From The Faculty of Arts & Science At The University of Toronto (CA): “By studying lizards researchers reveal the forces that shape biodiversity”

From The Faculty of Arts & Science

At

The University of Toronto (CA)

3.20.23
Chris Sasaki

Researchers in U of T’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology studied anoles on the islands of Jamaica and Hispaniola to better understand what determines biodiversity (all photos courtesy of Luke Mahler)

“If you pick a spot in, say, a rainforest, and count the number of different species of lizards within 15 metres and you come up with a number,” says Luke Mahler, “What determines that number?”

Mahler is an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science. He studies how the interplay of ecological and evolutionary forces over time and space results in the biodiversity we see in different habitats. He does this primarily by studying Anolis lizards – aka anoles – small, tree-dwelling reptiles in tropical regions of the Americas.

What determines the number of different species in local communities of animals? The question is a long-standing ecological problem for which there has been no consensus.

“Is it because of local processes like competition for food or territory?” Mahler asks. “Or is it the result of broader, regional processes like the generation of new species by evolution?”

One hypothesis suggests the determining force is local competition. In other words, if a local community – for example, a particular patch of forest on a tropical island – is “full up” with several species, then additional species wouldn’t be able to persist because every ecological niche is already occupied.

Anole lizards are small, tree-dwelling reptiles. Luke Mahler.

But according to another hypothesis, the diversity of species in such an area isn’t limited by a pre-existing number of niches. Instead, the most important factor determining the number of species in a local community is the diversity of the broader region.

“On an island with a small total number of species, local communities should have only a small number of species,” Mahler explains. “But on an island that has many species, you should see many species in local communities. In other words, local diversity is essentially a reflection of broader diversity, with classic ecological processes like competition mattering very little.

“If regional diversity determines what you see at a local site, then that local diversity is ultimately determined by the large-scale evolutionary processes that created the regional diversity.”

To answer the question of local versus regional, Mahler and his colleagues studied anoles on the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Hispaniola. What the researchers found was evidence for an unexpected third option – one that required marrying elements of both the “local” and “regional” hypotheses.

They found that the diversity of species in local communities indeed seems to be determined by local ecological processes that cap species diversity – but only if regional evolutionary forces have already produced the kinds of species that can monopolize local ecological resources. For example, the rich evolutionary diversity of species on Hispaniola, a large and ancient island, has “fed” a wealth of specialized species into the local communities at higher elevations on that island.

Luke Mahler (far right) and Luke Frishkoff (fourth from left) pose for photo with students. Luke Mahler.

Why? Hispaniola’s diversity – which stems from evolution playing out over millions of years across a very large and complex area – has led to unique anole species that exist only in the highlands. These species have filled all the available ecological niches, precluding more species from joining local communities there.

In contrast, Jamaica is smaller in area, especially in the highlands. And while many anole species have evolved on the island, the relative lack of space in the highlands hasn’t allowed the evolution of new highland-specialist species as it has on Hispaniola. In fact, there is only one distinct highland anole in Jamaica.

Put another way: local diversity is determined by both regional and local forces but in different ways. Regional forces produce a diverse set of species, which then compete with one another, establishing local limits on diversity in any given location. But if a region is lacking in “evolutionary opportunity” because it’s too small or too young, it fails to produce a diverse assembly of species and local limits are never reached.

Mahler and his colleagues described these findings in their study, published recently in the journal Ecology Letters [below]. Co-authors included Luke Frishkoff, who started working on the research as a post-doctoral researcher in Mahler’s lab and who is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas-Arlington, and Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky, a PhD candidate currently in Mahler’s lab.

The “laboratories” in which Mahler and his colleagues conducted their research – Jamaica and Hispaniola – were chosen because they are similar in many ways. They are situated at the same latitude, have matching topography and have similar forest habitats.

Every summer from 2016 to 2018, the researchers counted the number of anole species in dozens of 30-metre diameter plots on both islands from sea level to an altitude of approximately 2,000 metres.

“The anole faunas of Jamaica and Hispaniola provide a rich opportunity for comparison because they represent a natural experiment,” Mahler says. “And what we found is that local processes do matter. But they matter in such a way that it’s regional opportunities for diversification that determine their strength.”

“However, this is a single, if illustrative, comparison. Determining the generality of the evolutionary opportunity model we propose here awaits additional tests.”

Ecology Letters

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

The University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science is Canada’s largest and most research-intensive undergraduate and graduate enterprise, a vibrant intellectual community of students and scholars who are deeply committed to excellence, discovery and diversity.

The Faculty comprises 29 departments, seven colleges and 48 interdisciplinary centres, schools and institutes, which not only provide academic offerings, but also a thriving community outside the classroom. This breadth allows us to develop new synergies, to address novel research opportunities and student interest in areas that cut across the sectors.

More than 300 undergraduate and 70 graduate programs are offered across the humanities, social sciences and sciences.

Departments

Anthropology
Art History
David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics
Cell & Systems Biology
Chemistry
Classics
Computer Science
Earth Sciences
East Asian Studies
Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Economics
English
French
Geography & Planning
Germanic Languages & Literatures
History
Italian Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
Philosophy
Physics
Political Science
Psychology
Study of Religion
Slavic Languages & Literatures
Sociology
Spanish & Portuguese
Statistical Sciences

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From The Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering At The University of Toronto (CA): “University of Toronto researchers advance metal 3D printing technology for automotive and energy and biomedical applications”

From The Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

At

The University of Toronto (CA)

3.14.23
Safa Jinje

The metal 3D printers used by U of T Engineering Professor Yu Zou and his team are designed to specialize in both selective laser melting and directed energy deposition – two essential metal additive manufacturing techniques (Photo by Safa Jinje)

A team of University of Toronto researchers, led by Professor Yu Zou in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, is working to advance the field of metal additive manufacturing at the university’s first metal 3D printing laboratory.

The technology, which uses computer-aided design (CAD) to construct materials layer by layer, can improve manufacturing across aerospace, biomedical, energy and automotive industries.

“We are working to uncover the fundamental physics behind the additive manufacturing process, as well as improving its robustness and creating novel structural and functional materials through its applications,” says Zou, an assistant professor in the department of materials science and engineering.

Unlike traditional manufacturing, in which parts or components are made from bulk materials, the metal 3D printing process enables microstructure and materials constitutions to be locally tailored, meaning they can exhibit distinct properties.

“For example, medical implants require human bone-like materials that are dense and hard on the outside, but porous on the inside,” says Xiao Shang, a PhD candidate in Zou’s lab. “With traditional manufacturing, that’s really hard to accomplish – but metal printing gives you a lot more control and customized products.”

Subtractive manufacturing techniques generally involves removing material in order to achieve a desired end product. Additive manufacturing, by contrast, builds new objects by adding layers of material. This process significantly reduces production time, material cost and energy consumption when producing objects such as aerospace engine components, tooling parts for automotive production, critical components for nuclear reactors and joint implants.

Assistant professor Yu Zou, far left, and his 3D printing team conduct research in the Laboratory for Extreme Mechanics & Additive Manufacturing (Photo by Safa Jinje)

Zou’s metal 3D printers are designed to specialize in both selective laser melting and directed energy deposition – two essential metal additive manufacturing techniques used in both academia and industry.

First, CAD software is used to create a 3D model of the object and its layers. Then, for each layer, the machine deposits a very thin layer of metal powder, which is subsequently melted by a powerful laser according to the geometry defined by the 3D model.

After the molten metal solidifies, it adheres to either the previous layer or the substrate. Once each layer is complete, the machine will repeat the powder doping and laser melting process until all layers are printed and the object is completed.

“Conventional manufacturing techniques are still well-suited for large-scale industrial manufacturing,” says Tianyi Lyu, a PhD candidate in materials science and engineering. “But additive manufacturing has capabilities that go beyond what conventional techniques can do. These include the fabrication of complex geometries, rapid prototyping and customization of designs, and precise control of the material properties.”

Directed energy deposition metal 3D printing process.
Three different geometries are fabricated layer by layer using the directed energy deposition process (Video by Xiao Shang)

For example, dental professionals can use selective laser melting to create dentures or implants customized to specific patients via a precise 3D model with dimensional accuracy that is within a few micrometres. Rapid prototyping also allows for easy adjustments of the denture design. And since implants can require different material properties at distinct locations, this can be achieved by simply changing the process parameters.

The team is also applying novel experimental and analytical methods to gain a better understanding of the selective laser melting and directed energy deposition printing processes. Currently, their research is focused on advanced steels, nickel-based superalloys and high-entropy alloys, and they may expand to explore titanium and aluminum alloys in the future.

“One of the major bottlenecks in conventional alloy design today is the large processing times required to create and test new materials. This type of high-throughput design just isn’t possible for conventional fabrication methods,” says Ajay Talbot, a master’s student in materials science and engineering.

With additive manufacturing techniques such as directed energy deposition, the team is rapidly increasing the amount of alloy systems explored, altering the composition of materials during the printing process by adding or taking away certain elements.

“We are also working towards intelligent manufacturing. During the metal 3D printing process, the interaction between a high-energy laser and the material only lasts for a few microseconds. However, within this limited timeframe, multi-scale, multi-physics phenomena take place,” says Jiahui Zhang, a PhD candidate in materials science and engineering. “Our main challenge is attaining data to capture these phenomena.

“In our research, we have successfully customized specific machine learning methods for different parts of the metal additive manufacturing lifecycle.”

In the lab, high-speed infrared camera systems are integrated directly into the metal 3D printers. The team has also built an in-situ monitoring system based on the images taken by the printer to analyze and extract the key features of printed objects.

“With the development of computer vision, a well-trained deep learning model could automatically accomplish some basic tasks that human visual systems can do, such as classification, detection and segmentation,” adds Zhang.

One of the problems with current additive manufacturing processes is building a robust and reliable 3D printer that can deliver consistent high-quality parts. To this end, the team is actively working to apply machine learning and computer vision to develop a fully autonomous closed loop-controlled 3D printing system that can detect and correct defects that would otherwise emerge in parts made via additive manufacturing. Implementing these systems could greatly widen the adoption of metal additive manufacturing systems in the industry, says Zou.

