters, and other issues that are important to Canadians.”

“This funding will provide an excellent opportunity for McGill researchers to participate in a satellite mission to monitor the atmosphere with researchers from across Canada,” said Martha Crago, McGill’s Vice-Principal of Research and Innovation. “We can all be very proud that McGill will be a part of this important mission.”

The HAWC mission is a collaboration between four co-lead institutions ⁠— McGill University, University of Toronto, University of Saskatchewan, and l’Université du Québec à Montréal — and nine other universities across the country, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), Environment and Climate Change Canada, Natural Resources Canada, the National Research Council of Canada, and Canadian aerospace companies with expertise in optics and satellite technology.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

All about
McGill University [Université McGill] (CA)

With some 300 buildings, more than 38,500 students and 250,000 living alumni, and a reputation for excellence that reaches around the globe, McGill has carved out a spot among the world’s greatest universities.

Founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1821, McGill University [Université McGill](CA) is a leading Canadian post-secondary institution. It has two campuses, 11 faculties, 11 professional schools, 300 programs of study and some 39,000 students, including more than 9,300 graduate students. McGill attracts students from over 150 countries around the world, its 8,200 international students making up 21 per cent of the student body.

McGill University is a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV, the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant whose bequest in 1813 formed the university’s precursor, University of McGill College (or simply, McGill College); the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885.

McGill’s main campus is on the slope of Mount Royal in downtown Montreal, with a second campus situated in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, also on Montreal Island, 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of the main campus. The university is one of two universities outside the United States which are members of the Association of American Universities, alongside the University of Toronto (CA), and it is the only Canadian member of the Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) within the World Economic Forum.

McGill offers degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, with the highest average entering grades of any Canadian university. Most students are enrolled in the five largest faculties, namely Arts, Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Management. With a 32.2% international student body coming to McGill from over 150 countries, its student body is the most internationally diverse of any medical-doctoral research university in the country. Additionally, over 41% of students are born outside of Canada. In all major rankings, McGill consistently ranks in the top 50 universities in the world and among the top 3 universities in Canada. It has held the top position for the past 16 years in the annual Maclean’s Canadian University Rankings for medical-doctoral universities.

McGill counts among its alumni and faculty 12 Nobel laureates and 147 Rhodes Scholars, both the most of any university in Canada, as well as 13 billionaires, the current prime minister and two former prime ministers of Canada, a former Governor General of Canada, at least eight foreign leaders, 28 foreign ambassadors and more than 100 members of national legislatures. McGill alumni also include eight Academy Award winners, 10 Grammy Award winners, at least 13 Emmy Award winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and 121 Olympians with over 35 Olympic medals. The inventors of the game of basketball, modern organized ice hockey, and the pioneers of gridiron football, as well as the founders of several major universities and colleges are also graduates of the university.

Notable researchers include Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus and conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on the nature of radioactivity while working as Professor of Experimental Physics at the university. Other notable inventions by McGillians include the world’s first artificial cell, web search engine, and charge-couple device, among others.

McGill has the largest endowment per student in Canada. In 2019, it was the recipient of the largest single philanthropic gift in Canadian history, a $200 million donation to fund the creation of the McCall MacBain Scholarships programme.

Research

Research plays a critical role at McGill. McGill is affiliated with 12 Nobel Laureates and professors have won major teaching prizes. According to The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, “researchers at McGill are affiliated with about 75 major research centres and networks, and are engaged in an extensive array of research partnerships with other universities, government and industry in Quebec and Canada, throughout North America and in dozens of other countries.” In 2016, McGill had over $547 million of sponsored research income, the second highest in Canada, and a research intensity per faculty of $317,600, the third highest among full-service universities in Canada. McGill has one of the largest patent portfolios among Canadian universities. McGill’s researchers are supported by the McGill University Library, which comprises 13 branch libraries and holds over six million items.

Since 1926, McGill has been a member of the Association of American Universities , an organization of leading research universities in North America. McGill is a founding member of Universitas 21, an international network of leading research-intensive universities that work together to expand their global reach and advance their plans for internationalization. McGill is one of 26 members of the prestigious Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which acts as an intellectual community within the World Economic Forum to advise its leadership on matters relating to higher education and research. It is the only Canadian university member of GULF. McGill is also a member of the U15, a group of prominent research universities within Canada.

McGill-Queen’s University Press began as McGill in 1963 and amalgamated with Queen’s in 1969. McGill-Queen’s University Press focuses on Canadian studies and publishes the Canadian Public Administration Series.

McGill is perhaps best recognized for its research and discoveries in the health sciences. Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, and others made significant discoveries in medicine, neuroscience and psychology while working at McGill, many at the University’s Montreal Neurological Institute. The first hormone governing the Immune System (later christened the Cytokine ‘Interleukin-2’) was discovered at McGill in 1965 by Gordon & McLean.

The invention of the world’s first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang while an undergraduate student at the university. While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Alumnus Jack W. Szostak was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

William Chalmers invented Plexiglas while a graduate student at McGill. In computing, MUSIC/SP, software for mainframes once popular among universities and colleges around the world, was developed at McGill. A team also contributed to the development of Archie, a pre-WWW search engine. A 3270 terminal emulator developed at McGill was commercialized and later sold to Hummingbird Software. A team has developed digital musical instruments in the form of prosthesis, called Musical Prostheses.

Since 2017, McGill has partnered with the University of Montréal [Université de Montréal] (CA) on Mila (research institute), a community of professors, students, industrial partners and startups working in AI, with over 500 researchers making the institute the world’s largest academic research center in deep learning.

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA) Via “phys.org” : “New binary pulsar detected with CHIME“

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA)

Via

“phys.org”

9.21.22

Figure 1. A 2-second section of CHIME/FRB intensity data from an early transit of PSR J2108+4516 on
2018 October 13 (MJD 58404). The data has been dedispersed to 83.5 pc cm−3 and downsampled to 4 ms
time resolution and 6.25 MHz frequency resolution (64 subbands) for plotting clarity. The highest-SNR pulse
triggered the real-time intensity dump. The horizontal grey dashed line in the top panel denotes y = 0.
The blank horizontal sections in the bottom panel indicate frequency channels that have been flagged due
to RFI.

