August 31, 2004
Director Appointed for New Saskatchewan Structural Sciences Centre at U of S
Posted August 31, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - August 31, 2004 2004-08-07-OTHER
Director Appointed for New Saskatchewan Structural Sciences Centre at U of S
A U of S chemist known for his research in the area of molecular synthesis
will lead the Saskatchewan Structural Sciences Centre (SSSC), Vice-President
Research Steven Franklin announced today.
Marek Majewski will assume the position of SSSC Director on September 1,
2004.
"Professor Majewski brings to this position a combination of outstanding
academic credentials and valuable international experience," Franklin says.
"His expertise and leadership will be vital to the operation and ongoing
development of this multidisciplinary research centre."
The SSSC was developed to expand the U of S's research infrastructure and
complement other research facilities on campus such as the new Canadian
Light Source (CLS). Bruce Waygood, University Coordinator of Health
Research, served as acting director while a search was underway to fill the
position full-time.
Majewski joined the U of S chemistry department in 1985. While at the U of
S, he has served as a visiting professor to universities in Australia
(1991-92) and Poland (1996). Prior to joining the U of S, Majewski held
positions with Warsaw Technical University, the University of Alberta and
the National Research Council of Canada.
Majewski says the SSSC is an integral part of the university's research
infrastructure and will benefit a growing number of users from industry and
the public sector.
"This centre provides state-of-the-art equipment and capabilities that build
upon our university's research strengths," he says. "I would like to
especially encourage members of the U of S research community to take full
advantage of what is available in the centre."
The SSSC provides advanced equipment for probing the structure of matter,
work that can help scientists track environmental toxins, build
semiconductors, create new plastics and develop new drugs. With its new
lasers, microscopes and X-ray equipment, the SSSC will advance research in
areas such as biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, materials science,
environmental sciences, health sciences and mining.
Funding for the centre was announced in January, 2000, with commitments of
$3.7 million from the Canada/Saskatchewan Western Economic Partnership
Agreement, $3.4 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI),
$2.8 million from the U of S and $1.5 million from the Saskatchewan
government's Innovation and Science Fund.
More than 40 faculty members as well as 200 graduate students and
post-doctoral fellows will use the SSSC to conduct their research. The
centre is located in the Thorvaldson Building annex just a short walk from
the CLS.
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For more information about the SSSC, visit http://www.usask.ca/sssc.
For more information about the Canadian Light Source, visit
http://www.lightsource.ca.
Backgrounder information is available at
http://www.usask.ca/sssc/news-backgrounder.php.
For more information, contact:
Marek Majewski
Director, Saskatchewan Structural Sciences Centre
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-4373
Ramaswami Sammynaiken
Manager, Saskatchewan Structural Sciences Centre
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-4373
Dale Worobec
Research Communications
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-1474
dale.worobec@usask.ca
www.usask.ca/research
August 27, 2004
VIDO Receives Government Funding
Posted August 27, 2004
The following release was issued by the Government of Saskatchewan:
August 26, 2004
VIDO Receives Government Funding
Animal and human health researchers in Saskatchewan received a boost today
from new government funding. Learning Minister Andrew Thomson announced
today at the University of Saskatchewan that the Vaccine and Infectious
Disease Organization (VIDO) will receive $9 million over the next five years
from the provincial government's Innovation and Science Fund.
See the complete news release:
www.gov.sk.ca/newsrel/releases/2004/08/26-506.html
August 17, 2004
U of S Archaeology Students Find Stone Age Human Remains
Posted August 17, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - August 17, 2004 2004-08-05-OTHER
U of S Archaeology Students Find Stone Age Human Remains
A group of University of Saskatchewan archaeology students has discovered
human remains thought to be more than 7,000 years old while on an
archaeological dig in Jordan.
"There is a rule in archaeology that you find the exciting stuff on the last
day," says Chris Foley, an archaeology professor at St. Thomas More College
who led the dig.
There are only five other documented burial discoveries from the period and
culture in question, says Foley, who returned August 12 from Jordan.
The find, approximately 50 kilometres from the capital city of Amman, came
on the morning of July 27 as students were brushing a square of the dig to
prepare it for final photographs. The U of S team was just a few days from
wrapping up their six-week expedition and returning home to Saskatoon.
"I was near our square finishing some paperwork when Mark (Anderson) called
out that he thought he saw something," says Chantelle Klein, the fourth-year
archaeology student supervising the square in which the remains were found.