Since building up the lab’s metal printing capabilities, Zou and his team have established partnerships with government research laboratories, including National Research Council Canada (NRC) and many Canadian companies, including Oetiker Limited, Mech Solutions Ltd., EXCO Engineering and Magna International.

“Metal 3D printing has the potential to revolutionize manufacturing as we know it,” says Zou, who offers an additive manufacturing course that is available to both undergraduate and graduate students. “With robust autonomous systems, the cost of operating these systems can be dramatically reduced, allowing metal additive manufacturing to be adopted more widely across industries worldwide.

“The process also reduces materials and energy waste, leading towards a more sustainable manufacturing industry.”

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”.

<a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/ The University of Toronto (CA)blog/the-act-violence/201312/five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings”>five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering is an academic division of the University of Toronto devoted to study and research in engineering. Founded in 1873 as the School of Practical Science, it is still known today by the longtime nickname of Skule. The faculty is based primarily across 16 buildings on the southern side of the university campus in Downtown Toronto, in addition to operating the Institute for Aerospace Studies facility. The faculty administers undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degree programs, as well as a dual-degree program with the Rotman School of Management.

Departments

Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry (Chem)
Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering (Civ/Min)
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE)
Department of Materials Science & Engineering (MSE)
Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE)

Divisions

Division of Engineering Science (EngSci)
Division of Environmental Engineering & Energy Systems (DEEES)

Specialized institutes

University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS)
Institute of Biomedical Engineering (BME)

Affiliated research institutes and centres

BioZone
Centre for Advanced Coating Technologies (CACT)
Centre for Advanced Diffusion-Wave Technologies (CADIFT)
Centre for Advanced Nanotechnology Centre for Global Engineering (CGEN)
Centre for Maintenance Optimization & Reliability Engineering (C-MORE)
Centre for Management of Technology & Entrepreneurship (CMTE)
Centre for Research in Healthcare Engineering (CRHE)
Centre for the Resilience of Critical Infrastructure (RCI)
Centre for Technology & Social Development Emerging Communications Technology Institute (ECTI)
Identity, Privacy & Security Institute (IPSI)
Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead)
Institute for Multidisciplinary Design & Innovation (UT-IMDI)
Institute for Optical Sciences Institute for Robotics & Mechatronics (IRM)
Institute for Sustainable Energy (ISE)
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Centre & Test Bed
Lassonde Institute of Mining
Pulp & Paper Centre
Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research (SOCAAR)
Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research
Ontario Centre for the Characterization of Advanced Materials (OCCAM)

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From The University of Toronto (CA) And From The University of Oxford (UK) And From Durham University(UK): “Researchers’ model could help avert global helium supply crisis” Presented by The University of Toronto (CA)

From The University of Toronto (CA)

And

From The University of Oxford (UK)

And

From Durham University(UK)

3.3.23
Presented by The University of Toronto (CA)

A tube of helium glows in the presence of a plasma ball (image courtesy of Oliver Warr, University of Ottawa; AEL AMS Laboratory)

A new theoretical model developed by earth scientists at the University of Oxford, University of Toronto and Durham University may help alleviate a global supply shortage of helium – a naturally occurring gas critical for a wide range of medical, scientific and industrial applications, from cooling the magnets of MRI scanners to filling non-combustible balloons.

Barbara Sherwood Lollar (photo by Perry King)

In a study published Nature [below], lead author and Oxford post-doctoral researcher Anran Cheng and colleagues explain for the first time how helium-rich gas fields form just beneath Earth’s surface and could help in locating untapped reservoirs around the world. Cheng completed this research as part of her doctoral work at Oxford, supervised by study co-authors Chris Ballentine at Oxford and U of T University researcher Barbara Sherwood Lollar.

“Helium is in critically short supply worldwide, and current production methods are associated with significant carbon emissions that are contributing to climate change,” says Sherwood Lollar, University Professor in the department of Earth sciences in U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science. “These results may enable the identification of alternative, carbon-free sources of helium that are accessible due to natural processes – and may lead us to new hydrogen sources, as well.”

Helium escapes from deep in Earth’s crust through bubbles of nitrogen gas diffusing from subsurface water. The process can take hundreds of millions of years, but when it happens these bubbles rise towards the surface due to helium’s buoyancy until they hit a rock type through which they can’t pass. According to the new model the helium-rich gas bubbles then collect beneath the seal and can form a substantial gas field in the porous rock space beneath Earth’s surface.

By factoring in the presence of high concentrations of nitrogen gas – looking for nitrogen to find helium – the researchers for the first time used the model to determine the geological conditions necessary for the accumulation of nitrogen to become high enough to result in these helium-rich deposits. When the researchers applied the model to an example system – Williston Basin, a large sedimentary basin in North America – using expected nitrogen concentration values, the model predicted the observed nitrogen and helium proportions.

“This model provides a new perspective to help identify the environments that slow helium gases down enough to accumulate in commercial amounts,” says Cheng.

Helium is a US$6-billion market, with the gas being essential for the operation of MRI scanners, computer chips and fibre optic manufacture, as well as state-of-the-art nuclear and cryogenic applications. A current global shortage has pushed supplies nearly to a crisis point, with prices skyrocketing in recent years. The situation has been escalated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the new Amur gas-processing plant in Russia was to supply 35 per cent of the global helium demand.

In addition, almost all of today’s helium is a by-product of methane or carbon dioxide natural gas production. This carries a significant carbon footprint and hinders ambitions to achieve net-zero carbon emissions globally by 2050. In contrast, the naturally occurring nitrogen and helium-rich gases that were the focus of this study contain no methane or carbon dioxide so tapping them does not release carbon emissions.

The model also suggests regions where large amounts of hydrogen gas may accumulate underground since the radioactivity that generates helium also splits water to form hydrogen.

“This new understanding of helium accumulation provides us with the critical start of a recipe to identify where significant amounts of geological hydrogen, as well as helium, might still be found,” says study co-author Jon Gluyas, professor at Durham University and executive director of the Durham Energy Institute.

With a global market of US$135 billion hydrogen is used to create fertilizer and to produce many compounds essential for the food and petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. Virtually all hydrogen gas is currently produced from coal and natural gas, and this alone accounts for 2.3 per cent of global carbon emissions. Hydrogen-rich underground deposits could provide an alternative carbon-free source.

“The amount of hydrogen generated by the continental crust over the last one billion years could power society’s energy needs for more than 100000 years,” says Ballentine.

Sherwood Lollar adds, “Much of this hydrogen has escaped, been chemically reacted or used up by subsurface microbes – but we know from studying the gas in deep locations in the subsurface around the world that some of this hydrogen is indeed stored underground in significant quantities.”

The work was funded by the China Scholarship Council, the UKRI Oil and Gas DTP, the University of Oxford department of Earth sciences, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and CIFAR.

With files from the University of Oxford and Jon Gluyas.

Nature

From the science paper
Helium, nitrogen and hydrogen are continually generated within the deep continental crust[1*],[2],[3],[4],[5],[6],[7],[8],[9]. Conceptual degassing models for quiescent continental crust are dominated by an assumption that these gases are dissolved in water, and that vertical transport in shallower sedimentary systems is by diffusion within water-filled pore space (for example, refs. 7,8). Gas-phase exsolution is crucial for concentrating helium and forming a societal resource. Here we show that crustal nitrogen from the crystalline basement alone—degassing at a steady state in proportion to crustal helium-4 generation—can reach sufficient concentrations at the base of some sedimentary basins to form a free gas phase. Using a gas diffusion model coupled with sedimentary basin evolution, we demonstrate, using a classic intracratonic sedimentary basin (Williston Basin, North America), that crustal nitrogen reaches saturation and forms a gas phase; in this basin, as early as about 140 million years ago. Helium partitions into this gas phase. This gas formation mechanism accounts for the observed primary nitrogen–helium gas discovered in the basal sedimentary lithology of this and other basins, predicts co-occurrence of crustal gas-phase hydrogen, and reduces the flux of helium into overlying strata by about 30 per cent because of phase solubility buffering. Identification of this gas phase formation mechanism provides a quantitative insight to assess the helium and hydrogen resource potential in similar intracontinental sedimentary basins found worldwide.
*Citations in the science paper

For further images see the science paper.

See the full article presented by U Toronto here .

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

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Stem Education Coalition

Durham University (UK) is distinctive – a residential collegiate university with long traditions and modern values. We seek the highest distinction in research and scholarship and are committed to excellence in all aspects of education and transmission of knowledge. Our research and scholarship affect every continent. We are proud to be an international scholarly community which reflects the ambitions of cultures from around the world. We promote individual participation, providing a rounded education in which students, staff and alumni gain both the academic and the personal skills required to flourish.

The University of Oxford

Universitas Oxoniensis

The University of Oxford [a.k.a. The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford] is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world’s second-oldest university in continuous operation. It grew rapidly from 1167 when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris [Université de Paris](FR). After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled north-east to Cambridge where they established what became the The University of Cambridge (UK). The two English ancient universities share many common features and are jointly referred to as Oxbridge.

The university is made up of thirty-nine semi-autonomous constituent colleges, six permanent private halls, and a range of academic departments which are organised into four divisions. All the colleges are self-governing institutions within the university, each controlling its own membership and with its own internal structure and activities. All students are members of a college. It does not have a main campus, and its buildings and facilities are scattered throughout the city centre. Undergraduate teaching at Oxford consists of lectures, small-group tutorials at the colleges and halls, seminars, laboratory work and occasionally further tutorials provided by the central university faculties and departments. Postgraduate teaching is provided predominantly centrally.

Oxford operates the world’s oldest university museum, as well as the largest university press in the world and the largest academic library system nationwide. In the fiscal year ending 31 July 2019, the university had a total income of £2.45 billion, of which £624.8 million was from research grants and contracts.