Credit: https://trend.newswal.com

CHIME Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment-A partnership between The University of British Columbia (CA), The University of Toronto (CA), McGill University [Université McGill](CA), Yale University, and The National Research Council Canada [Conseil national de recherches Canada](CA) at The Canada NRCC Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, British Columbia(CA) Altitude 545 m (1,788 ft).

Using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), astronomers have detected a new radio pulsar in a binary system with a massive non-degenerate companion star. The discovery of the pulsar, which received designation PSR J2108+4516, was detailed in a paper published September 14 for The Astrophysical Journal [below].

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation.

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discovered pulsars with radio astronomy. Jocelyn Bell at Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, University of Cambridge(UK), taken for the Daily Herald newspaper in 1968. Denied the Nobel.

They are usually detected in the form of short bursts of radio emission; however, some of them are also observed via optical, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes.

Now, an international team of astronomers led by Bridget C. Andersen of McGill University in Montréal, Canada, reports the finding of a new rare type of a binary pulsar—hosting a massive companion. The detection was made using CHIME, a radio telescope possessing a very wide field of view, large collecting area and high sensitivity across the 400–800 MHz range.

“We discovered and initially monitored PSR J2108+4516 with the CHIME telescope, using the CHIME/FRB and CHIME/Pulsar backends to acquire various types of data,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

All in all, the team acquired almost three years of near-daily CHIME/Pulsar observations of PSR J2108+4516 extending from October 20, 2018 to September 3, 2021. Profile drifts over pulse phase indicated that the pulsar was experiencing significant acceleration from orbiting with a massive binary companion.

The observations of PSR J2108+4516 revealed that it has a spin period of about 0.58 seconds and orbital period of 269 days. The orbital eccentricity was found to be at a level of approximately 0.09 and the pulsar’s characteristic age was estimated to be around 2.1 million years. The surface magnetic field of PSR J2108+4516 was measured to be some 1.2 trillion Gauss.

When it comes to the companion object, the results suggest that its mass should be between 11.7 and 113 solar masses. The study found that the companion is a bright OBe star, known as EM* UHA 138, located at a distance of about 10,600 light years. The researchers estimate that the mass of this star is most likely between 17 and 23 solar masses.

Summing up the results, the astronomers underlined that PSR J2108+4516 is the sixth young pulsar with a massive non-degenerate companion so far detected.

“We have presented the CHIME/FRB discovery and 2.8-yr CHIME/Pulsar timing of a new radio pulsar/massive-star binary, PSR J2108+4516, only the 6th such binary pulsar known,” they concluded.

The authors of the paper added that PSR J2108+4516 may serve as a rare laboratory for the exploration of massive star winds and circumstellar disks. They propose future optical spectroscopic observations of this pulsar in order to determine the companion type and to investigate whether it has a disk, as well as X-ray and gamma-ray studies to inspect disk and wind interactions.

Science paper:
The Astrophysical Journal

See the full article here .

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All about
McGill University [Université McGill] (CA)

With some 300 buildings, more than 38,500 students and 250,000 living alumni, and a reputation for excellence that reaches around the globe, McGill has carved out a spot among the world’s greatest universities.

Founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1821, McGill University [Université McGill](CA) is a leading Canadian post-secondary institution. It has two campuses, 11 faculties, 11 professional schools, 300 programs of study and some 39,000 students, including more than 9,300 graduate students. McGill attracts students from over 150 countries around the world, its 8,200 international students making up 21 per cent of the student body.

McGill University is a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV, the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant whose bequest in 1813 formed the university’s precursor, University of McGill College (or simply, McGill College); the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885.

McGill’s main campus is on the slope of Mount Royal in downtown Montreal, with a second campus situated in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, also on Montreal Island, 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of the main campus. The university is one of two universities outside the United States which are members of the Association of American Universities, alongside the University of Toronto (CA), and it is the only Canadian member of the Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) within the World Economic Forum.

McGill offers degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, with the highest average entering grades of any Canadian university. Most students are enrolled in the five largest faculties, namely Arts, Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Management. With a 32.2% international student body coming to McGill from over 150 countries, its student body is the most internationally diverse of any medical-doctoral research university in the country. Additionally, over 41% of students are born outside of Canada. In all major rankings, McGill consistently ranks in the top 50 universities in the world and among the top 3 universities in Canada. It has held the top position for the past 16 years in the annual Maclean’s Canadian University Rankings for medical-doctoral universities.

McGill counts among its alumni and faculty 12 Nobel laureates and 147 Rhodes Scholars, both the most of any university in Canada, as well as 13 billionaires, the current prime minister and two former prime ministers of Canada, a former Governor General of Canada, at least eight foreign leaders, 28 foreign ambassadors and more than 100 members of national legislatures. McGill alumni also include eight Academy Award winners, 10 Grammy Award winners, at least 13 Emmy Award winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and 121 Olympians with over 35 Olympic medals. The inventors of the game of basketball, modern organized ice hockey, and the pioneers of gridiron football, as well as the founders of several major universities and colleges are also graduates of the university.

Notable researchers include Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus and conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on the nature of radioactivity while working as Professor of Experimental Physics at the university. Other notable inventions by McGillians include the world’s first artificial cell, web search engine, and charge-couple device, among others.

McGill has the largest endowment per student in Canada. In 2019, it was the recipient of the largest single philanthropic gift in Canadian history, a $200 million donation to fund the creation of the McCall MacBain Scholarships programme.

Research

Research plays a critical role at McGill. McGill is affiliated with 12 Nobel Laureates and professors have won major teaching prizes. According to The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, “researchers at McGill are affiliated with about 75 major research centres and networks, and are engaged in an extensive array of research partnerships with other universities, government and industry in Quebec and Canada, throughout North America and in dozens of other countries.” In 2016, McGill had over $547 million of sponsored research income, the second highest in Canada, and a research intensity per faculty of $317,600, the third highest among full-service universities in Canada. McGill has one of the largest patent portfolios among Canadian universities. McGill’s researchers are supported by the McGill University Library, which comprises 13 branch libraries and holds over six million items.

Since 1926, McGill has been a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization of leading research universities in North America. McGill is a founding member of Universitas 21, an international network of leading research-intensive universities that work together to expand their global reach and advance their plans for internationalization. McGill is one of 26 members of the prestigious Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which acts as an intellectual community within the World Economic Forum to advise its leadership on matters relating to higher education and research. It is the only Canadian university member of GULF. McGill is also a member of the U15, a group of prominent research universities within Canada.

