Minority language education rights were enshrined in section 23 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms when the constitution was repatriated in 1982. This created a positive right for children to receive schooling in their official mother tongue. However, federal programs looking to boost access to minority language education precede the Charter, dating back to the introduction of official bilingualism in 1969. “The Charter created a constitutional obligation out of an effort the government had started 13 years earlier,” Hayday said.

Through the Ministry of Canadian Heritage, the federal government started giving grants to provinces in the 1970s to establish minority-language education programs.

“For every student in a province studying in a minority language, the [federal] government would pay a percentage,” explained Hayday. French-language students were subsidized at a rate of 9 per cent, and French as a Second Language (FSL) students at 5 percent. Although the cost shared by the federal government might seem small, since education is a provincial responsibility the program was merely intended to cover for additional expenses in providing second-language resources.

The charter guarantees access to minority language education where “the number of those children so warrants.” Much of the Charter litigation on language rights has focused on the administration of minority language schools. For example, in Arsenault-Cameron v. Prince Edward Island (2000) the Supreme Court established that French-language school boards, and not the provincial Department of Education, have the discretion to decide whether there are enough children in an area to establish a school.

This trend of giving French boards greater control over their schools has been reflected in other provinces. Nova Scotia, for example, gave the only French school board in the province (as opposed to seven English ones) the authority to write the French-language curriculum in 2003, with the Department of Education retaining final approval power. Previously, French-language schools followed the English curriculum, with teachers expected to do much of the translation. This placed a heavy burden on teachers, who were forced to find material in French that would satisfy the requirements dictated by the curriculum.

“I remember as a teacher having to find material in French to teach for a course on law designed in English,” recalls Gilles LeBlanc, executive director of the Acadian and French Language Services branch of the Department of Education in Nova Scotia.

New Brunswick, the province with the second largest proportion of French speakers in the country, began reforms on French-language education in the late 1960s. Starting in 1966, francophone elementary-school students were entitled to receive instruction in their mother tongue. In 1969, the government of Premier Louis Robichaud enacted the Official Languages of New Brunswick Act, making the province the only one in the Canadian federation to be officially bilingual.

“New Brunswick is 30 per cent francophone, and so its government is a lot more sensitive to the demands of the Acadian population,” stated Matthew Hayday, a historian at the University of Guelph.

Although Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (PEI) also have Acadian populations, these provinces took longer to promote French schooling. Part of the reason comes down to numbers: in the 2006 census francophones made up only 4 per cent of PEI’s population and 3.6 per cent in Nova Scotia.

In the past, there was some reluctance among francophones to embrace French schools. Hayday explained that a small number of parents were concerned about what would happen to their children’s English skills if they were sent to a French school. This attitude has since changed, with francophone groups in those two provinces taking the government to court in recent years to gain control of the French-language school boards.

Measuring the success of the French-language schooling programs can be difficult. Looking at graduation rates is misleading, because the French program loses a lot of students to the English school boards. Graduation rates are calculated by dividing the number of students in grade 12 in a given year by the corresponding number of students in grade nine three years before then. If a lot of students transfer boards before graduation, this will result in an inaccurately low assessment of student success.

For example, some French schools in Nova Scotia were too small to offer upper years, forcing students to transfer to the English system to complete their diploma. This gave rise to seemingly appalling-looking graduation rates – as low as 54.8 per cent in 2001-2002 – that were more reflective of institutional limitations than academic difficulties.

LeBlanc said, however, that French programs are on the upswing. In Nova Scotia, the French school board Conseil scolaire acadien provincial, has drastically improved student retention rates over the past decade. The most recent graduation rate was 89.5 per cent for 2009-2010.

Future challenges to French-language schooling likely lie in funding. The federal government was criticized last August by the PEI French school board for the inadequate increase in the Canadian Heritage program that funds minority language schools, because it could result in a reduction of funding in real terms. In spite of these challenges, educators remain optimistic about the future of the minority language system.

“Of the seven boards in Nova Scotia, the French school board is the only one where enrolment is increasing,” LeBlanc said.

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The precise definition of asexuality itself is somewhat a subject of debate. The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), a prominent advocacy and support group founded by David Jay in 2001, defines asexuality as a lack of sexual attraction to another person. Although the AVEN definition has found wide acceptance within the community, the exact meaning of asexuality is something defined by those who identify with the term.