Oxford has educated a wide range of notable alumni, including 28 prime ministers of the United Kingdom and many heads of state and government around the world. As of October 2020, 72 Nobel Prize laureates, 3 Fields Medalists, and 6 Turing Award winners have studied, worked, or held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford, while its alumni have won 160 Olympic medals. Oxford is the home of numerous scholarships, including the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest international graduate scholarship programmes.

The University of Oxford’s foundation date is unknown. It is known that teaching at Oxford existed in some form as early as 1096, but it is unclear when a university came into being.

It grew quickly from 1167 when English students returned from The University of Paris-Sorbonne [Université de Paris-Sorbonne](FR). The historian Gerald of Wales lectured to such scholars in 1188, and the first known foreign scholar, Emo of Friesland, arrived in 1190. The head of the university had the title of chancellor from at least 1201, and the masters were recognised as a universitas or corporation in 1231. The university was granted a royal charter in 1248 during the reign of King Henry III.

The students associated together on the basis of geographical origins, into two ‘nations’, representing the North (northerners or Boreales, who included the English people from north of the River Trent and the Scots) and the South (southerners or Australes, who included English people from south of the Trent, the Irish and the Welsh). In later centuries, geographical origins continued to influence many students’ affiliations when membership of a college or hall became customary in Oxford. In addition, members of many religious orders, including Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites and Augustinians, settled in Oxford in the mid-13th century, gained influence and maintained houses or halls for students. At about the same time, private benefactors established colleges as self-contained scholarly communities. Among the earliest such founders were William of Durham, who in 1249 endowed University College, and John Balliol, father of a future King of Scots; Balliol College bears his name. Another founder, Walter de Merton, a Lord Chancellor of England and afterwards Bishop of Rochester, devised a series of regulations for college life. Merton College thereby became the model for such establishments at Oxford, as well as at the University of Cambridge. Thereafter, an increasing number of students lived in colleges rather than in halls and religious houses.

In 1333–1334, an attempt by some dissatisfied Oxford scholars to found a new university at Stamford, Lincolnshire, was blocked by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge petitioning King Edward III. Thereafter, until the 1820s, no new universities were allowed to be founded in England, even in London; thus, Oxford and Cambridge had a duopoly, which was unusual in large western European countries.

The new learning of the Renaissance greatly influenced Oxford from the late 15th century onwards. Among university scholars of the period were William Grocyn, who contributed to the revival of Greek language studies, and John Colet, the noted biblical scholar.

With the English Reformation and the breaking of communion with the Roman Catholic Church, recusant scholars from Oxford fled to continental Europe, settling especially at the University of Douai. The method of teaching at Oxford was transformed from the medieval scholastic method to Renaissance education, although institutions associated with the university suffered losses of land and revenues. As a centre of learning and scholarship, Oxford’s reputation declined in the Age of Enlightenment; enrollments fell and teaching was neglected.

In 1636, William Laud, the chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, codified the university’s statutes. These, to a large extent, remained its governing regulations until the mid-19th century. Laud was also responsible for the granting of a charter securing privileges for The University Press, and he made significant contributions to the Bodleian Library, the main library of the university. From the beginnings of the Church of England as the established church until 1866, membership of the church was a requirement to receive the BA degree from the university and “dissenters” were only permitted to receive the MA in 1871.

The university was a centre of the Royalist party during the English Civil War (1642–1649), while the town favoured the opposing Parliamentarian cause. From the mid-18th century onwards, however, the university took little part in political conflicts.

Wadham College, founded in 1610, was the undergraduate college of Sir Christopher Wren. Wren was part of a brilliant group of experimental scientists at Oxford in the 1650s, the Oxford Philosophical Club, which included Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. This group held regular meetings at Wadham under the guidance of the college’s Warden, John Wilkins, and the group formed the nucleus that went on to found the Royal Society.

Before reforms in the early 19th century, the curriculum at Oxford was notoriously narrow and impractical. Sir Spencer Walpole, a historian of contemporary Britain and a senior government official, had not attended any university. He said, “Few medical men, few solicitors, few persons intended for commerce or trade, ever dreamed of passing through a university career.” He quoted the Oxford University Commissioners in 1852 stating: “The education imparted at Oxford was not such as to conduce to the advancement in life of many persons, except those intended for the ministry.” Nevertheless, Walpole argued:

“Among the many deficiencies attending a university education there was, however, one good thing about it, and that was the education which the undergraduates gave themselves. It was impossible to collect some thousand or twelve hundred of the best young men in England, to give them the opportunity of making acquaintance with one another, and full liberty to live their lives in their own way, without evolving in the best among them, some admirable qualities of loyalty, independence, and self-control. If the average undergraduate carried from university little or no learning, which was of any service to him, he carried from it a knowledge of men and respect for his fellows and himself, a reverence for the past, a code of honour for the present, which could not but be serviceable. He had enjoyed opportunities… of intercourse with men, some of whom were certain to rise to the highest places in the Senate, in the Church, or at the Bar. He might have mixed with them in his sports, in his studies, and perhaps in his debating society; and any associations which he had this formed had been useful to him at the time, and might be a source of satisfaction to him in after life.”

Out of the students who matriculated in 1840, 65% were sons of professionals (34% were Anglican ministers). After graduation, 87% became professionals (59% as Anglican clergy). Out of the students who matriculated in 1870, 59% were sons of professionals (25% were Anglican ministers). After graduation, 87% became professionals (42% as Anglican clergy).

M. C. Curthoys and H. S. Jones argue that the rise of organised sport was one of the most remarkable and distinctive features of the history of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was carried over from the athleticism prevalent at the public schools such as Eton, Winchester, Shrewsbury, and Harrow.

All students, regardless of their chosen area of study, were required to spend (at least) their first year preparing for a first-year examination that was heavily focused on classical languages. Science students found this particularly burdensome and supported a separate science degree with Greek language study removed from their required courses. This concept of a Bachelor of Science had been adopted at other European universities (The University of London (UK) had implemented it in 1860) but an 1880 proposal at Oxford to replace the classical requirement with a modern language (like German or French) was unsuccessful. After considerable internal wrangling over the structure of the arts curriculum, in 1886 the “natural science preliminary” was recognized as a qualifying part of the first-year examination.

At the start of 1914, the university housed about 3,000 undergraduates and about 100 postgraduate students. During the First World War, many undergraduates and fellows joined the armed forces. By 1918 virtually all fellows were in uniform, and the student population in residence was reduced to 12 per cent of the pre-war total. The University Roll of Service records that, in total, 14,792 members of the university served in the war, with 2,716 (18.36%) killed. Not all the members of the university who served in the Great War were on the Allied side; there is a remarkable memorial to members of New College who served in the German armed forces, bearing the inscription, ‘In memory of the men of this college who coming from a foreign land entered into the inheritance of this place and returning fought and died for their country in the war 1914–1918’. During the war years the university buildings became hospitals, cadet schools and military training camps.

Reforms

Two parliamentary commissions in 1852 issued recommendations for Oxford and Cambridge. Archibald Campbell Tait, former headmaster of Rugby School, was a key member of the Oxford Commission; he wanted Oxford to follow the German and Scottish model in which the professorship was paramount. The commission’s report envisioned a centralised university run predominantly by professors and faculties, with a much stronger emphasis on research. The professional staff should be strengthened and better paid. For students, restrictions on entry should be dropped, and more opportunities given to poorer families. It called for an enlargement of the curriculum, with honours to be awarded in many new fields. Undergraduate scholarships should be open to all Britons. Graduate fellowships should be opened up to all members of the university. It recommended that fellows be released from an obligation for ordination. Students were to be allowed to save money by boarding in the city, instead of in a college.

The system of separate honour schools for different subjects began in 1802, with Mathematics and Literae Humaniores. Schools of “Natural Sciences” and “Law, and Modern History” were added in 1853. By 1872, the last of these had split into “Jurisprudence” and “Modern History”. Theology became the sixth honour school. In addition to these B.A. Honours degrees, the postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Law (B.C.L.) was, and still is, offered.

The mid-19th century saw the impact of the Oxford Movement (1833–1845), led among others by the future Cardinal John Henry Newman. The influence of the reformed model of German universities reached Oxford via key scholars such as Edward Bouverie Pusey, Benjamin Jowett and Max Müller.

Administrative reforms during the 19th century included the replacement of oral examinations with written entrance tests, greater tolerance for religious dissent, and the establishment of four women’s colleges. Privy Council decisions in the 20th century (e.g. the abolition of compulsory daily worship, dissociation of the Regius Professorship of Hebrew from clerical status, diversion of colleges’ theological bequests to other purposes) loosened the link with traditional belief and practice. Furthermore, although the university’s emphasis had historically been on classical knowledge, its curriculum expanded during the 19th century to include scientific and medical studies. Knowledge of Ancient Greek was required for admission until 1920, and Latin until 1960.

The University of Oxford began to award doctorates for research in the first third of the 20th century. The first Oxford D.Phil. in mathematics was awarded in 1921.

The mid-20th century saw many distinguished continental scholars, displaced by Nazism and communism, relocating to Oxford.

The list of distinguished scholars at the University of Oxford is long and includes many who have made major contributions to politics, the sciences, medicine, and literature. As of October 2020, 72 Nobel laureates and more than 50 world leaders have been affiliated with the University of Oxford.

To be a member of the university, all students, and most academic staff, must also be a member of a college or hall. There are thirty-nine colleges of the University of Oxford (including Reuben College, planned to admit students in 2021) and six permanent private halls (PPHs), each controlling its membership and with its own internal structure and activities. Not all colleges offer all courses, but they generally cover a broad range of subjects.