McGill-Queen’s University Press began as McGill in 1963 and amalgamated with Queen’s in 1969. McGill-Queen’s University Press focuses on Canadian studies and publishes the Canadian Public Administration Series.

McGill is perhaps best recognized for its research and discoveries in the health sciences. Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, and others made significant discoveries in medicine, neuroscience and psychology while working at McGill, many at the University’s Montreal Neurological Institute. The first hormone governing the Immune System (later christened the Cytokine ‘Interleukin-2’) was discovered at McGill in 1965 by Gordon & McLean.

The invention of the world’s first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang while an undergraduate student at the university. While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Alumnus Jack W. Szostak was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

William Chalmers invented Plexiglas while a graduate student at McGill. In computing, MUSIC/SP, software for mainframes once popular among universities and colleges around the world, was developed at McGill. A team also contributed to the development of Archie, a pre-WWW search engine. A 3270 terminal emulator developed at McGill was commercialized and later sold to Hummingbird Software. A team has developed digital musical instruments in the form of prosthesis, called Musical Prostheses.

Since 2017, McGill has partnered with the University of Montréal [Université de Montréal](CA) on Mila (research institute), a community of professors, students, industrial partners and startups working in AI, with over 500 researchers making the institute the world’s largest academic research center in deep learning.

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA) And The University of Washington State of Washington Ocean Acidification Center: “No ‘Safe Space’ for 12 key ocean species on North American West Coast” Revised

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA)

and

The University of Washington State of Washington Ocean Acidification Center

At

The University of Washington

28 July, 2022

Katherine Gombay
Media Relations Office
katherine.gombay@mcgill.ca
514-717-2289

For the generations who grew up watching Finding Nemo, it might not come as a surprise that the North American West Coast has its own version of the underwater ocean highway – the California Current Marine Ecosystem (CCME). The CCME extends from the southernmost tip of California up through Washington. Seasonal upward currents of cold, nutrient-rich water are the backbone to a larger food web of krill, squid, fish, seabirds and marine mammals. However, climate change and subsequent changes in ocean pH, temperature and oxygen levels are altering the CCME — and not in a good way.

New research led by McGill University Biology professor Jennifer Sunday and Professor Terrie Klinger from the Washington Ocean Acidification Center within EarthLab at the University of Washington warns that climate impacts will significantly affect twelve economically and culturally important species that make their home in the CCME over the next 80 years. The northern part of this region and areas that are closer to shore will have strongest responses within this setting to changing ocean conditions. The region can expect to see substantial loss in canopy-forming kelp, declining survival rates of red urchins, Dungeness crab and razor clams, as well as a loss of aerobic habitat for anchovy and pink shrimp.

Effects of changing climate are complex

Evaluating the biological effects of several environmental variables at once shows the complexities in climate sensitivity research. For example, while some anticipated environmental changes will boost metabolism and increase consumption and growth, accompanying changes in other variables, or even the same ones, could potentially decrease survival rates. Notably, physiological increases (such as in size, consumption or motility) are not always beneficial, especially when resources – such as food and oxygenated water – are limited.

Of all the climate effects modeled, ocean acidification was associated with the largest decreases in individual biological rates in some species, but the largest increases in others. This result emphasizes the need for continued research and monitoring to provide accurate, actionable information.

Modelling critical to safeguarding coastal ecosystems and future of fisheries

Investing in predictive models and implementing adaptation strategies will be increasingly critical to safeguard our ecosystems, coastal cultures and livelihoods locally. Similar challenges will face species not addressed in this study, and responses will be complicated by the arrival of invasive species, disease outbreaks and future changes in nutrient supply.

These species sensitivities will likely have socio-economic consequences felt up and down the West Coast, but they will likely not affect everyone and every place equally. Since the area is highly productive, supporting fisheries and livelihoods for tens of millions of West Coast residents, being able to predict changes at the population level for a range of species that are likely to be affected should shed light on potential economic impacts and optimal adaptive measures for the future.

“The time to accelerate science-based actions is now,” says Jennifer Sunday, an Assistant Professor in McGill’s Biology Department and the first author on the paper. She echoes the messages from the recent 2022 UN Ocean Conference and the associated WOAC side event. “Integrating scientific information, predictive models and monitoring tools into local and regional decision-making can promote stewardship of marine resources and contribute to human wellbeing as we face inevitable changes in the marine life that sustains us.”

Science paper:
Global Change Biology

See the full article here .

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University of Washington Washington Ocean Acidification Center

Since its creation in 2013, the Washington Ocean Acidification Center has been charged by the State Legislature to lead the state in priority areas of ocean acidification research.

The University of Washington is one of the world’s preeminent public universities. Our impact on individuals, on our region, and on the world is profound — whether we are launching young people into a boundless future or confronting the grand challenges of our time through undaunted research and scholarship. Ranked number 10 in the world in Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings and educating more than 54,000 students annually, our students and faculty work together to turn ideas into impact and in the process transform lives and our world. For more about our impact on the world, every day.

So what defines us —the students, faculty and community members at the University of Washington? Above all, it’s our belief in possibility and our unshakable optimism. It’s a connection to others, both near and far. It’s a hunger that pushes us to tackle challenges and pursue progress. It’s the conviction that together we can create a world of good. Join us on the journey.

The University of Washington is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in downtown Seattle approximately a decade after the city’s founding to aid its economic development. Today, the university’s 703-acre main Seattle campus is in the University District above the Montlake Cut, within the urban Puget Sound region of the Pacific Northwest. The university has additional campuses in Tacoma and Bothell. Overall, University of Washington encompasses over 500 buildings and over 20 million gross square footage of space, including one of the largest library systems in the world with more than 26 university libraries, as well as the UW Tower, lecture halls, art centers, museums, laboratories, stadiums, and conference centers. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees through 140 departments in various colleges and schools, sees a total student enrollment of roughly 46,000 annually, and functions on a quarter system.

University of Washington is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, UW spent $1.41 billion on research and development in 2018, ranking it 5th in the nation. As the flagship institution of the six public universities in Washington state, it is known for its medical, engineering and scientific research as well as its highly competitive computer science and engineering programs. Additionally, University of Washington continues to benefit from its deep historic ties and major collaborations with numerous technology giants in the region, such as Amazon, Boeing, Nintendo, and particularly Microsoft. Paul G. Allen, Bill Gates and others spent significant time at Washington computer labs for a startup venture before founding Microsoft and other ventures. The University of Washington’s 22 varsity sports teams are also highly competitive, competing as the Huskies in the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA Division I, representing the United States at the Olympic Games, and other major competitions.