A study conducted in 2008 by Kristin S. Scherrer of the University of Michigan asked 160 participants, recruited through an ad on the AVEN website, to answer an online questionnaire. Although it found that a plurality of people identified with the AVEN definition of asexuality, the rest of the participants fell into smaller groups with slightly different definitions. “Of the 89 participants who responded to the question ‘What does this identity mean to you?,’ 39 of participants (44 per cent) said that their asexual identity means that they do not experience sexual attraction or sexual desire,” writes Scherrer. “The most common description of asexuality used the same language as the AVEN website, however the remaining 50 participants (56 per cent) put forth alternative understandings of their asexual identity.”

A lack of sexual attraction toward other people does not mean that asexual people are incapable of forming interpersonal relationships. Rather, asexuality complicates the picture, creating relationships of many different varieties.

Some asexual people form romantic relationships, which may be celibate, or, in the case where at least one of the partners is sexual, include an agreed upon amount of sexual contact as a compromise. Asexual individuals tend to exhibit certain patterns in their dating behaviour, whether it is a preference for opposite-sex partners, same-sex partners, or gender-blind dating.

Although some asexual people develop romantic relationships, this is not true of everyone who identifies as asexual. Instead, many asexual people prefer to build committed networks of platonic friendships, whether such an arrangement takes form mainly with a primary partner or with a greater number of individuals. Whether a person has or lacks a “romantic drive” is in itself not a marker of asexuality.

“In the sexual world there is a sense that romantic relationships kind of stand above other kinds of intimacy. That when you talk about intimacy, if you’re not in a romantic relationship, then you’re not really doing it – which is why words like single exist – whereas in the asexual community the definition is more fluid,” argues Jay. “There’s less of a sense you need to be in a romantic relationship to be happy.”

One misconception about asexuality is that those who identify as asexual do not enjoy any type of sexual activity. The more nuanced reality is that asexual individuals dislike sex with other people – some enjoy masturbation.

“The distinction between sexual and asexual people is that, if asexuals think about other people during masturbation (many asexuals don’t think about anything specifically sexual), it is only as fantasy. If they were actually given the opportunity to be sexual with that person there would be no attraction, or the drive would be so low as to be completely ignorable,” explains the AVEN website.

In 2007, Nicole Prause and Cynthia Graham, two researchers at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, published a study in the journal Archives of Sex Research that touched on the apparent dissonance between masturbation and asexuality. For the study, the authors sampled a number of individuals, both sexual and asexual. “The interviews…suggested that asexual individuals interpret fewer behaviours as sexual, as compared to non-asexual individuals, possibly due to the lack of pleasure associated with them,” argue the authors. The report also observes that “asexuals reported significantly less desire for sex with a partner, lower sexual arousability, and lower sexual excitation, but did not differ consistently from non-asexuals in their sexual inhibition scores or their desire to masturbate.”

One of the main goals of the asexual movement is to build awareness of asexuality in mainstream society. When thinking of asexuality as a part of the realm of sexual orientation, it may be helpful to think of people as being on a gradient between sexual and asexual, rather than grouping asexuality as an alternative to heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality, or any other sexual identification. Unlike these forms of queer sexuality, whose movements have aimed at combatting governmental and societal persecution, the biggest challenge currently faced by asexual people is becoming part of the public consciousness.

“The biggest issue facing the asexual community is invisibility. Historically, it is not that we’ve been told that we’re bad and evil. We’re told that we don’t exist,” explains Jay.

In the pursuit of that goal, the asexual community considers universities as one of the key battlegrounds to attain visibility. Academic research on asexuality, which had been met with tepid interest until very recently, is seen as a means to promote understanding of asexual people. “Universities are really, really powerful places to build a discussion about the fact that asexual people exist,” asserts Jay. “The more people who research asexuality and write papers on us, the more we become part of the mainstream dialogue about how sexuality works.”

Another valuable aspect of university campuses, according to Jay, is the prevalence of queer student support and awareness groups. Such a group, if inclusive of the asexual individuals at the school, can benefit the larger asexual community by helping to build awareness. Whether asexuality should be classified as “queer” is a subject of much debate within the asexual community, as some asexuals feel excluded by queer organizations.

“Most university LGBT groups are extremely sex-positive, and that’s good because most asexual people are extremely sex-positive. However, groups that are really sex-positive can be weirded out by the fact that people feel empowered by not having sex,” says Jay. “That is unfortunate because it makes an unsafe space for asexual people. In some ways, it makes a space that is limiting for everyone else. You have a safe space to celebrate enjoying sexuality at the expense of a safe space to celebrate things other than sexuality, meaning certain kinds of non-sexual intimacy.”

