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University of British Columbia

The University of British Columbia is a public research university in Vancouver and Kelowna, Canada, spanning sciences, medicine, and engineering.

Current stories

scienceOne report1 publisher

Canadian researchers find a lymphatic drainage route at the back of the mouse eye

UBC and University of Toronto researchers report a route, shown in mice, that drains fluid and waste from the back of the eye into the lymphatic system. Its value against glaucoma or macular degeneration depends on finding it in human eyes and showing it falters in disease.

Publishers:sciencedaily.com

Reality

Evidence35
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+45
Incentives60
Confidence40
scienceOne report1 publisher

CHIME picks out a 9-billion-year-old hydrogen glow using only its own radio data

Canada's CHIME telescope has detected the faint radio glow of hydrogen from about 9 billion years ago using only its own observations. The University of British Columbia says that opens a cheaper path to studying dark energy, once the hydrogen maps are turned into a history of cosmic expansion.

Publishers:sciencedaily.com

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+30
Incentives60
Confidence55
scienceOne report1 publisher

Brescia microscope maps femtosecond electron interactions across a few-layer tungsten diselenide sheet

Brescia physicists built a wide-field microscope that uses ultrashort laser pulses to map electron interactions over femtoseconds. They propose it for finding flaws that limit solar cells and LEDs, but so far it has been shown on a single device a few atomic layers thick.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+40
Incentives55
Confidence60
productOne report1 publisher

Weizmann's AI decoder redraws what eight scanned volunteers were looking at

Weizmann researchers built an AI decoder that redraws images people saw from brain scans, trained on eight volunteers who each viewed about 9,000 pictures. The uses for patients are still hopes, and one neuroscientist is already warning about consent.

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Mount Sinai pins stress sensitization in mice on an overlooked hypothalamic nucleus

Mount Sinai reports in Nature that blocking an amygdala-to-hypothalamus pathway in mice kept prior stress from amplifying later threat responses. Trauma-sensitization research now has one circuit to test. So far, every causal test of it has been in mice.

Reality

Evidence40
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+30
Incentives45
Confidence45
scienceOne report1 publisher

CHIME picks out distant hydrogen's radio glow from 94 nights of its own data

CHIME, a Canadian radio telescope, detected the faint glow of hydrogen from a universe about 5 billion years old using 94 nights of its own data. Any test of dark energy theories comes later, from years of archived observations still to be analysed.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+35
Incentives60
Confidence55
scienceOne report1 publisher

RNA study tracks thousands of gene changes linked to worm's influence on earwigs' water-seeking behavior

Researchers at Otago, UBC and Brown report 673 earwig genes and 2,672 worm genes growing more active as a parasitic worm drives its host toward water. The RNA data give experimenters candidate genes in both species, though the paper stops short of showing which ones make the earwig seek water.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

UBC model finds just over half of Kelowna's potential tree shade in a fifth of the city

UBC researchers testing two heat-planning tools in Kelowna found that 20% of the city's analyzed area holds 50.8% of its potential new tree shade. Paired with heat maps sharpened to 10-meter pixels, the rankings reach single blocks, though they rest on surface heat.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceConfirmed2 publishers

One field season in the Salish Sea turned up two sea spider species new to science

Cormac Toler-Scott went looking for data on how Salish Sea sea spiders respond to warming water, found none, and ended up writing the region's first imaging-and-DNA identification guide along the way.

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers
Builder
Builder 38%
Operator
Operator 50%
Investor
Investor 12%

Reality

Evidence68
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+8
Incentives30
Confidence74
productOne report1 publisher

V8's ToBoolean path leaks the secret bit that constant-time-js was written to hide

A University of British Columbia team showed that three selection functions in Soatok's constant-time-js leak their condition through V8's cache behaviour. He shipped version 0.5.0 and requested a CVE.

Publishers:soatok.blog

Reality

Evidence72
Adoption6
Hype gap−18
Incentives42
Confidence70
scienceOne report1 publisher

Laser scans of a Cyprus temple wall found 23 ship carvings a 1982 survey missed

Forty years after a visual survey recorded the ship carvings on a temple wall at Kition Kathari, a scan aimed at the masonry found 23 more, faint enough to be invisible at the wall and spread over as much as three centuries.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence64
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+12
Incentives38
Confidence62
scienceOne report1 publisher

A global survey finds steady rain-to-runoff behavior on 1.5% of the land area studied

A Nature Water team used more than 2 million rainfall-runoff events to classify more than 80,000 catchments, and found that on 87% of the land area evaluated the same rainfall can deliver very different flow.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence68
Adoption15
Hype gap+8
Incentives45
Confidence62
scienceOne report1 publisher

One Huntington variant concentrates very large repeat expansions in the neurons that die

Carriers of the CAG-CCG loss-of-interruption variant start having motor symptoms up to 12.5 years earlier than other Huntington patients. A UBC-led team measured the long expansions in their isolated striatal neurons, and saw no matching signal in blood.

Publishers:genengnews.com

Reality

Evidence60
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives58
Confidence55
scienceOne report1 publisher

Projected shorebird losses ran worse than habitat loss alone in eight of nine studies

The first global systematic review of sea-level rise and shorebirds pools 37 studies across 29 species. Its authors say the dikes and roads behind a wetland set how much habitat survives the water.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+10
Incentives45
Confidence58
scienceOne report1 publisher

Mercury's weak core field can account for the crustal magnetism across most of its mapped north

A reanalysis of MESSENGER's low-altitude passes finds the planet's weak present-day field enough to explain crustal magnetism over more than 85 percent of the area north of 38 degrees north, a region covering under a fifth of Mercury.

Publishers:physicsworld.com

Reality

Evidence60
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+18
Incentives20
Confidence55
scienceOne report1 publisher

Moorings left through a canceled field season caught Canada's last epishelf lake draining

Instruments nobody could reach in 2020 recorded the Milne Fiord lake losing its freshwater layer within months of the ice shelf breakup, and the annual visits since have found nothing of it coming back.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence70
Adoption22
Hype gap+8
Incentives58
Confidence66
scienceOne report1 publisher

MIT team uses electricity to cut heat and energy needed to extract hydrogen from ammonia

By coupling a palladium membrane to a molten hydroxide electrolyte, the Nature paper gets hydrogen out of ammonia already pure and keeps the reaction moving, though the account of it reports neither an operating temperature nor an energy cost.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+22
Incentives60
Confidence48
scienceConfirmed2 publishers

A tethered gut buckles the snake embryo into its first right-handed coil

Researchers led by the Canadian Museum of Nature scored coil direction in photographs of more than 900 embryos and then found the tether on a CT scan, which points to mechanics rather than a developmental program.

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers
Builder
Builder 52%
Operator
Operator 38%
Investor
Investor 10%

Reality

Evidence48
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+24
Incentives64
Confidence58
buildOne report1 publisher

Raptor's 0.37 pJ/bit is measured. The DRAM underneath it has no named fab.

d-Matrix says stacking compute on a co-designed DRAM die moves bits at roughly a sixth of HBM4's energy cost. It still has not said who fabricates the die.

Publishers:tomshardware.com

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption12
Hype gap+32
Incentives72
Confidence55
scienceOne report1 publisher

Riverbed ice is not glue: lab flume finds Arctic beds erode 10 times faster while thawing

Simon Fraser and UBC researchers reran the experiment until they believed it. The mechanism they landed on inverts the sign on the stabilizing term in Arctic erosion budgets.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence38
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+32
Incentives68
Confidence45

Earlier coverage