"When we swept more we could see that it was a skull of some type, and at
first we thought it was from an animal. But then we noticed it was way too
round," says Klein.
The remains are those of an adolescent and were buried - with feet and arms
tucked carefully into a fetal position - underneath a dirt floor in what was
once a settlement from the Yarmoukian period. The Yarmoukian culture is from
the 'early pottery' Neolithic era, the latter part of the Stone Age when
humans first took up agriculture.
The U of S team was part of a larger dig called the Wadi ath-Thamad project,
led by Wilfrid Laurier University archaeologist Michele Daviau. The main
dig was focused on excavating the Iron Age fortified city of Khirbat al-Mudayna,
while the Saskatchewan group concentrated their efforts on the nearby
Neolithic site.
While the discovery was exciting for the group - made up of 13 undergraduate
students, two graduate students, two volunteers plus Foley and his wife,
Laura - the more significant find may be the location and nature of the site
itself.
"This site has a lot of features that make it very archaeologically
interesting," says Foley.
"For one thing, you don't expect to see anything Yarmoukian outside of the
Mediterranean zone. But this site was in a desert fringe area and far from
where we'd expect to find it," he says.
Also of interest to Foley and his wife, a sessional lecturer in archaeology
at St. Thomas More, is that some of the recovered pottery appears to be from
the Jericho IX period, a poorly documented Neolithic culture that is
believed to have been either contemporary with, or a little later than the
Yarmoukian period.
Samples from the site - including the human remains - will be analyzed and
carbon 14-dated at the University of Saskatchewan. The remains will be
examined by U of S archaeologist and forensic expert Ernie Walker.
The Foleys say the Wadi ath-Thamad site is so interesting they plan to
return next year, and will likely initiate a major five-year excavation of
the area.
The U of S has provided support for the Wadi ath-Thamad project by funding
students who traveled to Jordan this year, with funds coming from the Office
of the President, St. Thomas More College, and the College of Arts and
Science.
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Note to editors: Photos are available of the Wadi ath-Thamad excavation and
trip participants.
For more information, contact:
Professor Chris Foley
St. Thomas More College (Archaeology)
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-4175
Dale Worobec
Research Communications
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-1474
dale.worobec@usask.ca
www.usask.ca/research
August 10, 2004
Marijuana Compound May Intensify Epileptic Seizures - Research at the University of Saskatchewan
Posted August 10, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Tuesday, August 10, 2004 2004-08-04-OTHER
Marijuana Compound May Intensify Epileptic Seizures
Researchers with the University of Saskatchewan's new Neural Systems and
Plasticity Group have found that although a component of marijuana
suppresses grand-mal type epileptic seizures in rats, it may intensify the
severity of the most common seizures -- those starting in the temporal lobes
of the brain.
Epilepsy is conventionally treated with anticonvulsant drugs that can cause
nausea, headaches, hair loss, swollen gums, impotence, depression, liver
failure, and in some extreme cases, psychosis.
Some epileptics who can't tolerate these medications use marijuana or
cannabinoids (synthetic forms of THC -- the psychoactive ingredient of
cannabis) to control seizures -- with no previously identified side effects.
But initial findings from a U of S study suggest that in some cases,
cannabinoids may do more harm than good.
With funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the
Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation (SHRF), group leader Michael
Corcoran is using rats to study the effects of a new generation of
cannabinoid drugs on "kindling" -- a small electrical stimulus in the brain
that triggers a burst of epileptic-like activity that eventually generates
seizures.
Discovered in Canada by Graham Goddard at McGill University in the 1960s,
kindling works in a way similar to epilepsy and is one of the best models
for studying temporal lobe seizures.
"The brain is caught in a constant tug of war maintaining a balance between
factors that excite electrical activity and those that restrict it," says
Corcoran. So to protect itself, it relies on built-in systems that act as
firewalls, limiting the spread of electrical activity.
During a seizure, the firewalls crash and electrical discharges spread in
abnormal patterns to groups of neighboring cells, causing a storm of intense
synchronized electrical activity that can manifest itself as convulsions.
After two seizures, a person is diagnosed with epilepsy.
Kindling is a simulation of that same kind of electrical firestorm. To
induce kindling, Corcoran's team applies a low current (about 20
microamperes or one one-millionth of an amp) to a specific site in a rat's
brain for about 120 milliseconds. With repetition, the electrical discharge
spreads from cell to cell and the brain is permanently changed in a way that
resembles epilepsy's electrical activity.