Jay finds some of the changes he has observed in U.S. universities in recent years encouraging, however. As more asexual people take ownership of the queer identity, they also have become more prominent within queer organizations.

“One of the cool things that’s happening on college campuses around the country is that, as asexual people are getting involved on campus LBGT groups, the groups are talking about non-sexual connections in the same way they talked about sexual connections in the past. They are starting to queer non-sexual intimacy, in the way that they’ve been queering sexuality,” says Jay.

The advent of the internet and AVEN, along with the increase in societal inclusion of marginalized sexualities, has benefitted the cause of asexual acceptance and visibility. It’s likely that a better understanding of asexuality will produce a more tolerant and nuanced conception of interpersonal relations, sexual and otherwise.

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Atlantic bluefin tuna is divided into two major stocks – one based out of North American waters and the other one out of the Mediterranean Sea. A study sponsored by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) found that the population of Mediterranean fish of spawning-size (those capable of reproducing) had declined by 74.2 per cent since 1958. The situation was grimmer in the western stock, where an 82.4 per cent decline was observed since 1970.

“Even considering uncertainties in the assessment, continuing fishing at the 2007 fishing mortality rates is expected to drive the spawning stock biomass (SSB) to very low levels; i.e. to about 18 per cent of the SSB in 1970 and 6 per cent of the unfished SSB,” warned an ICCAT report on the state of the Mediterranean fishery in 2008.

At a summit of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) last month, the government of Monaco proposed a ban on the trade of bluefin tuna. The motion was defeated, 68 to 20, with 30 other countries abstaining. Canada was among those opposing the ban. CITES will meet again in three years’ time, where a fresh attempt may be put to a vote.

Bluefin may be far too expensive to be on the diet of your average university student, but everyone comes across a variety of endangered fish in everyday life. Atlantic salmon, prawns, Chinese tilapia – these are just some of the species found on the red list of endangered fishes compiled by SeaChoice, a Canadian non-governmental organization dedicated to promoting sustainable seafood programs.

Making sustainable choices requires paying attention, not only to the species of fish but also to its country of origin and the method used in its capture. The Pacific cod fishery along the coast of Alaska has been certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), a non-profit organization whose mission is to recognize sustainable fishing practices; Atlantic cod, meanwhile, is listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Much has changed in the way that sustainable fishing is promoted at McGill since the start of the school year. At the Fall 2009 General Assembly (GA), Greenpeace McGill introduced a motion banning the sale of fish listed on the red list within the Shatner building. Although the GA lost quorum before the motion could be debated, the measure resurfaced at SSMU Council on November 12, 2009, where it was successfully passed.

Implementing the motion will require Greenpeace McGill to determine first the identity of all the fish sold by the cafeterias in Shatner, explains Sariné Willis-O’Connor, one of the students leading the campaign. Once that has been established, the club is responsible for providing SSMU with a list of suitable fish alternatives and specific vendors that could supply them.

“We should have the research done by the end of the summer, and then meet with the cafeteria managers sometime in September,” reports Willis-O’Connor.

While international governmental action appears to have stalled in the short term, consumers retain a good measure of control on the demand for red list fish. Avoiding the purchase of endangered species sends a market signal to fish suppliers and helps industries that have moved to sustainable fishing practices. The McGill community has taken a stand on this issue. Whether enough people will join to make a difference in the long-term health of the oceans will be the crucial test for the survival of fish like bluefin tuna.

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Obtaining a license under CAMR is a lengthy process. A developing country and a Canadian manufacturer of generic drugs must first establish what medication is going to be produced and in what quantity. While the developing country notifies the World Trade Organization, the drug manufacturer must get approval from Health Canada, which is responsible for ensuring that all medications sold in this country pass standards of safety, quality, and efficacy. No medication may be exported unless it complies with Canadian regulations. The next step requires that the generic drug manufacturer negotiate with the original patent-holder for a voluntary license of their product. At this point, full details of the deal – including number of doses and recipient country – must be disclosed. If the companies fail to reach an agreement within 30 days, the manufacturer may apply to the Canadian government for a compulsory license, which overrides a patent.