The colleges are:

All-Souls College
Balliol College
Brasenose College
Christ Church College
Corpus-Christi College
Exeter College
Green-Templeton College
Harris-Manchester College
Hertford College
Jesus College
Keble College
Kellogg College
Lady-Margaret-Hall
Linacre College
Lincoln College
Magdalen College
Mansfield College
Merton College
New College
Nuffield College
Oriel College
Pembroke College
Queens College
Reuben College
St-Anne’s College
St-Antony’s College
St-Catherines College
St-Cross College
St-Edmund-Hall College
St-Hilda’s College
St-Hughs College
St-John’s College
St-Peters College
Somerville College
Trinity College
University College
Wadham College
Wolfson College
Worcester College

The permanent private halls were founded by different Christian denominations. One difference between a college and a PPH is that whereas colleges are governed by the fellows of the college, the governance of a PPH resides, at least in part, with the corresponding Christian denomination. The six current PPHs are:

Blackfriars
Campion Hall
Regent’s Park College
St Benet’s Hall
St-Stephen’s Hall
Wycliffe Hall

The PPHs and colleges join as the Conference of Colleges, which represents the common concerns of the several colleges of the university, to discuss matters of shared interest and to act collectively when necessary, such as in dealings with the central university. The Conference of Colleges was established as a recommendation of the Franks Commission in 1965.

Teaching members of the colleges (i.e. fellows and tutors) are collectively and familiarly known as dons, although the term is rarely used by the university itself. In addition to residential and dining facilities, the colleges provide social, cultural, and recreational activities for their members. Colleges have responsibility for admitting undergraduates and organizing their tuition; for graduates, this responsibility falls upon the departments. There is no common title for the heads of colleges: the titles used include Warden, Provost, Principal, President, Rector, Master and Dean.

Oxford is regularly ranked within the top 5 universities in the world and is currently ranked first in the world in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, as well as the Forbes’s World University Rankings. It held the number one position in The Times Good University Guide for eleven consecutive years, and the medical school has also maintained first place in the “Clinical, Pre-Clinical & Health” table of The Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the past seven consecutive years. In 2021, it ranked sixth among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. The Times Higher Education has also recognised Oxford as one of the world’s “six super brands” on its World Reputation Rankings, along with The University of California-Berkeley, The University of Cambridge (UK), Harvard University, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University. The university is fifth worldwide on the US News ranking. Its Saïd Business School came 13th in the world in The Financial Times Global MBA Ranking.
Oxford was ranked ninth in the world in 2015 by The Nature Index, which measures the largest contributors to papers published in 82 leading journals. It is ranked fifth best university worldwide and first in Britain for forming CEOs according to The Professional Ranking World Universities, and first in the UK for the quality of its graduates as chosen by the recruiters of the UK’s major companies.

In the 2018 Complete University Guide, all 38 subjects offered by Oxford rank within the top 10 nationally meaning Oxford was one of only two multi-faculty universities (along with Cambridge) in the UK to have 100% of their subjects in the top 10. Computer Science, Medicine, Philosophy, Politics and Psychology were ranked first in the UK by the guide.

According to The QS World University Rankings by Subject, the University of Oxford also ranks as number one in the world for four Humanities disciplines: English Language and Literature, Modern Languages, Geography, and History. It also ranks second globally for Anthropology, Archaeology, Law, Medicine, Politics & International Studies, and Psychology.

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From The University of Toronto (CA): “Researchers enhance durability of low-cost solar cells made from nano-sized crystals”

From The University of Toronto (CA)

2.23.23
Tyler Irving

U of T Engineering post-doctoral researcher Chongwen Li holds up a sample of an inverted perovskite solar cell (Photo by Remigiusz Wolowiec)

An international team of researchers has developed a new technique to enhance the durability of inverted perovskite solar cells – an important step toward commercialization of an emerging photovoltaic technology that could significantly reduce the cost of solar energy.

Unlike traditional solar cells, which are made from wafers of extremely high-purity silicon, perovskite solar cells are built from nano-sized crystals. These perovskite crystals can be dispersed into a liquid and spin-coated onto a surface using low-cost, well-established techniques.

It is also possible to tune the wavelengths of light that get absorbed by the perovskites by adjusting the thickness and chemical composition of the crystal films. Perovskite layers tuned to different wavelengths can even be stacked on top of each other, or on top of traditional silicon cells, leading to “tandem” cells that absorb more of the solar spectrum than today’s devices.

The latest work, published in the journal Science [below], included researchers from the University of Toronto, Northwestern University, the University of Toledo and the University of Washington.

“Perovskite solar cells have the potential to overcome the inherent efficiency limitations of silicon solar cells,” says study co-author Ted Sargent, who recently joined the department of chemistry and the department of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University but remains affiliated with U of T Engineering, where he has a research lab.

“They are also amenable to manufacturing methods that have a much lower cost than those used for silicon. But one place where perovskites still lag silicon is in their long-term durability. In this study, we used a rational-design approach to address that in a new and unique way.”

In recent years, Sargent and his collaborators have made several advances that improve the performance of perovskite solar cells. But whereas much of this previous work focused on enhancing efficiency, their latest work looks at the challenge of durability.

“One key point of vulnerability in these types of solar cells is the interface between the perovskite layer and the adjacent layers, which we call carrier transport layers,” says Chongwen Li, a post-doctoral researcher who recently moved to U of T Engineering from the University of Toledo and is one of the paper’s lead co-authors.

“These adjacent layers extract the electrons or holes that will flow through the circuit. If the chemical bonding between these layers and perovskite layer gets damaged by light or heat, electrons or holes can’t get into the circuit – this lowers the overall efficiency of the cell,” Li says.

To address this issue, the international research team went back to first principles. They used computer simulations based on density functional theory (DFT) to predict what kind of molecules would be best at creating a bridge between the perovskite layer and the charge transport layers.

“Previous research has shown that molecules known as Lewis bases are good for creating strong bonding between these layers,” says Bin Chen, a post-doctoral researcher in Sargent’s lab who is now a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and a co-author on the paper.

“This is because one end of the molecule bonds to the lead atoms in the perovskite layer and the other bonds to the nickel in the carrier transport layers. What our simulations predicted was that Lewis bases which contained the element phosphorus would have the best effect.”

In the lab, the team tried out various formulations of phosphorus-containing molecules. Their experiments showed the best performance with a material known as 1,3 bis(diphenylphosphino)propane, or DPPP.

The team built inverted perovskite solar cells that contained DPPP, as well as some without. They subjected both types to tests that simulated the kind of conditions solar cells would experience in the field, illuminating them with light at a similar intensity to the sun. They also tried exposing them to high temperatures, both in the light and in the dark.

“With DPPP, under ambient conditions – that is, no additional heating – the overall power conversion efficiency of the cell stayed high for approximately 3,500 hours,” says Li.

“The perovskite solar cells that have been previously published in the literature tend to see a significant drop in their efficiency after 1,500 to 2,000 hours, so this is a big improvement.”

Li says the team has applied for a patent for the DPPP technique and has already received interest from commercial solar cell manufacturers.

“I think what we’ve done is to show a new path forward – that DFT simulations and rational design can point the way toward promising solutions,” he says.

“But there may be even better molecules out there. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where perovskite solar cells can compete commercially with silicon, which is the state-of-the-art photovoltaic technology of today. This is an important step in that direction, but there is still further to go.”

Science
From the science paper:
Lewis base molecules that bind undercoordinated lead atoms at interfaces and grain boundaries (GBs) are known to enhance the durability of metal halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Using density functional theory calculations, we found that phosphine-containing molecules have the strongest binding energy among members of a library of Lewis base molecules studied herein. Experimentally, we found that the best inverted PSC treated with 1,3-bis(diphenylphosphino)propane (DPPP), a diphosphine Lewis base that passivates, binds, and bridges interfaces and GBs, retained a power conversion efficiency (PCE) slightly higher than its initial PCE of ~23% after continuous operation under simulated AM1.5 illumination at the maximum power point and at ~40°C for >3500 hours. DPPP-treated devices showed a similar increase in PCE after being kept under open-circuit conditions at 85°C for >1500 hours.

Fig.1.

Fig 2.

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

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From The University of Toronto (CA): “AI used to discover clean energy materials ‘faster and more efficiently'”

From The University of Toronto (CA)

2.7.23
Don Campbell

Alex Voznyy, an assistant professor at U of T Scarborough, right, speaks with a colleague in the lab (photo by Dylan Toombs)

Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a method of harnessing artificial intelligence to discover new and more efficient materials for clean energy technology.

A team led by Alex Voznyy, an assistant professor in the department of physical and environmental sciences at University of Toronto-Scarborough, used machine learning to significantly speed up the amount of time needed to find new materials with desired properties.

“We are trying to find better alternatives to the materials we currently have,” says Voznyy, whose research looks at developing new materials for lithium-ion batteries, hydrogen storage, CO2 capture and solar cells.

“This could mean developing completely new materials or using materials we already know about but never considered using in clean energy applications.”

Voznyy says a major problem with the materials currently used in clean energy technologies is they are either expensive, inefficient or at the limit of their capabilities. The goal, he says, is to create new and better materials by combining elements of existing ones.

The machine learning model relies on data found in the Materials Project, an open-source database of more than 140,000 known materials developed over the past decade. It contains information about the components of known materials, including crystal structure, molecular composition, density, energy conductivity and stability.

To figure out what combination of existing materials could lead to a better lithium-ion battery, for example, Voznyy says it may require figuring out the stability of the new material and how much energy it can store.

The challenge is that the calculations required to do this work do not scale very well. More complex materials such as an alloy require twice as many atoms to encode, making it four times slower to calculate using conventional methods. Doing these types of calculations currently relies on a quantum chemistry approach that Voznyy refers to as “computing by brute force” because it is slow and uses a lot of computing power.

By contrast, the model developed by Voznyy’s team can do these calculations 1,000 times faster.

“Our philosophy is that we don’t want to spend another 10 years preparing data that will predict the same outcome,” says Voznyy, who runs the Clean Energy Lab at U of T Scarborough.

“We want to be able to predict new materials faster and more efficiently so we can start physically creating these materials sooner and with greater certainty that they will work.”