The university has been affiliated with many notable alumni and faculty, including 21 Nobel Prize laureates and numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, Fulbright Scholars, Rhodes Scholars and Marshall Scholars.

In 1854, territorial governor Isaac Stevens recommended the establishment of a university in the Washington Territory. Prominent Seattle-area residents, including Methodist preacher Daniel Bagley, saw this as a chance to add to the city’s potential and prestige. Bagley learned of a law that allowed United States territories to sell land to raise money in support of public schools. At the time, Arthur A. Denny, one of the founders of Seattle and a member of the territorial legislature, aimed to increase the city’s importance by moving the territory’s capital from Olympia to Seattle. However, Bagley eventually convinced Denny that the establishment of a university would assist more in the development of Seattle’s economy. Two universities were initially chartered, but later the decision was repealed in favor of a single university in Lewis County provided that locally donated land was available. When no site emerged, Denny successfully petitioned the legislature to reconsider Seattle as a location in 1858.

In 1861, scouting began for an appropriate 10 acres (4 ha) site in Seattle to serve as a new university campus. Arthur and Mary Denny donated eight acres, while fellow pioneers Edward Lander, and Charlie and Mary Terry, donated two acres on Denny’s Knoll in downtown Seattle. More specifically, this tract was bounded by 4th Avenue to the west, 6th Avenue to the east, Union Street to the north, and Seneca Streets to the south.

John Pike, for whom Pike Street is named, was the university’s architect and builder. It was opened on November 4, 1861, as the Territorial University of Washington. The legislature passed articles incorporating the University, and establishing its Board of Regents in 1862. The school initially struggled, closing three times: in 1863 for low enrollment, and again in 1867 and 1876 due to funds shortage. University of Washington awarded its first graduate Clara Antoinette McCarty Wilt in 1876, with a bachelor’s degree in science.

19th century relocation

By the time Washington state entered the Union in 1889, both Seattle and the University had grown substantially. University of Washington’s total undergraduate enrollment increased from 30 to nearly 300 students, and the campus’s relative isolation in downtown Seattle faced encroaching development. A special legislative committee, headed by University of Washington graduate Edmond Meany, was created to find a new campus to better serve the growing student population and faculty. The committee eventually selected a site on the northeast of downtown Seattle called Union Bay, which was the land of the Duwamish, and the legislature appropriated funds for its purchase and construction. In 1895, the University relocated to the new campus by moving into the newly built Denny Hall. The University Regents tried and failed to sell the old campus, eventually settling with leasing the area. This would later become one of the University’s most valuable pieces of real estate in modern-day Seattle, generating millions in annual revenue with what is now called the Metropolitan Tract. The original Territorial University building was torn down in 1908, and its former site now houses the Fairmont Olympic Hotel.

The sole-surviving remnants of Washington’s first building are four 24-foot (7.3 m), white, hand-fluted cedar, Ionic columns. They were salvaged by Edmond S. Meany, one of the University’s first graduates and former head of its history department. Meany and his colleague, Dean Herbert T. Condon, dubbed the columns as “Loyalty,” “Industry,” “Faith”, and “Efficiency”, or “LIFE.” The columns now stand in the Sylvan Grove Theater.

20th century expansion

Organizers of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition eyed the still largely undeveloped campus as a prime setting for their world’s fair. They came to an agreement with Washington’s Board of Regents that allowed them to use the campus grounds for the exposition, surrounding today’s Drumheller Fountain facing towards Mount Rainier. In exchange, organizers agreed Washington would take over the campus and its development after the fair’s conclusion. This arrangement led to a detailed site plan and several new buildings, prepared in part by John Charles Olmsted. The plan was later incorporated into the overall University of Washington campus master plan, permanently affecting the campus layout.

Both World Wars brought the military to campus, with certain facilities temporarily lent to the federal government. In spite of this, subsequent post-war periods were times of dramatic growth for the University. The period between the wars saw a significant expansion of the upper campus. Construction of the Liberal Arts Quadrangle, known to students as “The Quad,” began in 1916 and continued to 1939. The University’s architectural centerpiece, Suzzallo Library, was built in 1926 and expanded in 1935.

After World War II, further growth came with the G.I. Bill. Among the most important developments of this period was the opening of the School of Medicine in 1946, which is now consistently ranked as the top medical school in the United States. It would eventually lead to the University of Washington Medical Center, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top ten hospitals in the nation.

In 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Seattle area were forced into inland internment camps as part of Executive Order 9066 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. During this difficult time, university president Lee Paul Sieg took an active and sympathetic leadership role in advocating for and facilitating the transfer of Japanese American students to universities and colleges away from the Pacific Coast to help them avoid the mass incarceration. Nevertheless, many Japanese American students and “soon-to-be” graduates were unable to transfer successfully in the short time window or receive diplomas before being incarcerated. It was only many years later that they would be recognized for their accomplishments during the University of Washington’s Long Journey Home ceremonial event that was held in May 2008.

From 1958 to 1973, the University of Washington saw a tremendous growth in student enrollment, its faculties and operating budget, and also its prestige under the leadership of Charles Odegaard. University of Washington student enrollment had more than doubled to 34,000 as the baby boom generation came of age. However, this era was also marked by high levels of student activism, as was the case at many American universities. Much of the unrest focused around civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. In response to anti-Vietnam War protests by the late 1960s, the University Safety and Security Division became the University of Washington Police Department.

Odegaard instituted a vision of building a “community of scholars”, convincing the Washington State legislatures to increase investment in the University. Washington senators, such as Henry M. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, also used their political clout to gather research funds for the University of Washington. The results included an increase in the operating budget from $37 million in 1958 to over $400 million in 1973, solidifying University of Washington as a top recipient of federal research funds in the United States. The establishment of technology giants such as Microsoft, Boeing and Amazon in the local area also proved to be highly influential in the University of Washington’s fortunes, not only improving graduate prospects but also helping to attract millions of dollars in university and research funding through its distinguished faculty and extensive alumni network.