Developing countries can incur high political costs when taking advantage of the compulsory licensing schemes offered by Western countries. After the public disclosure of the importing country’s identity, developing nations can face measures of retaliation if they do not suspend their request for a compulsory license. In 2007, Thailand issued a compulsory license for lopinavir, an AIDS medication produced by the U.S.-based Abbott Laboratories. In response, the United States placed Thailand on the Priority Watch List of countries that do not respect intellectual property law. The adverse reaction spread to other Western states, with the European Union also condemning the move.

“A lot of our partner countries that we approached sent a request to their department of foreign affairs and got a response that: ‘There’s no way we’re touching this,’” explained Rachel Kiddell-Monroe, president of the board at UAEM.

One of the strongest criticisms of the CAMR system is that the delay in getting a license and potential political damage to the recipient country are strong disincentives for the regime to be used effectively. In the five years that CAMR has been in operation, there has only been one drug produced under its aegis, in an order placed by Médecins sans frontières (MSF) for its projects in Rwanda. Although the NGO started the process in May 2004, it did not receive the first shipment of drugs until September 2007. Of all the generic manufacturers that MSF approached in 2004, only the Toronto-based Apotex agreed to become involved. The pharmaceutical company has since stated that, unless CAMR is reformed, it has no interest in joining a compulsory license request again.

Reforms to CAMR are currently being considered by Parliament. The main improvements would be a boost to confidentiality, which would help shield developing countries from retaliation, and added flexibility to the compulsory license. Once a request has been approved, the generic drug manufacturer would not need to go through the application process repeatedly if the developing country needs to increase the size of an order. With Parliament back in session, the Industry, Science, and Technology Committee is expected to discuss the proposed measures (Bill C-393) as the first item on its agenda.

At second reading, C-393 was passed with 143 MPs voting in favour and 127 opposing the measure. The Conservative government enforced party discipline to urge cabinet members to vote against the legislation, but allowed the rest of its caucus a free vote. The Bloc Québécois voted in favour of the bill, but claimed that it intended to seek amendments to the legislation at the committee stage. Marc Garneau, McGill’s local MP and a member of the Industry Committee, has stated his opposition to the measure. If C-393 clears the House of Commons, it will still have to go through the same lengthy process in the Senate, ensuring that Canadian medicines can count security at the airport as the shortest part of their trip to the developing world.

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Dark energy is a hypothetical type of energy that, according to the current space-time model, makes up approximately 74 per cent of the total mass-energy in the universe. The existence of dark energy is a key component of the theories that make up our current understanding of the universe. Astrophysicists know from observing supernovae (bright stellar explosions) not only that the universe is expanding, but that it is doing so at an increasing rate.

When this was first established in 1998, scientists were baffled – the observations seemed to contradict gravity. All objects with mass attract one another, so assuming our universe is still expanding from the Big Bang, the rate of expansion should be decreasing in the absence of outside forces. Gravity would be trying to pull all mass together.

There are two competing theories that would account for this accelerating expansion, and both hinge on the presence of dark energy. The first theory, the cosmological constant, comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Stricken from Einstein’s universe-balancing equation when Edwin Hubble – after whom the NASA telescope is named – confirmed in 1929 that neighbouring galaxies are moving away from us, the cosmological constant has since come into vogue again. It represents a kind of energy reservoir. So a positive value for the constant would, mathematically speaking, result in an accelerated expansion of empty space.

One of the biggest problems with the cosmological constant theory, however, is that the amount of energy required to drive the expansion is not consistent with observations gathered by NASA’s Voyager probes. Moreover, some scientists argue that if this kind of acceleration had been present at the beginning of the universe, stars and galaxies could not have formed.

A competing theory takes a different approach. It posits that the universe is filled with a fluid-like substance, named quintessence, which has a negative gravitational mass. This theory has been thus far unsuccessful in working out some of the simpler models.

Dark energy is not only central to explaining the shape and behaviour of the universe – it may also eventually be the cause of its demise. Some astrophysicists theorize that, when the density of the dark energy present in the universe becomes great enough, all matter will eventually be reduced to its elementary particles. This theory, dubbed the Big Rip, holds that the outward acceleration caused by this dense “phantom energy” will be strong enough to tear apart everything in the universe – down to the atomic level.

Not all scientists agree with this prediction. Anton Baushev, from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia, argues that current models can be interpreted to show that the aging of the universe will not necessarily produce this gravitational effect.