Previous models were able to reproduce the stabilities of known materials, but they couldn’t predict for materials with unknown crystal structures, which refers to the way atoms, ions and molecules are arranged in a material – an essential factor in determining its physical properties. By training the new model on something called distorted structures, it provides insights into how new materials will perform under strain and allows the model to relax a crystal structure to its more stable configuration.

“Knowing the precise crystal geometry is essential to accurately predicting what the properties of new materials will look like and how they will perform,” says Voznyy. “This method significantly speeds up this process and opens up a lot of possibilities.”

Voznny’s team used the Lenovo Niagara, U of T’s supercomputer located at the SciNet centre, to run the calculations for the study.

Lenovo Niagara supercomputer

The research, which is published in the journal Patterns, was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From The Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering At The University of Toronto (CA): “‘Liquid windows’ inspired by squid skin could help buildings save energy”

From The Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

At

The University of Toronto (CA)

1.31.23
Tyler Irving

Prototypes of a multilayered fluidic system designed by U of T Engineering researchers contain several layers of channels that contain fluids with various optical properties (Artist’s impression courtesy of Raphael Kay, Adrian So)

Inspired by the dynamic colour-changing skin of organisms such as squid, University of Toronto researchers have developed a multilayered fluidic system that can reduce the energy costs of heating, cooling and lighting buildings.

The platform, which optimizes the wavelength, intensity and dispersion of light transmitted through windows, offers much greater control than existing technologies while keeping costs low due to its use of simple, off-the-shelf components.

“Buildings use a ton of energy to heat, cool and illuminate the spaces inside them,” says Raphael Kay, who recently graduated with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and is lead author on a new paper published in the journal PNAS [below].

“If we can strategically control the amount, type and direction of solar energy that enters our buildings, we can massively reduce the amount of work that we ask heaters, coolers and lights to do.”

Currently, certain “smart” building technologies such as automatic blinds or electrochromic windows – which change their opacity in response to an electric current – can be used to control the amount of sunlight that enters the room. But Kay says that these systems are limited: they cannot discriminate between different wavelengths of light, nor can they control how that light gets distributed spatially.

“Sunlight contains visible light, which impacts the illumination in the building – but it also contains other invisible wavelengths, such as infrared light, which we can think of essentially as heat,” he says.

“In the middle of the day in winter, you’d probably want to let in both – but in the middle of the day in summer, you’d want to let in just the visible light and not the heat. Current systems typically can’t do this – they either block both or neither. They also have no ability to direct or scatter the light in beneficial ways.”

Biological inspiration for fluidic multilayer: (A) Colour change in the panther chameleon is achieved using a multilayer architecture of active photonic crystals; (B) Colour change in the squid is achieved using co-ordinated actuations within a multilayer of pigmentary and structural elements.

Developed by Kay and a team led by Associate Professor Ben Hatton, the system leverages the power of microfluidics to offer an alternative. The team also included PhD candidate Charlie Katrycz, both in the department of materials science and engineering, and Alstan Jakubiec, an assistant professor in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

The prototypes consist of flat sheets of plastic that are permeated with an array of millimetre-thick channels through which fluids can be pumped. Customized pigments, particles or other molecules can be mixed into the fluids to control what kind of light gets through – such as visible versus near-infrared wavelengths – and in which direction this light is then distributed.

These sheets can be combined in a multi-layer stack, with each layer responsible for a different type of optical function: controlling intensity, filtering wavelength or tuning the scattering of transmitted light indoors. By using small, digitally controlled pumps to add or remove fluids from each layer, the system can optimize light transmission.

“It’s simple and low-cost, but it also enables incredible combinatorial control. We can design liquid-state dynamic building facades that do basically anything you’d like to do in terms of their optical properties,” Kay says.

The work builds on another system that uses injected pigment, developed by the same team earlier this year. While that study drew inspiration from the colour-changing abilities of marine arthropods, the current system is more analogous to the multilayered skin of squid.

Many species of squid have skin that contains stacked layers of specialized organs – including chromatophores, which control light absorption, and iridophores, which impact reflection and iridescence. These individually addressable elements work together to generate unique optical behaviors that are only possible through their combined operation.

While the U of T Engineering researchers focused on the prototypes, Jakubiec built detailed computer models that analyzed the potential energy impact of covering a hypothetical building in this type of dynamic facade.

The models were informed by physical properties measured from the prototypes. The team also simulated various control algorithms for activating or deactivating the layers in response to changing ambient conditions.

“If we had just one layer that focuses on modulating the transmission of near-infrared light – so not even touching the visible part of the spectrum – we find that we could save about 25 per cent annually on heating, cooling and lighting energy over a static baseline,” says Kay.

“If we have two layers – infrared and visible – it’s more like 50 per cent. These are very significant savings.”

In the most recent study, the control algorithms were designed by humans, but Hatton points out that the challenge of optimizing them would be an ideal task for artificial intelligence – a possible future direction for the research.

“The idea of a building that can learn – that can adjust this dynamic array on its own to optimize for seasonal and daily changes in solar conditions – is very exciting for us,” Hatton says.

“We are also working on how to scale this up effectively so that you could cover a whole building. That will take work but given that this can all be done with simple, non-toxic, low-cost materials, it’s a challenge that can be solved.”

Hatton also hopes that the study will encourage other researchers to think more creatively about new ways to manage energy in buildings.

“Globally, the amount of energy that buildings consume is enormous – it’s even bigger than what we spend on manufacturing or transportation,” he says. “We think making smart materials for buildings is a challenge that deserves a lot more attention.”

PNAS

Fig. 1.

Biological inspiration for fluidic multilayer. (A) Color change in the panther chameleon, achieved using a multilayer architecture of active photonic crystals. (B) Color change in the squid, achieved using coordinated actuations within a multilayer of pigmentary and structural elements. The top images are of Sepioteuthis lessoniana, whereas the bottom images are of Loligo pealeii. (C and D) Schematic for achieving independent multilayered switchable responses in building facades, where switchable fluid flow within distinct layers can enable multiple distinct optical functions. (E) Schematic exemplifying several functional or multifunctional states, achieved through coordinated fluid injections within a bilayer. The fluid multilayer acts as an additive light filter for incoming light. Scale bars: (A) white, 20 μm; black, 200 nm; (B) 1 mm; (D) 1 cm. Images in (A) reproduced from ref. 51*, published under a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Images in (B) reproduced with permission from ref. 48, and under license from refs. 52 and 53. *See in science paper.

Fig. 2.

Additive and spectrally selective absorption. (A) Still frames across two complete cycles of fluid injection and retraction, demonstrating four unique colored states (bolded frames) within fluidic devices. Photograph of bilayer device shown to demonstrate device scale and visible transparency. Fluids were cycled up to 100 times within channel layers, with no evidence of fouling. (B) Design of bilayer device. (C) Overlapping crosshatch bilayer design, demonstrating periodic instances of additive color filtering, as well as instances of single-layer color filtering. Spectral measurements (v) were taken using “model” bilayer sample section, shown in (iv), and illustrate transmission spectra from both independent layers (yellow, blue) and combined bilayer (yellow and blue). We confirm that transmission spectra are multiplicative, where B/Y bilayer spectrum [green curve in (vi)] is equivalent to multiplication of B spectrum and Y spectrum [black curve in (vi)]. (D) Aqueous fluid injection and retraction sequence, from left to right, imaged in the visible and IR spectrum (with a digital camera and infrared (IR) camera, respectively). While there are no noticeable changes to visible transmission, IR transmission is decreased with fluid injection, and increased again with fluid retraction. Experiment conducted in the horizontal plane for ease. The timestamps are formatted as hours:minutes:seconds. (E) Differential NIR transmission across three independent fluids (air, glycerol, and 0.0156 mg carbon/mL water, from top to bottom) that each have high transmission in the visible spectrum. (F) Temperature of PMMA plate behind a fluid layer across an injection sequence of each fluid from (E). Air represents control injection. (G) Experimental schematic for temperature measurements in (F). (i) 100-W incandescent light bulb as heat source. (ii) switchable fluid layer. (iii) PMMA plate. (iv) thermocouple measuring PMMA temperature over time. Other experimental details can be found in Materials and Methods.

Fig. 3.

Dynamic fluidic shading and scattering. (A–C) Still frames across three independent injection sequences within a bilayer, for three fluids of different particle concentrations (concentrations in D). (Scale bar is 5 cm.) The timestamps are formatted as hours:minutes:seconds. (D) Corresponding interior light intensity measurement within model room (experiment demonstrated in SI Appendix, Fig. S6). (E) Measured transmission spectra (within cuvette) as function of particle concentration. Curves correspond to transmission spectra of fluids concentrated at 0, 15.6, 21.5, 30.0, 44.5, 77, 130, and 250 μg C/mL H2O, from top to bottom. Spectral information into the NIR range is available in SI Appendix, Fig. S11. (F) Measured transmission spectra (within cuvette) as function of number of activated (filled) layers. Dotted red lines show Beer–Lambert model estimate, calculated from the measured transmission spectrum of the 15.6 μg/mL solution using Eq. 1. Images show cross-section of bilayer cuvette. Fluid concentrated at 77 μg C/mL H2O. Top curve represents spectrum of empty cuvette. Dotted red line shows Beer–Lambert model estimate for completely filled bilayer, calculated by doubling optical path length of spectrum for half-filled bilayer in Eq. 1. (G) SEM and digital images illustrating multiscale fluidic mechanism, utilizing nanoscale particle features for macroscale optical control. Scale bars, from top to bottom, are 4 µm, 2 µm, 250 nm, and 5 cm. Particles in top image are synthesized PMMA. (H) Images of three cuvettes, each filled with an aqueous suspension of titania. (Scale bar is 5 mm.) (I) Differentially scattered light profiles for each fluid concentration in (H). Increasing concentrations correspond to increasing back scattering. Data is plotted on a logarithmic scale. (J) Suspensions with higher particle concentrations transmit less visible light. Curves represent specular transmission measurements. (K–M) Suspensions with higher particle concentrations scatter more visible light (L). Therefore, as transmission increases, relative scattered (diffuse) lighting decreases (K), representing a limit to the degree of independence between transmission and scattering.

