Wednesday, November 3, 4:00-6:00 pm, Gradroom at Grad House, 66 Harbord St, Toronto. All are welcome. No advance registration is required. Presentations: Why hasn’t natural selection made us immortal? Arvid Ågren (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) Only around 100 years ago, the Western world had a life expectancy 25 years lower than today. This was the […]

Wednesday, November 17, 4:00-6:00 pm, Gradroom at Grad House, 66 Harbord St, Toronto. All are welcome. No advance registration is required. Presentations: Networks in Telecommunications and Computer Engineering Ruediger Willenberg (Electrical & Computer Engineering) Computer and Telecom networks are very much part of our modern life. We will will take a brief look at what […]

Wednesday, October 20, 4:00-6:00 pm, Gradroom at Grad House, 66 Harbord St, Toronto. All are welcome. No advance registration is required. Presentations: Genetically Modified Plants and the Law: A Growth Industry Robert Smith (Law) My topic begins with the question “can a company patent a plant?”  In my speech I will explain the extent to which […]

Wednesday, October 6, 4:00-6:00 pm, Gradroom at Grad House, 66 Harbord St, Toronto. All are welcome. No advance registration is required. RSVP on Facebook Presentations: The Neurobiology of Pain Massih Moayedi (Neuroscience) Pain is a complex, multidimensional experience.  It has been defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as an unpleasant sensory […]

Wednesday, September 22, 4:00-6:00 pm, Gradroom at Grad House, 66 Harbord St, Toronto. All are welcome. No advance registration is required. G20 WIDEN was curated by Morgan Vanek & Jessica Duffin Wolfe in response to the G20 weekend in Toronto in June 2010. Presentations: Civil Liberties in Comparative Perspectives: G20 Under the Lens of Global […]

In commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Montreal Massacre: The Marriage Market and Women Colin Decker, Mathematics Many cultures throughout history have kept detailed marriage records. Marriage data is sometimes used by economists to gain a foothold in the study of other social phenomena for which direct data is not available. I will briefly […]

Biphoton Wave Functions: Pictures from Quantum Optics Luke Helt, Physics Although explored by Newton as early as 1672, optics is still an intense area of current research. We can produce various colours for displays (with phosphors, or liquid crystals), reduce glare (with polarized sunglasses), and send information at high speeds (with fiber-optic cables and diode […]

The Last Man to Know Everything Jacqueline Whyte Appleby, Faculty of Information Alexander Pope advises us: “a little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.” Just how deeply do we need to drink to be an expert? And how have our expectations of these depths changed through the ages? […]

HIV: The Basics Wendy Dobson-Belaire, Molecular Genetics The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is one of the plagues of the 20th and 21st century. Despite many concerted efforts, no cure or vaccine yet exists. This talk will focus on the basics of the virus, how and what cells it infects, and discuss some of the current […]

Portraits of Planets in Other Solar Systems Bryce Croll, Astronomy Over 300 planets have been discovered to date in solar systems other than our own. The characteristics of these planets have been odder and more diverse than our simple theories suggested and that we could even imagine in our wildest dreams. In the past 15 […]