“Even if the phantom energy prevails in the universe, the Big Rip does not necessarily occur,” writes Baushev in a recent article in the journal Physics Letters B. “A more probable outcome of the cosmological evolution is the decay of the phantom field into ‘normal’ matter.”

Scientists hope to learn more about the nature of dark energy through an experiment that is taking place at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The Dark Energy Survey Project, an international consortium of universities and government institutions, is building a massive camera that will allow the observatory’s telescope to take very precise measurements of the redshift of distant stellar bodies – that is, the change in the wavelength of light that occurs when the light-emitter and the light-observer are at motion in respect to one another.

The data gathered by this $35-million apparatus will allow them to calculate the dark energy density to a precision margin of five to 15 per cent, bringing physicists one step closer to figuring out how well this theory represents reality.

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The Schulich Library for Science and Engineering was renovated in 2006, increasing the number of workstations, improving the lighting of the building, and restoring the handsome oak furniture. The Cyberthèque, part of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, opened on January 2008, adding 125 computers to the network. Starting in February 2008, the library made it possible to book the Cyberthèque pods through the online catalogue. This online room booking system expanded to the rest of the network a year later.

McGill Libraries has continued investing in its facilities. A renovated Walter Hitschfeld Geographic Information Centre (GIC) was opened on the fifth floor of Burnside Hall last October. Students have enthusiastically embraced these changes in the library. Schulich Library, for example, saw an increase in traffic of 40 per cent since the refurbishment was completed.

“It’s a lot more pleasant to study at the library,” says Erin Shumlich, a U1 Cognitive Science student. “There’s less hassle in trying to find a place where to connect your computer, and it’s great that they finally added a little bit of colour.”

Despite the many improvements in recent years, there remain shortcomings in the system. Group study is mostly limited to the fifth floor of the Schulich Engineering Library. Because of the popularity of the space, and the small size of the Schulich Library in comparison to the other major libraries, finding a spot can be extremely difficult. The group workrooms interspersed across the network are useful, but they tend to be booked solidly in advance. The renovated GIC has helped alleviate some of this shortage, but it is still unclear how much of an effect it will ultimately have.

An issue that prevents the full use of study spaces at McGill is how difficult it is to plan to stay on campus for the day. On evenings and weekends, access to many buildings is restricted. This presents a problem for students who are prevented from accessing their lockers during those periods. And for those students who have a lengthy commute home – especially those off the island of Montreal – studying on campus means hauling heavy textbooks across the city.

“Coming to campus on a weekend is always a hassle, because of the amount of crap that I have to carry around,” observes Marie-Lise Drapeau-Bisson, a U1 Economics student, who lives on the South Shore. “It’d be much easier to study at a library if I could just get stuff from my locker in Leacock.”

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Manning studied physics at the University of Alberta for three years, but chose to transfer into the economics program before the end of his degree. As the leader of the former Reform Party, he represented Calgary Southwest in Parliament from 1993 to 2002. During his time there, he was the opposition critic for science and technology. From this vantage point, he discussed why science does not play a more prominent role in the legislative work of government and why scientific consensus sometimes takes a backseat to political expediency.

“I’m conscious of the communications gap between the political community and the scientific community,” Manning explained. “I try to bridge that divide.”

Barney, however, challenged the Conservative record by listing several actions taken by the present government since coming into power. He mentioned was Environment Minister Rona Ambrose forbidding a public servant from promoting his own novel in 2006 because it discussed climate change. Another example, from 2008, was Health Minister Tony Clement, who questioned in a speech to the Canadian Medical Association the ethics of physicians who support safe injection sites.

Manning rejected the idea that these claims are evidence of an anti-science bias in the Conservative Party. He pointed out that instead, there’s simply a shortage of scientific talent in all political parties. Manning claimed to be interested in developing intellectual capital by getting more scientists elected into public office.

“There’s a profound misconception that confuses Canadian Conservatives with Republicans,” countered Manning. “The challenge with Conservatives, and all political parties, is an apathy to applying science to what it is doing.”

To Manning’s credit, he is not a government apologist. Part of the discussion focused on examining the present government’s shortcomings in addressing the concerns of the scientific community on climate change, and he did not dance around the issue.

“Conservatives have not applied their own view to the preservation of the environment,” Manning reflected. “The principle behind fiscal conservatism is living within your means.”

This admission should not be taken as a shift in his politics. Manning simply believes that there are market-driven solutions to the environment that the government has not applied.