21st century

In 1990, the University of Washington opened its additional campuses in Bothell and Tacoma. Although originally intended for students who have already completed two years of higher education, both schools have since become four-year universities with the authority to grant degrees. The first freshman classes at these campuses started in fall 2006. Today both Bothell and Tacoma also offer a selection of master’s degree programs.

In 2012, the University began exploring plans and governmental approval to expand the main Seattle campus, including significant increases in student housing, teaching facilities for the growing student body and faculty, as well as expanded public transit options. The University of Washington light rail station was completed in March 2015, connecting Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood to the University of Washington Husky Stadium within five minutes of rail travel time. It offers a previously unavailable option of transportation into and out of the campus, designed specifically to reduce dependence on private vehicles, bicycles and local King County buses.

University of Washington has been listed as a “Public Ivy” in Greene’s Guides since 2001, and is an elected member of the American Association of Universities. Among the faculty by 2012, there have been 151 members of American Association for the Advancement of Science, 68 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 67 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 53 members of the National Academy of Medicine, 29 winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 21 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 15 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, 15 MacArthur Fellows, 9 winners of the Gairdner Foundation International Award, 5 winners of the National Medal of Science, 7 Nobel Prize laureates, 5 winners of Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, 4 members of the American Philosophical Society, 2 winners of the National Book Award, 2 winners of the National Medal of Arts, 2 Pulitzer Prize winners, 1 winner of the Fields Medal, and 1 member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Among UW students by 2012, there were 136 Fulbright Scholars, 35 Rhodes Scholars, 7 Marshall Scholars and 4 Gates Cambridge Scholars. UW is recognized as a top producer of Fulbright Scholars, ranking 2nd in the US in 2017.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has consistently ranked University of Washington as one of the top 20 universities worldwide every year since its first release. In 2019, University of Washington ranked 14th worldwide out of 500 by the ARWU, 26th worldwide out of 981 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and 28th worldwide out of 101 in the Times World Reputation Rankings. Meanwhile, QS World University Rankings ranked it 68th worldwide, out of over 900.

U.S. News & World Report ranked University of Washington 8th out of nearly 1,500 universities worldwide for 2021, with University of Washington’s undergraduate program tied for 58th among 389 national universities in the U.S. and tied for 19th among 209 public universities.

In 2019, it ranked 10th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. In 2017, the Leiden Ranking, which focuses on science and the impact of scientific publications among the world’s 500 major universities, ranked University of Washington 12th globally and 5th in the U.S.

In 2019, Kiplinger Magazine’s review of “top college values” named University of Washington 5th for in-state students and 10th for out-of-state students among U.S. public colleges, and 84th overall out of 500 schools. In the Washington Monthly National University Rankings University of Washington was ranked 15th domestically in 2018, based on its contribution to the public good as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service.

All about
McGill University [Université McGill] (CA)

With some 300 buildings, more than 38,500 students and 250,000 living alumni, and a reputation for excellence that reaches around the globe, McGill has carved out a spot among the world’s greatest universities.

Founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1821, McGill University [Université McGill](CA) is a leading Canadian post-secondary institution. It has two campuses, 11 faculties, 11 professional schools, 300 programs of study and some 39,000 students, including more than 9,300 graduate students. McGill attracts students from over 150 countries around the world, its 8,200 international students making up 21 per cent of the student body.

McGill University is a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV, the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant whose bequest in 1813 formed the university’s precursor, University of McGill College (or simply, McGill College); the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885.

McGill’s main campus is on the slope of Mount Royal in downtown Montreal, with a second campus situated in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, also on Montreal Island, 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of the main campus. The university is one of two universities outside the United States which are members of the Association of American Universities, alongside the University of Toronto (CA), and it is the only Canadian member of the Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) within the World Economic Forum.

McGill offers degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, with the highest average entering grades of any Canadian university. Most students are enrolled in the five largest faculties, namely Arts, Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Management. With a 32.2% international student body coming to McGill from over 150 countries, its student body is the most internationally diverse of any medical-doctoral research university in the country. Additionally, over 41% of students are born outside of Canada. In all major rankings, McGill consistently ranks in the top 50 universities in the world and among the top 3 universities in Canada. It has held the top position for the past 16 years in the annual Maclean’s Canadian University Rankings for medical-doctoral universities.

McGill counts among its alumni and faculty 12 Nobel laureates and 147 Rhodes Scholars, both the most of any university in Canada, as well as 13 billionaires, the current prime minister and two former prime ministers of Canada, a former Governor General of Canada, at least eight foreign leaders, 28 foreign ambassadors and more than 100 members of national legislatures. McGill alumni also include eight Academy Award winners, 10 Grammy Award winners, at least 13 Emmy Award winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and 121 Olympians with over 35 Olympic medals. The inventors of the game of basketball, modern organized ice hockey, and the pioneers of gridiron football, as well as the founders of several major universities and colleges are also graduates of the university.

Notable researchers include Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus and conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on the nature of radioactivity while working as Professor of Experimental Physics at the university. Other notable inventions by McGillians include the world’s first artificial cell, web search engine, and charge-couple device, among others.

McGill has the largest endowment per student in Canada. In 2019, it was the recipient of the largest single philanthropic gift in Canadian history, a $200 million donation to fund the creation of the McCall MacBain Scholarships programme.

Research

Research plays a critical role at McGill. McGill is affiliated with 12 Nobel Laureates and professors have won major teaching prizes. According to The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, “researchers at McGill are affiliated with about 75 major research centres and networks, and are engaged in an extensive array of research partnerships with other universities, government and industry in Quebec and Canada, throughout North America and in dozens of other countries.” In 2016, McGill had over $547 million of sponsored research income, the second highest in Canada, and a research intensity per faculty of $317,600, the third highest among full-service universities in Canada. McGill has one of the largest patent portfolios among Canadian universities. McGill’s researchers are supported by the McGill University Library, which comprises 13 branch libraries and holds over six million items.

Since 1926, McGill has been a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization of leading research universities in North America. McGill is a founding member of Universitas 21, an international network of leading research-intensive universities that work together to expand their global reach and advance their plans for internationalization. McGill is one of 26 members of the prestigious Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which acts as an intellectual community within the World Economic Forum to advise its leadership on matters relating to higher education and research. It is the only Canadian university member of GULF. McGill is also a member of the U15, a group of prominent research universities within Canada.