Fig. 4.

Simulated indoor daylight tunability. (A) Backward ray-tracing renders illustrating daylighting differences for differently concentrated fluid window layers (aqueous carbon black). (B) Daylight availability simulations demonstrating differences in available daylight across a modeled interior space for differently concentrated fluid window layers. Window optical properties derived from transmission properties of fluids concentrated at 0, 15.6, 21.5, 44.5, and 77 μg C/mL H2O, from left to right. Failing, supplemental, acceptable, and excessive daylighting are defined, respectively, as 3,000 lux. (C–F) Floor area fractional spatial illuminance quality for differently concentrated fluid layers as a function of depth within the space. Illuminance values are taken as central (width) value at each depth within the space. Scale bars in (B) are 5 mm. (G and H) Backward ray-tracing renders illustrating spatial daylighting differences between regular control window and window with scattering particles (4 mg TiO2/mL H2O). The scattering window enables visibly deeper light penetration. (I) Daylight availability simulation demonstrating the degree to which a scattering layer can reduce excessive illuminance. (J) Daylight availability simulation demonstrating the degree to which a scattering layer can improve daylight penetration. (K–N) Scattering layers improve optical comfort, having a small effect on excessive illuminance throughout the year (K), but decreasing the fraction of indoor space that requires supplemental electric lighting (M and N), and increasing the fraction of indoor space that requires no electric lighting (L). (O and P) As a result, the scattering layer enables reductions to electric lighting usage at depths between 3 and 9 m, enabling 10% annual reductions in electric lighting energy consumption.

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

The Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering is an academic division of the University of Toronto devoted to study and research in engineering. Founded in 1873 as the School of Practical Science, it is still known today by the longtime nickname of Skule. The faculty is based primarily across 16 buildings on the southern side of the university campus in Downtown Toronto, in addition to operating the Institute for Aerospace Studies facility. The faculty administers undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degree programs, as well as a dual-degree program with the Rotman School of Management.

Departments

Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry (Chem)
Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering (Civ/Min)
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE)
Department of Materials Science & Engineering (MSE)
Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE)

Divisions

Division of Engineering Science (EngSci)
Division of Environmental Engineering & Energy Systems (DEEES)

Specialized institutes

University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS)
Institute of Biomedical Engineering (BME)

Affiliated research institutes and centres

BioZone
Centre for Advanced Coating Technologies (CACT)
Centre for Advanced Diffusion-Wave Technologies (CADIFT)
Centre for Advanced Nanotechnology Centre for Global Engineering (CGEN)
Centre for Maintenance Optimization & Reliability Engineering (C-MORE)
Centre for Management of Technology & Entrepreneurship (CMTE)
Centre for Research in Healthcare Engineering (CRHE)
Centre for the Resilience of Critical Infrastructure (RCI)
Centre for Technology & Social Development Emerging Communications Technology Institute (ECTI)
Identity, Privacy & Security Institute (IPSI)
Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead)
Institute for Multidisciplinary Design & Innovation (UT-IMDI)
Institute for Optical Sciences Institute for Robotics & Mechatronics (IRM)
Institute for Sustainable Energy (ISE)
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Centre & Test Bed
Lassonde Institute of Mining
Pulp & Paper Centre
Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research (SOCAAR)
Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research
Ontario Centre for the Characterization of Advanced Materials (OCCAM)

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) At The University of Toronto (CA) And From The Green Bank Observatory : “Astronomers Use New AI Technique to Accelerate Search for Extraterrestrial Life”

From The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA)

At

The University of Toronto (CA)

And

Green Bank Radio Telescope, West Virginia, USA, now the center piece of the Green Bank Observatory, being cut loose by the National Science Foundation(US), supported by Breakthrough Listen Project, West Virginia University, and operated by the nonprofit Associated Universities, Inc..

From The Green Bank Observatory

1.30.23
Jill Malusky | GBO

Meaghan MacSween
Communications and Multimedia Officer
Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics
University of Toronto
meaghan.macsween@utoronto.ca
The old question: “Are we alone in the universe?”

Scientists may have just moved us closer to answering this question. The team – led by researchers from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto – has streamlined the search for extraterrestrial life by using a new algorithm to organize the data from their telescopes into categories, to distinguish between real signals and interference. This has allowed them to quickly sort through the information and find patterns, through an artificial intelligence process known as machine learning.

The quest to discover other advanced life in the universe involves locating technologically-generated signals (“technosignatures”), because it is assumed that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be sophisticated enough to emit these signals. Since the 1960s, astronomers working on “SETI” (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) have used powerful radio telescopes to search thousands of stars and hundreds of galaxies for these technosignatures.

Even though the telescopes used for these searches are located in areas where there is minimal interference from technology like cell phones and TV stations, human disturbance still poses major challenges. “In many of our observations, there is a lot of interference,” says Peter Ma, a University of Toronto undergraduate student and researcher. He’s also the first author on the research paper that reveals this latest technique, published today in Nature Astronomy [below]. “We need to distinguish the exciting radio signals in space from the uninteresting radio signals from Earth.”

By simulating signals of both types, the team has trained their machine-learning tools to differentiate between extraterrestrial-like signals and human-generated interference. They compared a range of different machine-learning algorithms, studied their precision and false-positive rates, and then used that information to settle on a powerful algorithm, created by Ma.

This new algorithm has resulted in the discovery of eight new radio signals that could potentially be transmissions from extraterrestrial intelligence. The eight signals came from five different stars, located 30 to 90 light years away from Earth. These signals were overlooked in a previous analysis of the same data, which did not use machine learning.
To the SETI team, these signals are considered notable for two reasons. “First,” explains Dr. Steve Croft, Project Scientist for Breakthrough Listen on the Green Bank Telescope, “they are present when we look at the star and absent when we look away – as opposed to local interference, which is generally always present. Second, the signals change in frequency over time in a way that makes them appear far from the telescope.”

Croft notes that it’s important to realize that when you have a dataset containing millions of signals, occasionally signals can have the two characteristics he explains above – just by sheer chance. “It’s a bit like walking across a gravel path and finding a stone stuck in the tread of your shoe that seems to fit perfectly.”

For this reason, even though the signals appear the way the team expects extraterrestrial signals to look, the researchers are not yet convinced that they are from extraterrestrial intelligence – at least until they see the same signal again. When brief follow-up observations were done using the Green Bank Radio Telescope, the patterns that could indicate extraterrestrial signals were not found. More observations and analyses are underway.

Ma refers to the algorithm that he created as a combination of two subtypes of machine learning – supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Called “semi-unsupervised learning,” his approach involves using supervised techniques to guide and train the algorithm in order to help it generalize, with unsupervised learning techniques, so that new hidden patterns can be more easily discovered in the data.

Ma first came up with the idea to apply this specific algorithm to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in a Grade 12 computer science class. Unfortunately, the project confused his teachers, because they weren’t sure how it could be used.

“I only told my team after the paper’s publication that this all started as a high-school project that wasn’t really appreciated by my teachers.”

Dr. Cherry Ng, a research associate at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and second author on the paper, says that new ideas are very important in a field like SETI. “By poking the data with every technique, we might be able to discover exciting signals.”

Ng, who has been working on this project with Ma since the summer of 2020, says machine learning is the way to go in the current era of big data astronomy. “I am impressed by how well this approach has performed on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.”

“With the help of artificial intelligence, I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to better quantify the likelihood of the presence of extraterrestrial signals from other civilizations.”

Looking ahead, Ma, Ng, and the rest of the SETI team hope to expand on their new algorithm and apply it to other datasets and observatories. Using powerful, multi-antenna radio telescopes like MeerKAT, the Square Kilometre Array, and the Next Generation VLA, Ma says the team plans to scale their machine learning approach in a major way.

SKA SARAO Meerkat [SKA-Mid] Telescope (SA), 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

SKA ASKAP Pathfinder Radio Telescope at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA Square Kilometre Array low frequency at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA Murchison Widefield Array (AU), Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

ngVLA to be located near the location of the NRAO Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array site on the plains of San Agustin, fifty miles west of Socorro, NM, at an elevation of 6970 ft (2124 m) with additional mid-baseline stations currently spread over greater New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Mexico.

“With our new technique, combined with the next generation of telescopes, we hope that machine learning can take us from searching hundreds of stars, to searching millions.”

The data used in this study come from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia [below], which is one of the major facilities involved in the Breakthrough Listen technosignature search project.

_____________________________________________________________________________________
Breakthrough Listen Project

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

Green Bank Radio Telescope, West Virginia, USA, now the center piece of the Green Bank Observatory(US), being cut loose by the National Science Foundation(US), supported by Breakthrough Listen Project, West Virginia University, and operated by the nonprofit Associated Universities, Inc.

CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (AU) Parkes Observatory [ Murriyang, the traditional Indigenous name], located 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, 414.80m above sea level.

SKA SARAO Meerkat telescope(SA) 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

Newly added

University of Arizona Veritas Four Čerenkov telescopes A novel gamma ray telescope under construction at the CfA Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (US), Mount Hopkins, Arizona (US), altitude 2,606 m 8,550 ft. A large project known as the Čerenkov Telescope Array, composed of hundreds of similar telescopes to be situated at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory [Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias](ES) in the Canary Islands and Chile at European Southern Observatory Cerro Paranal(EU) site. The telescope on Mount Hopkins will be fitted with a prototype high-speed camera, assembled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (US) and capable of taking pictures at a billion frames per second. Credit: Vladimir Vassiliev. _____________________________________________________________________________________

The Breakthrough Listen Initiative, sponsored by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, is the most powerful, comprehensive and intensive scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.