“Conservatives should specialize in harnessing pricing mechanisms in order to address climate change,” he counselled.

Manning argued that such challenging issues require more than government action; there must be a commitment by the general population to a change in lifestyle. He observed that private enterprise can be very successful in tackling such problems, and that the private sector would inevitably have to take part if these issues were to be fixed. Pretending otherwise, he argued, would only do more harm.

“You can condition [people] that governmental intervention is a solution to everything,” he said.

A conversation between an academic and a retired politician may seem unlikely to effect change, but the participants took a different view. Part of the problem when debating science with politicians is that during a campaign, everything factors into political calculus: debates are not framed on the merits of the issue, but on whose image will benefit from them.

Manning suggested that our officials might take up the offer of discussing their views more often if they had a place available that allowed for neutral dialogue, such as the one provided on Thursday. In short, he called for a forum where the main concern is not about winning.

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Much of the film’s argument is derived from trends in the fish population – in particular, the decline of northern bluefin tuna. The film quotes a study published in Nature in 2003 that measures the bluefin population at only 10 per cent of its historical level. With its legal status still unclear, bluefin tuna is sometimes found on the menu at upscale restaurants around the world. This past summer the governments of Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands called for a ban on the trade of the northern bluefin.

Although it is widely accepted in the scientific community that global fishing stocks are in decline, coming up with an estimate of the damage has proved controversial. There has been some recent self-criticism among scientists that objective science has been giving way to sensationalism. Notably, Ray Hilborn, a professor of fisheries management at the University of Washington, accused several studies of overstating their results in an issue of Fisheries journal in 2006.

The film claims that at current fishing rates, we will see a collapse in the oceans by 2048. The problem is that predicting the complete end of seafood is impossible. It violates a basic assumption in economics called the law of diminishing returns – eventually, if a fish population declines sufficiently, it will become unprofitable for anyone to exploit it.

“The fisheries merely become commercially extinct,” says McGill professor Andrew Hendry, who studies evolutionary dynamics at the Redpath Museum. “Although that still doesn’t tell us how quickly they can recover.”

Imposing serious fishing quotas tends to be a problem for governments wary of upsetting voters. However, delaying important decisions only exacerbates the problem, as the federal government discovered in 1992 when it finally ordered a stop to all cod fishing in the North Atlantic, a ban still in effect to this day.

The collapse of the cod fishery in the Grand Banks has had catastrophic effects for Newfoundland. Overnight, the provincial economy lost 40,000 jobs. Losing the cod was a devastating blow to a culture that had been based around it for four centuries. With the industry closed, young Newfoundlanders have since been leaving the small, fish-dependent towns along the coast in search of better opportunities.

“You walk along the shore of one of those villages, and all you see are two-, three-million dollar boats rotting on the dry docks,” says Derrick Lovell, a U1 student in Canadian Studies who hails from the northwest corner of the island. “My parents are teachers. There used to be about 600 kids at their school, and the number has now gone down to 120.”

The arguments made by The End of the Line offer a limited perspective on the science of fisheries, diminishing the importance of the issue. Nevertheless, despite the film’s shortcomings, it could be a starting point to discuss a real problem affecting the environment. In Canada, the nightmare returned this summer with the collapse of the salmon fishery in British Columbia’s Fraser River.

Calls to ramp up conservation efforts, such as those put forth by the film, will likely grow stronger. But whether the world is willing to have a serious conversation on the management of our oceans remains to be seen.

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Astronomers did not find evidence of exoplanets – planets outside of our solar system – until the eighties. In 1988, a team of Canadian scientists working at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal detailing their observations of a group of bright stars. The team claimed to have found a planet with a mass similar to that of Jupiter orbiting Gamma Cephei, a star approximately 45 light-years away.

At the time, the announcement was met with a great deal of surprise and scepticism. Previously, claims of exoplanet findings had turned out to be experimental mistakes, explains one of the paper’s authors, Gordon Walker, Professor Emeritus from the University of British Columbia.

“It was recognized that the observation was difficult to make,” said Walker.

Detecting an exoplanet is not an easy task and often must be done indirectly. Planets cause a very small gravitational disturbance on their parent star, where the star orbits a centre of mass between the two bodies. In our solar system, for example, Jupiter causes the Sun to orbit a point near the solar surface at a speed of 13 metres per second. By measuring these movements, astronomers can determine the characteristics of the planet causing them.