McGill-Queen’s University Press began as McGill in 1963 and amalgamated with Queen’s in 1969. McGill-Queen’s University Press focuses on Canadian studies and publishes the Canadian Public Administration Series.

McGill is perhaps best recognized for its research and discoveries in the health sciences. Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, and others made significant discoveries in medicine, neuroscience and psychology while working at McGill, many at the University’s Montreal Neurological Institute. The first hormone governing the Immune System (later christened the Cytokine ‘Interleukin-2’) was discovered at McGill in 1965 by Gordon & McLean.

The invention of the world’s first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang while an undergraduate student at the university. While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Alumnus Jack W. Szostak was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

William Chalmers invented Plexiglas while a graduate student at McGill. In computing, MUSIC/SP, software for mainframes once popular among universities and colleges around the world, was developed at McGill. A team also contributed to the development of Archie, a pre-WWW search engine. A 3270 terminal emulator developed at McGill was commercialized and later sold to Hummingbird Software. A team has developed digital musical instruments in the form of prosthesis, called Musical Prostheses.

Since 2017, McGill has partnered with the University of Montréal [Université de Montréal](CA) on Mila (research institute), a community of professors, students, industrial partners and startups working in AI, with over 500 researchers making the institute the world’s largest academic research center in deep learning.

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA) and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Astronomers detect a radio ‘heartbeat’ billions of light-years from Earth”

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA)

and

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

13 July 2022

Katherine Gombay
Media Relations Office
katherine.gombay@mcgill.ca
514-717-2289

Jennifer Chu | MIT News

The clear and periodic pattern of fast radio bursts may originate from a distant neutron star.

Astronomers at McGill University, MIT and elsewhere have detected a strange and persistent radio signal from a far-off galaxy, that appears to be flashing with surprising regularity. Classified as a fast radio burst, or FRB, this new signal persists for up to three seconds, about 1,000 times longer than the average FRB. Within this window, the team detected bursts of radio waves that repeat every 0.2 seconds in a clear periodic pattern.

The researchers have labeled the signal FRB 20191221A. It is currently the longest-lasting FRB, with the clearest periodic pattern, detected to date.

CHIME Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment-A partnership between The University of British Columbia (CA), The University of Toronto (CA), McGill University [Université McGill](CA), Yale University, and The National Research Council Canada [Conseil national de recherches Canada](CA) at The Canada NRCC Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, British Columbia(CA) Altitude 545 m (1,788 ft).

On December 21, 2019, the CHIME telescope picked up a signal of a potential FRB, which immediately drew the attention of Daniele Michilli, who noticed something unusual while scanning the incoming data.

“Not only was it very long, lasting about three seconds, but there were periodic peaks that were remarkably precise, emitting every fraction of a second — boom, boom, boom — like a heartbeat,” recalls Michilli, who led the research, initially while at McGill University and then as a postdoc at MIT. “This is the first time the signal itself is periodic.”

“There are not many things in the universe that emit strictly periodic signals,” adds Aaron Pearlman, a FRQNT postdoctoral fellow at the McGill Space Institute who also collaborated on the paper. “Examples that we know of in our own galaxy are radio pulsars and magnetars, which rotate and produce a beamed emission similar to a lighthouse. And we think this new signal could be a magnetar or pulsar on steroids.”

The team hopes to detect more periodic signals from this source, which could then be used as an astrophysical clock. For instance, the frequency of the bursts, and how they change as the source moves away from Earth, could be used to measure the rate at which the universe is expanding.

Brilliant bursts

In analyzing the pattern of FRB 20191221A’s radio bursts, Michilli and his colleagues found similarities with emissions from radio pulsars and magnetars in our own galaxy. Radio pulsars are neutron stars that emit beams of radio waves, appearing to pulse as the star rotates, while a similar emission is produced by magnetars due to their extreme magnetic fields.

The main difference between the new signal and radio emissions from our own galactic pulsars and magnetars is that FRB 20191221A appears to be more than a million times brighter. Michilli says the luminous flashes may originate from a distant radio pulsar or magnetar that is normally less bright as it rotates and for some unknown reason ejected a train of brilliant bursts, in a rare three-second window that CHIME was luckily positioned to catch.

“CHIME has now detected many FRBs with different properties,” Michilli says. “We’ve seen some that live inside clouds that are very turbulent, while others look like they’re in clean environments. From the properties of this new signal, we can say that around this source, there’s a cloud of plasma that must be extremely turbulent.”

The astronomers hope to catch additional bursts from the periodic FRB 20191221A, which can help to refine their understanding of its source, and of neutron stars in general.

“This detection raises the question of what could cause this extreme signal that we’ve never seen before, and how we can use this signal to study the universe,” Michilli says. “Future telescopes promise to discover thousands of FRBs a month, and at that point we may find many more of these periodic signals.”

Science paper:
The discovery is reported in the journal Nature and is authored by members of the CHIME/FRB Collaboration.

See the full article here .

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USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory , the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center , and the Haystack Observatory , as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Whitehead Institute.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory campus

Massachusettes Institute of Technology-Haystack Observatory Westford, Massachusetts, USA, Altitude 131 m (430 ft).

Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology . The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU).

Foundation and vision

In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

“The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

Early developments

Two days after The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

In 1916, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

Curricular reforms

In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

These activities affected The Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However six Massachusetts Institute of Technology students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

In the 1980s, there was more controversy at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

Recent history

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched OpenCourseWare to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation .

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

The mission of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

All about
McGill University [Université McGill] (CA)

With some 300 buildings, more than 38,500 students and 250,000 living alumni, and a reputation for excellence that reaches around the globe, McGill has carved out a spot among the world’s greatest universities.

Founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1821, McGill University [Université McGill](CA) is a leading Canadian post-secondary institution. It has two campuses, 11 faculties, 11 professional schools, 300 programs of study and some 39,000 students, including more than 9,300 graduate students. McGill attracts students from over 150 countries around the world, its 8,200 international students making up 21 per cent of the student body.

McGill University is a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV, the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant whose bequest in 1813 formed the university’s precursor, University of McGill College (or simply, McGill College); the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885.

McGill’s main campus is on the slope of Mount Royal in downtown Montreal, with a second campus situated in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, also on Montreal Island, 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of the main campus. The university is one of two universities outside the United States which are members of the Association of American Universities (US), alongside the University of Toronto (CA), and it is the only Canadian member of the Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) within the World Economic Forum.