Nature Astronomy

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

The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics (CA) at the University of Toronto (CA) is an endowed research institute with nearly 70 faculty, postdocs, students and staff, dedicated to innovative technology, ground-breaking research, world-class training, and public engagement. The research themes of its faculty and Dunlap Fellows span the Universe and include: optical, infrared and radio instrumentation; Dark Energy; large-scale structure; the Cosmic Microwave Background; the interstellar medium; galaxy evolution; cosmic magnetism; and time-domain science.

The Dunlap Institute (CA), Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics (CA), Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CA), and Centre for Planetary Sciences (CA) comprise the leading centre for astronomical research in Canada, at the leading research university in the country, the University of Toronto (CA).

The Dunlap Institute (CA) is committed to making its science, training and public outreach activities productive and enjoyable for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, nationality or religion.

Our work is greatly enhanced through collaborations with the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics (CA), Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CA), David Dunlap Observatory (CA), Ontario Science Centre (CA), Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (CA), the Toronto Public Library (CA), and many other partners.

The University of Toronto participates in the CHIME Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment at The Canada NRCC Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, British Columbia(CA) Altitude 545 m (1,788 ft).

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).

U Toronto Dunlap Dragonfly telescope Array (CA) with its team at its home at high-altitude observing location New Mexico Skies hosting facility at 7300′ altitude.

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

The The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

The University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, The University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill University [Université McGill] (CA) .

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at The University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

Mission Statement

The Green Bank Observatory enables leading edge research at radio wavelengths by offering telescope, facility and advanced instrumentation access to the astronomy community as well as to other basic and applied research communities. With radio astronomy as its foundation, the Green Bank Observatory is a world leader in advancing research, innovation, and education.

Green Bank Observatory campus

History

60 years ago, the trailblazers of American radio astronomy declared this facility their home, establishing the first ever National Radio Astronomy Observatory within the United States and the first ever national laboratory dedicated to open access science. Today their legacy is alive and well.

From The Faculty of Arts & Science At The University of Toronto (CA): “University of Toronto research ‘collaboratory’ uses global lens to pursue community-based Indigenous research”

From The Faculty of Arts & Science

At

The University of Toronto (CA)

1.25.23
Cynthia Macdonald

Uahikea Maile, a noted Kanaka Maoli scholar, activist and practitioner from Hawaiʻi, recently established the Ziibiing Lab to study global Indigenous politics (photo by Diana Tyszko)

Indigenous Peoples all over the world have endured a common history. And, as Uahikea Maile notes, the experience of “colonial dispossession, territorial enclosure and the subsequent creation of nation states” is not unique to North America.

Global political resistance against the effects of this shared history – which continues to this day – is at the heart of Maile’s recently established research laboratory at the University of Toronto. Known as the Ziibiing Lab, the new Indigenous politics “collaboratory” takes its name from the Anishinaabemowin word for Taddle Creek, a stream that flowed through the land on which U of T sits until the 19th century, when it was buried to create sewage infrastructure for the city.

“The name is an important reference to that waterway, which still exists and resurfaces from time to time,” says Maile, an assistant professor of Indigenous politics in the department of political science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and a noted Kanaka Maoli scholar, activist and practitioner from the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu. “This responds to the Answering the Call report – produced five years ago by U of T in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – which contains a recommendation as part of the Call to Action to create significant dedicated Indigenous space, including a greater recognition of these particular underground waterways here at U of T.”

Foreground: Professor Robert Vipond with Assistant Professor Uahikea Maile (photo by Diana Tyszko)

At Ziibiing, says Maile, “We are producing robust, community-based research that is collaborative – not just concerned with Indigenous politics, policy and praxis in Canada but also internationally. And we’re also open to research that is transnational, reflecting how Indigenous politics function across nations and beyond the nation-state.”

Maile says that Ziibiing’s highly collaborative structure “flips the model” of how research labs usually operate.

Instead of being driven by one principal investigator who oversees the hiring, strategy and research agenda, the lab is overseen by a nine-member governing council comprising Maile and eight other Indigenous faculty members from the Faculty of Arts & Science.

Ziibiing is highly interdisciplinary, which is important, given the complex nature of Indigenous politics. On its governing council, there are representatives from not only political science but geography, history, religion and English.

Maile wants to support researchers in their own pursuits, which is why Ziibiing provides training in knowledge mobilization. In addition to generating reports and briefs – and training participants on how to apply for grants and observe proper research protocols – the lab boasts its own vocal booth where researchers can record podcasts, oral histories and interviews. One of the latter is already available: REDsurgence, a series of thought-provoking conversations hosted by Anishnaabe journalist and speaker Riley Yesno, a PhD candidate in political science.

A quick scan of research projects underway at Ziibiing highlights its international outlook. Post-doctoral researcher Sardana Nikolaeva is preparing a report on diamonds and Indigenous politics in Russia’s Sakha Republic. Yojana Miraya Oscco is developing a new podcast as part of her dissertation research concerning Andean Indigenous political thought and resistance to extractivism in Latin America. Post-doctoral researcher Karl Gardner is working on Indigenous deportation and anti-deportation in Canada and Australia and Yesno – who is a research assistant at Ziibiing – is examining the land back movement across Canada.

Maile’s own personal research exemplifies the collaboratory’s transnational aspect. For many years he’s been monitoring and challenging the proposed construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, an international project to build a large-scale telescope in Hawaiʻi on Mauna Kea. Mauna Kea is one of the most sacred dormant volcanoes in Native Hawaiian religion and culture; Maile and others who’ve been opposing the telescope’s planned construction cite not only its threat to territorial sovereignty, but to aquifers and local biodiversity.

“My research considers the kind of transnational ways not just nations, but institutions and corporations, have become entangled in global forms of dispossession of Indigenous Peoples’ territories and ongoing occupation,” he says.

He adds that research is the ground from which action arises – action that is best taken as part of a collective. “Coming here to U of T, that’s how I treat my Indigenous students from all over the world. They’re not just individuals, they are representatives of their nations and their communities.”

The lab, shown here at its launch in October, produces community-based research with an international outlook (photo by Diana Tyszko)

They are also linked to the communities around the world, whose concerns and philosophies they often share. In discussing responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples around the world, Maile invokes two Hawaiian concepts. One is kuleana, or the obligation to care for the land and the place you are in. The other is kulana, which involves using one’s power and position for the betterment of the collective.

“Leaving home was not something that I desired as a child, but it became a way for me to walk in my ancestors’ footsteps,” Maile says. “Some left Hawaiʻi to secure international treaties that then bestowed international forms of recognition on the Hawaiian Kingdom. And they also left Hawaiʻi to lobby the United States congress when the annexation treaty was defeated in 1897.

“So Hawaiian internationalism is a tradition of our community and I’m taking and carrying that mantle not only in my educational pursuits, but also in my work here at U of T. This is why we say that Indigenous Peoples do not just concentrate on understanding the political forms of sovereignty in the communities where we live: as Indigenous Peoples, we are sovereign peoples no matter where we go.”

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

The University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science is Canada’s largest and most research-intensive undergraduate and graduate enterprise, a vibrant intellectual community of students and scholars who are deeply committed to excellence, discovery and diversity.

The Faculty comprises 29 departments, seven colleges and 48 interdisciplinary centres, schools and institutes, which not only provide academic offerings, but also a thriving community outside the classroom. This breadth allows us to develop new synergies, to address novel research opportunities and student interest in areas that cut across the sectors.

More than 300 undergraduate and 70 graduate programs are offered across the humanities, social sciences and sciences.

Departments

Anthropology
Art History
David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics
Cell & Systems Biology
Chemistry
Classics
Computer Science
Earth Sciences
East Asian Studies
Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Economics
English
French
Geography & Planning
Germanic Languages & Literatures
History
Italian Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
Philosophy
Physics
Political Science
Psychology
Study of Religion
Slavic Languages & Literatures
Sociology
Spanish & Portuguese
Statistical Sciences

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) At The University of Toronto (CA): “Canadian researchers will have access to next-generation radio astronomy observatory”

From The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA)

At

The University of Toronto (CA)

1.27.23

Canada intends to proceed to full membership in the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), a next-generation radio astronomy observatory bringing together nations from around the world to build and operate cutting-edge radio telescopes.

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The Square Kilometre Array (SKA)– a next-generation telescope due to be completed by the end of the decade – will likely be able to make images of the earliest light in the Universe, but for current telescopes the challenge is to detect the cosmological signal of the stars through the thick hydrogen clouds.

SKA-Square Kilometer Array

SKA SARAO Meerkat Telescope (SA), 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

SKA Hera at SKA South Africa.

SKA Murchison Widefield Array (AU), Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA ASKAP Pathfinder Radio Telescope at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA Square Kilometre Array low frequency at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Widefield Array, Boolardy station in outback Western Australia on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

Testing EDGES at MIT Haystack Observatory

EDGES telescope in a radio quiet zone at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia, on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA Pathfinder – LOFAR location at Potsdam via Google Images.
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SKAO will operate two telescopes – one in Australia and one in South Africa – with headquarters in the United Kingdom. The facility will enable discoveries that will advance our understanding of the universe, the fundamental laws of physics and the prospects for life on other planets. Membership in the SKAO will allow Canada to develop strong scientific, technical and industrial capabilities and collaborations well into the future.

The decision to proceed with full membership, announced this week by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François‑Philippe Champagne, is expected to provide Canadian astronomers with a six per cent use-share of the SKAO and support establishing a domestic regional centre. The centre will provide direct connections to data collected with the SKA telescopes and science support to enable ground-breaking discoveries.

“This is tremendously exciting news,” says Bryan Gaensler, director of the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics in the Faculty of Arts & Science and former science director of the Canadian Square Kilometre Array, a global radio observatory. “Canadian membership in the SKAO was one of the marquee priorities in the Canadian Astronomy Long Range Plan for 2020-2030. Membership will open new opportunities for University of Toronto leadership at an international scale.”

With full membership, U of T envisages significant involvement in a Canadian SKA Regional Centre as part of its recently established Data Sciences Institute.

