Daily News

Posted on Nov. 11: Exploring the dark, cold regions of space

It's like a dirty snowball, perhaps one metre to 10 kilometres wide. It's somewhere far from the earth and sun and no one, including astronomer Christine Wilson, knows just where Comet Wilson is. Wilson discovered the comet in 1986, when she was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. "Comet Wilson was the most unbound of any comets they'd seen its orbit was a hyperbola rather than an ellipse and it was only observable for 18 months it doesn't look like it's ever going to come back," she explains. Christine Wilson is McMaster's only radio astronomy faculty member, frequently carrying out her observational research using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, located in Hawaii. She is also the Canadian project scientist for the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), the world's largest millimetre wavelength telescope, 5,000 metres above sea level on the Chajnantor plain of the Chilean Andes. The ALMA project is an international partnership, funded in North America by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). Wilson will be presenting some of the results of her research on a collision between two spiral galaxies, interstellar medium and star formation in nearby galaxies and our own Milky Way at tonight's Science in the City lecture.

Posted on Nov. 11: 2003 Whidden lecture tackles history through tsunamis, earthquakes and floods

Archeological sites from the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and early Arabic eras provide important clues to the past, but those sites have largely disappeared under sand and water. Jean-Daniel Stanley, senior scientist and director of the Deltas-Global Change and Coastal Geoarcheology programs at Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian Institution (National Museum of Natural History), will be delivering the 2003 Whidden Lectures to help explain the human-induced and natural geological processes that are causing cities full of history to sink into the past. For nearly four decades Stanley has studied Mediterranean deltas sedimentary deposits that form at river mouths along marine and lucustrine coasts around the world which have historically attracted humans because they provide the ideal place to grow agriculture and arrange transport and trade. The lectures (free admission) take place Wednesday, Nov. 12 and Thursday, Nov. 13 at 8 p.m. in Convocation Hall. Both lectures will focus mainly on Egypt's Nile delta, which is located in a relatively stable geologic area in the eastern Mediterranean while neighbouring archeologically-significant sites have already disappeared.

Posted on Nov. 9: McMaster ranks in top five for innovation, highest quality education

McMaster's focus on innovation and excellence is reinforced in Maclean's magazine. McMaster once again ranked as the second most innovative university among research-intensive universities in the magazine's ranking issue. The University placed fifth in the country in the highest quality of education category. The annual magazine ranking exercise takes a measure of the undergraduate experience, comparing universities in three peer groupings. McMaster is ranked in the medical doctoral category that includes universities with a broad range of PhD programs and research, as well as medical schools. President Peter George said innovative approaches to teaching, learning and research continue to be cornerstones of the McMaster experience. "We are committed to providing an innovative, stimulating learning experience for our students that centres on academic excellence and integrating teaching and scholarship at the undergraduate level," said President Peter George. "McMaster's culture of innovation is a mainstay of our success and we will continue to cultivate it to attract the highest quality students and faculty to participate in a unique learning and research environment."