McGill offers degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, with the highest average entering grades of any Canadian university. Most students are enrolled in the five largest faculties, namely Arts, Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Management. With a 32.2% international student body coming to McGill from over 150 countries, its student body is the most internationally diverse of any medical-doctoral research university in the country. Additionally, over 41% of students are born outside of Canada. In all major rankings, McGill consistently ranks in the top 50 universities in the world and among the top 3 universities in Canada. It has held the top position for the past 16 years in the annual Maclean’s Canadian University Rankings for medical-doctoral universities.

McGill counts among its alumni and faculty 12 Nobel laureates and 147 Rhodes Scholars, both the most of any university in Canada, as well as 13 billionaires, the current prime minister and two former prime ministers of Canada, a former Governor General of Canada, at least eight foreign leaders, 28 foreign ambassadors and more than 100 members of national legislatures. McGill alumni also include eight Academy Award winners, 10 Grammy Award winners, at least 13 Emmy Award winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and 121 Olympians with over 35 Olympic medals. The inventors of the game of basketball, modern organized ice hockey, and the pioneers of gridiron football, as well as the founders of several major universities and colleges are also graduates of the university.

Notable researchers include Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus and conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on the nature of radioactivity while working as Professor of Experimental Physics at the university. Other notable inventions by McGillians include the world’s first artificial cell, web search engine, and charge-couple device, among others.

McGill has the largest endowment per student in Canada. In 2019, it was the recipient of the largest single philanthropic gift in Canadian history, a $200 million donation to fund the creation of the McCall MacBain Scholarships programme.

Research

Research plays a critical role at McGill. McGill is affiliated with 12 Nobel Laureates and professors have won major teaching prizes. According to The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, “researchers at McGill are affiliated with about 75 major research centres and networks, and are engaged in an extensive array of research partnerships with other universities, government and industry in Quebec and Canada, throughout North America and in dozens of other countries.” In 2016, McGill had over $547 million of sponsored research income, the second highest in Canada, and a research intensity per faculty of $317,600, the third highest among full-service universities in Canada. McGill has one of the largest patent portfolios among Canadian universities. McGill’s researchers are supported by the McGill University Library, which comprises 13 branch libraries and holds over six million items.

Since 1926, McGill has been a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization of leading research universities in North America. McGill is a founding member of Universitas 21, an international network of leading research-intensive universities that work together to expand their global reach and advance their plans for internationalization. McGill is one of 26 members of the prestigious Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which acts as an intellectual community within the World Economic Forum to advise its leadership on matters relating to higher education and research. It is the only Canadian university member of GULF. McGill is also a member of the U15, a group of prominent research universities within Canada.

McGill-Queen’s University Press began as McGill in 1963 and amalgamated with Queen’s in 1969. McGill-Queen’s University Press focuses on Canadian studies and publishes the Canadian Public Administration Series.

McGill is perhaps best recognized for its research and discoveries in the health sciences. Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, and others made significant discoveries in medicine, neuroscience and psychology while working at McGill, many at the University’s Montreal Neurological Institute. The first hormone governing the Immune System (later christened the Cytokine ‘Interleukin-2’) was discovered at McGill in 1965 by Gordon & McLean.

The invention of the world’s first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang while an undergraduate student at the university. While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Alumnus Jack W. Szostak was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

William Chalmers invented Plexiglas while a graduate student at McGill. In computing, MUSIC/SP, software for mainframes once popular among universities and colleges around the world, was developed at McGill. A team also contributed to the development of Archie, a pre-WWW search engine. A 3270 terminal emulator developed at McGill was commercialized and later sold to Hummingbird Software. A team has developed digital musical instruments in the form of prosthesis, called Musical Prostheses.

Since 2017, McGill has partnered with the University of Montréal [Université de Montréal](CA) on Mila (research institute), a community of professors, students, industrial partners and startups working in AI, with over 500 researchers making the institute the world’s largest academic research center in deep learning.

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA): “New insights into seasons on a planet outside our solar system”

From McGill University [Université McGill](CA)

13 January 2022

Katherine Gombay
Media Relations Office
katherine.gombay@mcgill.ca
Mobile Phone: 514-717-2289

XO-3b, a hot Jupiter on an eccentric orbit. Credit: R. Hurt (Caltech NASA Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (US)) NASA-JPL/Caltech(US)/

Imagine being in a place where the winds are so strong that they move at the speed of sound. That’s just one aspect of the atmosphere on XO-3b, one of a class of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system), known as hot Jupiters. The eccentric orbit of the planet also leads to seasonal variations hundreds of times stronger than what we experience on Earth. In a recent paper, a McGill-led research team, provides new insight into what seasons looks like on a planet outside our solar system. The researchers also suggest that the oval orbit, extremely high surface temperatures (2,000 degrees C- hot enough to vaporize rock) and “puffiness” of XO-3b reveal traces of the planet’s history. The findings will potentially advance both the scientific understanding of how exoplanets form and evolve and give some context for planets in our own solar system.

Hot Jupiters are massive, gaseous worlds like Jupiter, that orbit closer to their parent stars than Mercury is to the Sun. Though not present in our own solar system, they appear to be common throughout the galaxy. Despite being the most studied type of exoplanet, major questions remain about how they form. Could there be subclasses of hot Jupiters with different formation stories? For example, do these planets take shape far from their parent stars – at a distance where it’s cold enough for molecules such as water to become solid – or closer. The first scenario fits better with theories about how planets in our own solar system are born, but what would drive these types of planets to migrate so close to their parent stars remains unclear.

To test those ideas, the authors of a recent McGill-led study used data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope to look at the atmosphere of exoplanet XO-3b.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US) Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope no longer in service. Launched in 2003 and retired on 30 January 2020.

They observed eccentric seasons and measured wind speeds on the planet by obtaining a phase curve of the planet as it completed a full revolution about its host star.

Looking at atmospheric dynamics and interior evolution

“This planet is an extremely interesting case study for atmospheric dynamics and interior evolution, as it lies in an intermediate regime of planetary mass where processes normally neglected for less massive hot Jupiters may come into play,” says Lisa Dang, the first author of a paper published recently in The Astronomical Journal, a PhD student at McGill University’s Department of Physics. “XO-3b has an oval orbit rather than the circular orbit of almost all other known hot Jupiters. This suggests that it recently migrated toward its parent star; if that’s the case, it will eventually settle into a more circular orbit.”