“The SKAO is a key part of U of T’s Strategic Research Plan for 2018 – 2023 and an important institutional priority,” says Leah Cowen, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives. “It is a brilliant example of a high-impact, interdisciplinary research collaboration that is a reflection of our incredible research community.”

U of T also leads the $10-million Canadian Initiative for Radio Astronomy Data Analysis (CIRADA), a consortium of six Canadian universities, the National Research Council Canada and many international partners, whose goal is to establish Canadian capability for processing, archiving and sharing the enormous scientific data sets anticipated for the SKA.

“I’m thrilled to congratulate everyone at U of T for their work over many years in bringing us to this historic commitment,” says Melanie Woodin, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science. “It’s rewarding to know that the SKAO involves researchers from five Arts & Science units: the Dunlap Institute, the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, the Department of Physics and the Department of Statistical Sciences.”

The initial phase of the SKAO consists of 197 radio dishes located in South Africa [MeerKat] and 131,072 antennas located in Australia. Construction on Phase 1 began in June 2021 and is expected to be completed by 2029.

Canada was one of six founding members of the initial SKAO consortium in 2000 and has maintained substantial involvement and engagement in the SKAO project to date. Canadian astronomers are playing leading roles in designing marquee SKA science programs – including tests of gravity, low-frequency cosmology, cosmic magnetism, dark energy and detecting transient systems. They have multi-wavelength expertise in galaxy evolution, multi-messenger astronomy and planetary system formation.

“Canada’s commitment to the SKA secures our position at the forefront of astrophysics for the next few decades. Everybody at U of T that has the slightest interest in astronomy should prepare to get absolutely blown away by what the SKA is going to find,” says Roberto Abraham, chair of the David A. Dunlap department of astronomy and astrophysics. “And what makes it extra exciting is that U of T’s leadership in the national consortium means that many of the most amazing discoveries will get made right here. What an exciting time to be an astronomer. To all the young people just getting into the subject: Hold on to your hats – it’s going to be a wild ride!”

As well as working on many aspects of the SKA project itself, Canadian astronomers are developing a variety of new facilities and experiments aimed at testing the technology needed for the SKAO. Foremost amongst these is the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) of which U of T is a member.

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).

CHIME is a unique radio telescope that can detect fast radio bursts and is making a three-dimensional map of the dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe.

The NRC points out that for the SKAO, respecting Indigenous cultures and the local populations has been a key consideration from the start: “These core principles are fully aligned with the priorities of the Canadian astronomical community as expressed in the Canadian Astronomy Long Range Plan 2020-2030.”

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

The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics (CA) at the University of Toronto (CA) is an endowed research institute with nearly 70 faculty, postdocs, students and staff, dedicated to innovative technology, ground-breaking research, world-class training, and public engagement. The research themes of its faculty and Dunlap Fellows span the Universe and include: optical, infrared and radio instrumentation; Dark Energy; large-scale structure; the Cosmic Microwave Background; the interstellar medium; galaxy evolution; cosmic magnetism; and time-domain science.

The Dunlap Institute (CA), Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics (CA), Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CA), and Centre for Planetary Sciences (CA) comprise the leading centre for astronomical research in Canada, at the leading research university in the country, the University of Toronto (CA).

The Dunlap Institute (CA) is committed to making its science, training and public outreach activities productive and enjoyable for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, nationality or religion.

Our work is greatly enhanced through collaborations with the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics (CA), Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CA), David Dunlap Observatory (CA), Ontario Science Centre (CA), Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (CA), the Toronto Public Library (CA), and many other partners.

The University of Toronto participates in the CHIME Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment at The Canada NRCC Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, British Columbia(CA) Altitude 545 m (1,788 ft).

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).

U Toronto Dunlap Dragonfly telescope Array (CA) with its team at its home at high-altitude observing location New Mexico Skies hosting facility at 7300′ altitude.

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

The The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

The University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, The University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill University [Université McGill] (CA) .

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at The University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From The Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering At The University of Toronto (CA): “Researchers say new catalyst design could make better use of captured carbon”

From The Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

At

The University of Toronto (CA)

1.23.23
Tyler Irving

Post-doctoral researcher Adnan Ozden holds up a sample of the new catalyst, which improves the efficiency of reactions that convert captured CO2 into valuable products such as ethanol and ethylene (photo by Aaron Demeter)

A new catalyst design created by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering could significantly improve the practicality of an electrochemical process that converts captured carbon dioxide into multi-carbon molecules – some of the key building blocks of the chemical industry.

“We need alternative routes to everyday products that do not require fossil fuel inputs,” says David Sinton, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering and senior author on a new paper published in Nature Energy [below].

“With recent advances in carbon capture, there is an opportunity to use CO2 to replace core chemical feedstocks on which the modern world relies. By developing cost-effective ways to upgrade this carbon into products we already need, we can increase the economic incentive to capture, rather than emit, CO2.”

One way to upgrade carbon involves electrochemistry – electricity used to drive forward a desired chemical reaction. The conversion is carried out in devices known as “electrolyzers”, where electrons combine with the reactants at the surface of a solid catalyst.

The team has a proven track record of successfully developing innovative ways to improve the efficiency of electrochemical CO2 conversion.

In their latest published work, the researchers focused on a variant of the process known as “cascade CO2 reduction.” In this two-step process, CO2 is first dissolved in a liquid electrolyte and then passed through an electrolyzer, where it reacts with electrons to form carbon monoxide (CO).

The CO is then passed through a second electrolyzer where it is converted into two-carbon products such as ethanol, which is commonly used as fuel, and ethylene, which is a precursor to many types of plastics as well as other consumer goods.

It is at this second step where the team found inefficiencies they believed could be overcome. The challenges were related to selectivity, which is the ability to maximize production of the target molecules by reducing the formation of undesirable side products.

“One of the key issues is the poor selectivity under low reactant availability,” says post-doctoral researcher Adnan Ozden, one of four lead authors on the new paper.

“This, in turn, leads to a trade-off between the energy efficiency – meaning how efficiently we use the electrons we pump into the system – versus the carbon efficiency, which is a measure of how efficiently we use CO2 and CO.”

“There are ways to achieve high energy efficiency, and there are ways to achieve high carbon efficiency, but they are usually approached separately,” says former post-doctoral researcher Jun Li, another of the lead authors, who is now an associate professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

“Achieving both in a single-operation mode is the key.”

In this schematic of the catalyst design, the large spheres represent copper nanoparticles, which are covered in a honeycomb-like mesh that represents the covalent organic framework. The blue spheres are positively charged cations and the clear ones are negatively charged anions. The coloured molecules on the surface represent the carbon monoxide reactant (CO) and the reaction product, ethylene (Image courtesy of Alex Tokarev, Kate Zvorykina from Ella Maru studio)

The team investigated the reasons for this trade-off and found that it originates from excessive accumulation of the positively charged ions, known as cations, on the catalyst surface, as well as the undesirable migration of the negatively charged ions, known as anions, away from the catalyst surface.

To overcome this challenge, they took inspiration from the design of supercapacitors, another electrochemical system where the transport of ions is critical. They added a porous material, known as a covalent organic framework, onto the surface of the catalyst, which enabled them to control the transport of cations and anions in the local reaction environment.

“With this modification, we obtained a highly porous, highly hydrophobic catalyst layer,” says Li.

“In this design, the covalent organic framework interacts with the cations to limit their diffusion to the active sites. The covalent organic framework also confines the locally produced anions due to its high hydrophobicity.”

Using the new catalyst design, the team built an electrolyzer that converts CO into two-carbon products with 95 per cent carbon efficiency, while also keeping energy efficiency relatively high at 40 per cent.

“When you look at what has been achieved so far in the field, the various approaches have tended to focus either on getting really high energy efficiency, or really high carbon efficiency,” says Ozden. “Our new design shows that it’s possible to break this trade-off.”

There is still more work to be done. For example, while the prototype device maintained its performance for more than 200 hours, it will need to last even longer if it’s to be used industrially. Still, the new strategy shows potential in terms of its ability to improve the value proposition of upgrading captured carbon.

“If this process is going to be adopted commercially, we need to be able to show that we can accomplish the conversion in a way that’s scalable and cost-effective enough to make economic sense,” says Sinton. “I think our approach demonstrates that this is a goal within reach.”

Nature Energy

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

The Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering is an academic division of the University of Toronto devoted to study and research in engineering. Founded in 1873 as the School of Practical Science, it is still known today by the longtime nickname of Skule. The faculty is based primarily across 16 buildings on the southern side of the university campus in Downtown Toronto, in addition to operating the Institute for Aerospace Studies facility. The faculty administers undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degree programs, as well as a dual-degree program with the Rotman School of Management.

Departments

Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry (Chem)
Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering (Civ/Min)
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE)
Department of Materials Science & Engineering (MSE)
Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE)

Divisions

Division of Engineering Science (EngSci)
Division of Environmental Engineering & Energy Systems (DEEES)

Specialized institutes

University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS)
Institute of Biomedical Engineering (BME)

Affiliated research institutes and centres

BioZone
Centre for Advanced Coating Technologies (CACT)
Centre for Advanced Diffusion-Wave Technologies (CADIFT)
Centre for Advanced Nanotechnology Centre for Global Engineering (CGEN)
Centre for Maintenance Optimization & Reliability Engineering (C-MORE)
Centre for Management of Technology & Entrepreneurship (CMTE)
Centre for Research in Healthcare Engineering (CRHE)
Centre for the Resilience of Critical Infrastructure (RCI)
Centre for Technology & Social Development Emerging Communications Technology Institute (ECTI)
Identity, Privacy & Security Institute (IPSI)
Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead)
Institute for Multidisciplinary Design & Innovation (UT-IMDI)
Institute for Optical Sciences Institute for Robotics & Mechatronics (IRM)
Institute for Sustainable Energy (ISE)
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Centre & Test Bed
Lassonde Institute of Mining
Pulp & Paper Centre
Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research (SOCAAR)
Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research
Ontario Centre for the Characterization of Advanced Materials (OCCAM)

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.