In Corcoran's study, kindling gets worse when the rats are given compounds
that act at the same cellular receptor as THC.
He thinks that may mean the cannabinoid compounds increase epileptic
seizures by reducing inhibition in the brain and drastically increasing
excitatory electrical activity, but more research needs to be done before he
can explain exactly what's happening when epileptic mechanisms affect brain
function.
The neural systems group is composed of 13 researchers from the U of S
departments of psychology, physiology, biology, neurosurgery, mechanical
engineering, neurology, pharmacy, nutrition and dietetics, kinesiology and
veterinary biomedical sciences. There are also more than 45 post-doctoral
fellows and graduate students with the group, as well as more than 10
undergraduates and summer students.
Corcoran's kindling study is only one of a number of innovative neuroscience
projects the group has been undertaking for some time.
The group is also one of five new U of S human health research groups
established through a funding partnership between SHRF (www.shrf.ca) and
Saskatchewan universities. The funding program encourages health
researchers from a variety of disciplines to form research groups, thereby
increasing U of S research intensity.
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For more information, contact:
Professor Michael Corcoran
Anatomy and Cell Biology
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-4079
Kristina Bergen
Research Communications
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-1425
bergen@sask.usask.ca
www.usask.ca/research
August 04, 2004
Report Urges National Response to Chronic Wasting Disease in the Wild
Posted August 04, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - August 4, 2004 2004-08-02-WCVM
Report Urges National Response to Chronic Wasting Disease in the Wild
Saskatoon - Canada's wildlife ministers must act now to curtail the spread
of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and other wildlife populations
throughout Canada, states the final report by a U of S-led international
panel of experts.
"This is a catastrophe in the making, and there have been very few resources
allocated to deal with it," says François Messier, chair of the
seven-member panel assembled by the Canadian Co-operative Wildlife Health
Centre (CCWHC) on the University of Saskatchewan campus.
"What we need is a national framework to deal with the disease in wild
populations," says Messier, who is also head of the U of S department of
biology.
Without a national response, the disease is likely to spread throughout
Canada's provinces and significantly reduce wild deer and other susceptible
populations over the long term, says the report.
CWD affects cervids like mule deer, white-tailed deer and elk. It is still
unknown whether the disease can infect other cervids like moose and caribou,
although scientists have concluded CWD poses little or no risk to cattle.
There is no clear consensus as to whether CWD does or does not pose a threat
to human health.
The spread of CWD would hurt Canada's $800-million hunting industry, reduce
wildlife viewing at national parks and increase the threat of re-infection
to game farms. Harder to predict is the environmental impact, but the report
cites shifts in prey selection by scavengers and predators as among the
likely effects.
The first Canadian CWD case was diagnosed at a Saskatchewan elk farm in 1996
and further testing found the disease had spread to 40 farms in Saskatchewan
and three in Alberta. In 2000, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency began a
successful multi-million dollar program to eradicate the disease in farmed
animals.
There have been no such programs by wildlife departments to contain CWD
after the disease jumped to wild deer populations in Saskatchewan. CWD was
first detected in the wild in 2000 and by the end of the 2003 hunting season
was found in 34 wild deer from three distinct geographic areas of the
province.
To date, no other wild deer populations in Canada are known to be affected,
although the report says this will change unless action is taken.
The CCWHC report recommends an aggressive management and research response
on both regional and national levels. The recommendations include risk-based
surveillance and severe reductions of deer numbers (less than one deer per
square kilometre) in certain affected areas.
CWD belongs to a group of diseases called transmissible spongiform
encephalopathies (TSEs) which are entirely new to science. Other TSE's
include scrapie in sheep, mad cow disease or bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
The independent CCWHC panel included scientists and experts from Australia,
Belgium, Canada and the United States. The full report will be available
online at http://wildlife.usask.ca.
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For more information, contact:
François Messier
Chair - Expert Scientific Panel on Chronic Wasting Disease
Department of Biology
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-4400
francois.messier@usask.ca
Frederick (Ted) A. Leighton
Executive Director, Canadian Co-operative Wildlife Health Centre
Western College of Veterinary Medicine
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-7281
ted.leighton@usask.ca
Michael Robin
Research Communications
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-2427
michael.robin@usask.ca
