Sheepy Coodin is convinced that giving high-school students a chance to purify their own DNA or to make bacteria glow a bright green with genes from a jellyfish will get them thinking about a career in science. That's why the Winnipeg science teacher and founder of a national biotechnology camp invited students from Colonel By Secondary School in Ottawa to a five-day session of BioTrek last week.
Mr. Coodin, who has a doctorate in cell biology, started the program in 1999 because he was worried that so many his brightest students weren't interested in becoming scientists. In May, he read a Focus article in which students at Colonel By expressed the same lack of enthusiasm despite their obvious aptitude in science. So he called their teacher and invited the students to the program, which is largely financed by donations from pharmaceutical and high-tech companies and has sessions in cities across the country.
A number of the students took him up on the offer. So did putting jellyfish genes in bacteria change their minds?
Anurita Ghosh, 16, has been thinking of studying law or art, but she says the hands-on program has helped her decide to study science in university. "It was definitely a nudge, in that I'm taking bio in university because I want to keep going with it. But it isn't like this is what I want to do for the rest of my life."
Muriel Chen, 17, had already decided on studying biochemistry, but wasn't sure about science as a career. "Science is something that interested me, but being a scientist - not so much." Now, she can see it might work.
But Stephanie Mondor, 17, says while she enjoyed the experience, she is still planning to be a general practitioner. "I'm still not convinced. We did some fun stuff, but I don't see myself doing it for my whole life."
HERSCHEL'S NEW FRONTIER
A lot of things went wrong during the construction of the Herschel Space Observatory, the largest telescope ever put into space that was launched by the European Space Agency in mid-May after many delays. Astronomers expected glitches and planned five months of testing and fine-tuning, says the University of Waterloo's Michel Fich, part of a team that worked on one of the infrared instruments on board.
But all of the problems seemed to have been fixed before Herschel left the ground, and it is working amazingly well in orbit 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, four times farther away than the moon.
Dr. Fich says he and his colleagues couldn't resist taking a sneak peak at an area in the constellation Cygnus, a celestial nursery where stars are born. They expected to find material falling into new stars, but instead detected a strange, more complicated motion.
It could be a sign of many important discoveries to come once the official research program begins, Dr. Fich says.
UNTAINTED MEAT
Boar taint is a urine-like odour and unpleasant taste in cooked pork caused in part by a steroid that male pigs produce in their testes once they reach puberty.
Canadians aren't familiar with boar taint since most male pigs in Canada and the United States are castrated shortly after birth to prevent it, the University of Guelph's Jim Squires says.
The smell of androstenone, the boar taint pheromone, makes female pigs more open to mating. But there is a lot of variability in how much of the stuff individual males produce.
Dr. Squires is working on a genetic test that would allow farmers to select pigs that make very little androstenone. They could be bred into a lineage free of boar taint. This would eliminate the need to castrate males in order to prevent stinky meat.
He and his colleagues have identified 55 genetic markers associated with boar taint, and recently received a grant from the Ontario Genomics Institute to study 100 more. The work has been challenging because the pig genome has not yet been sequenced.
The other culprit in boar taint is something called skatole, which is produced when pigs digest food, but it can be controlled with diet.
E-MAIL THAT SELF-DESTRUCTS
Computer scientists at the University of Washington say they have developed a way to put an expiry date on sensitive e-mails or Facebook posts so that they self-destruct over time.
The new software is called Vanish and for each message it sends, it creates a secret key used to encrypt it. That key is then divided into dozens of pieces and sent to random computers that are part of file-sharing networks people use to share music or movies. As computers leave those networks, pieces of the key get lost and the original message can no longer be deciphered, the researchers say.
A paper about the project will be presented in Montreal next month, but you can read more about it at http://vanish.cs.washington.edu.
Anne McIlroy is The Globe and Mail's science reporter.