The eccentric orbit of the planet also leads to seasonal variations hundreds of times stronger than what we experience on Earth. Nicolas Cowan, a McGill professor explains: “The entire planet receives three times more energy when it is close to its star­­ during a brief sort of summer, than when it is far from the star.”

The researchers also re-estimated the planet’s mass and radius and found that the planet was surprisingly puffier than expected. They suggest and that the possible source of this heating could be due to leftover nuclear fusion.

Excess warmth and puffiness due to tidal heating?

Observations by Gaia, an ESA (European Space Agency) mission, found that the planet is puffier than expected which indicate its interior may be particularly energetic.

European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU) GAIA satellite.

Spitzer observations also hints that the planet produces much of its own heat as XO-3b’s excess thermal emission isn’t seasonal – it’s observed throughout the year on XO-3b. It’s possible that the excess warmth is coming from the planet’s interior, through a process called tidal heating. The star’s gravitational squeeze on the planet oscillates as the oblong orbit takes the planet farther and then closer to the star. The resulting changes in interior pressure produce heat.

For Dang, this unusual hot Jupiter provides an opportunity to test ideas about which formation processes may producer certain characteristics in these exoplanets. For example, could tidal heating in other hot Jupiters also be a sign of recent migration? XO-3b alone won’t unlock the mystery, but it serves as an important test for emerging ideas about these scorching giants.

See the full article here .

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All about
McGill University [Université McGill] (CA)

With some 300 buildings, more than 38,500 students and 250,000 living alumni, and a reputation for excellence that reaches around the globe, McGill has carved out a spot among the world’s greatest universities.

Founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1821, McGill University [Université McGill](CA) is a leading Canadian post-secondary institution. It has two campuses, 11 faculties, 11 professional schools, 300 programs of study and some 39,000 students, including more than 9,300 graduate students. McGill attracts students from over 150 countries around the world, its 8,200 international students making up 21 per cent of the student body.

McGill University(CA) is a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV, the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant whose bequest in 1813 formed the university’s precursor, University of McGill College (or simply, McGill College); the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885.

McGill’s main campus is on the slope of Mount Royal in downtown Montreal, with a second campus situated in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, also on Montreal Island, 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of the main campus. The university is one of two universities outside the United States which are members of the Association of American Universities (US), alongside the University of Toronto (CA), and it is the only Canadian member of the Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) within the World Economic Forum.

McGill offers degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, with the highest average entering grades of any Canadian university. Most students are enrolled in the five largest faculties, namely Arts, Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Management. With a 32.2% international student body coming to McGill from over 150 countries, its student body is the most internationally diverse of any medical-doctoral research university in the country. Additionally, over 41% of students are born outside of Canada. In all major rankings, McGill consistently ranks in the top 50 universities in the world and among the top 3 universities in Canada. It has held the top position for the past 16 years in the annual Maclean’s Canadian University Rankings for medical-doctoral universities.

McGill counts among its alumni and faculty 12 Nobel laureates and 147 Rhodes Scholars, both the most of any university in Canada, as well as 13 billionaires, the current prime minister and two former prime ministers of Canada, a former Governor General of Canada, at least eight foreign leaders, 28 foreign ambassadors and more than 100 members of national legislatures. McGill alumni also include eight Academy Award winners, 10 Grammy Award winners, at least 13 Emmy Award winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and 121 Olympians with over 35 Olympic medals. The inventors of the game of basketball, modern organized ice hockey, and the pioneers of gridiron football, as well as the founders of several major universities and colleges are also graduates of the university.

Notable researchers include Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus and conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on the nature of radioactivity while working as Professor of Experimental Physics at the university. Other notable inventions by McGillians include the world’s first artificial cell, web search engine, and charge-couple device, among others.

McGill has the largest endowment per student in Canada. In 2019, it was the recipient of the largest single philanthropic gift in Canadian history, a $200 million donation to fund the creation of the McCall MacBain Scholarships programme.

Research

Research plays a critical role at McGill. McGill is affiliated with 12 Nobel Laureates and professors have won major teaching prizes. According to The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, “researchers at McGill are affiliated with about 75 major research centres and networks, and are engaged in an extensive array of research partnerships with other universities, government and industry in Quebec and Canada, throughout North America and in dozens of other countries.” In 2016, McGill had over $547 million of sponsored research income, the second highest in Canada, and a research intensity per faculty of $317,600, the third highest among full-service universities in Canada. McGill has one of the largest patent portfolios among Canadian universities. McGill’s researchers are supported by the McGill University Library, which comprises 13 branch libraries and holds over six million items.

Since 1926, McGill has been a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization of leading research universities in North America. McGill is a founding member of Universitas 21, an international network of leading research-intensive universities that work together to expand their global reach and advance their plans for internationalization. McGill is one of 26 members of the prestigious Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which acts as an intellectual community within the World Economic Forum to advise its leadership on matters relating to higher education and research. It is the only Canadian university member of GULF. McGill is also a member of the U15, a group of prominent research universities within Canada.

McGill-Queen’s University Press began as McGill in 1963 and amalgamated with Queen’s in 1969. McGill-Queen’s University Press focuses on Canadian studies and publishes the Canadian Public Administration Series.

McGill is perhaps best recognized for its research and discoveries in the health sciences. Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, and others made significant discoveries in medicine, neuroscience and psychology while working at McGill, many at the University’s Montreal Neurological Institute. The first hormone governing the Immune System (later christened the Cytokine ‘Interleukin-2’) was discovered at McGill in 1965 by Gordon & McLean.

The invention of the world’s first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang while an undergraduate student at the university. While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Alumnus Jack W. Szostak was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

William Chalmers invented Plexiglas while a graduate student at McGill. In computing, MUSIC/SP, software for mainframes once popular among universities and colleges around the world, was developed at McGill. A team also contributed to the development of Archie, a pre-WWW search engine. A 3270 terminal emulator developed at McGill was commercialized and later sold to Hummingbird Software. A team has developed digital musical instruments in the form of prosthesis, called Musical Prostheses.

Since 2017, McGill has partnered with the University of Montréal [Université de Montréal](CA) on Mila (research institute), a community of professors, students, industrial partners and startups working in AI, with over 500 researchers making the institute the world’s largest academic research center in deep learning.