Due to limited precision, exoplanet discoveries have mostly been of large planets that have easily observable effects on their stars, explained Robert Lamontagne, a professor at the Université de Montréal.

“If you were an astronomer in another world [with our current technology], you would not be able to detect Earth,” he said.

The Kepler Telescope will change that, using another technique called differential photometry to detect exoplanets indirectly. Differential photometry allows astronomers to measure the changes in a star’s luminosity. Every time a planet orbits in front of its star, it creates a small, partial eclipse. Kepler detects these changes in luminosity and uses the information to calculate the mass and size of the planet.

The process will take some time, Walker explained, as the planet must complete several transits in front of its star before astronomers can confirm its existence.

“If you were looking to detect Earth, you would need to watch for three years,” Walker said.

Until very recently, the search for exoplanets generated little interest in academic circles. Walker explained that, after several bogus claims in the sixties, there was little appetite in the professional field for exoplanetary research.

“Some people felt that such an undertaking was not even a legitimate part of astronomy,” Walker said.

The Kepler Mission is merely one of several upcoming projects that are looking for exoplanets. For example, the European Space Agency plans to launch the Darwin Spacecraft in 2015 in order to detect and study exoplanets using infrared telescopes. This will allow analysis of the composition of the planet’s atmosphere, which could be an indicator of the presence of carbon-based life.

Three-hundred-and-forty-four exoplanets have been found to date, according to records kept by officials at the Paris Observatory. That number is only expected to increase as new telescopes are deployed in space, and as the technologies used for Earth-based observations progressively improve.

The discovery of an exoplanet capable of harbouring life would mark an enormous achievement in astronomy. Such an observation, Lamontagne remarked, would help determine how likely it is that life has arisen elsewhere in the universe.

“The answer will come within our lifetime,” he said.

The Kepler Mission will cost an estimated $600 million and will monitor approximately 100,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation.

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TAPthirst argues that the production of plastic water bottles has a negative impact on the environment as the raw ingredients required to make them – terephthalic acid and monoethylene glycol – are very toxic. According to the Container Recycling Institute, a non-profit organization involved in the promotion of recycling beverage containers, more than eight out of ten plastic water bottles in the United States end up in a landfill or incinerator. The bottled water industry is also a very waste-intensive one. The Pacific Institute, a non-profit research institute working toward environmental development, estimates that twice as much water is used in production of a bottle of water than is sold in the bottle.

According to TAPthirst McGill, bottled water is 240-10,000 times more expensive than tap water. Bottled water consumers pay $750 for the same amount of water it costs manufacturers $1.38 to produce.

Laura Beach, a second-year Concordia student majoring in geography and anthropology, said that the consumption of bottled water ultimately prevents the declaration of water as a human right.

“Buying bottled water doesn’t seem like a large act, but it does help promote the privatization of water to a certain extent,” argued Beach.

Caytee Lush, U2 Science and Education, expressed her frustration with the stigma associated with tap water, when most bottled water comes from the same source.

“We have this weird culture where you can’t drink or eat anything if it’s not wrapped in plastic,” she said.

Something that galls activists at TAPthirst is that bottled water companies usually take the water from the municipal system. For example, Dasani water in Canada is simply processed Calgary tap water, and Aquafina is sourced from the systems of Vancouver and Mississauga.

Part of the problem in trying to encourage tap water consumption is the image that many people have of leaky, rusty pipes in the municipal water system.

“I know a lot of people who don’t drink tap water because the infrastructure is really old,” said Pawel Porowski, a third-year geography major at Concordia.

Such prejudices against the municipal water system may be unfounded. Material distributed at the workshop pointed out that while bottled water is only subject to random inspection by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, municipal water is monitored closely and constantly.

Porowski added that there are some problems caused by the aging water infrastructure, but those are mainly the result of water losses in the system.

“Up to 40 per cent of water is lost during transportation to leaks,” he explained.

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According to Donderi, the first widely publicized UFO sighting occured in 1947. Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot from Idaho, saw what he later described as “bright, saucer-like objects” flying in the air. Arnold tried to approach the government about the incident, but after failing to find a receptive federal agency, he turned his attention to the local press. After news of this incident was published, reports of UFO sightings became more common.

The task of classifying eyewitness accounts was first dealt with by the U.S. Air Force (USAF), beginning in the late forties. The USAF hired J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer, to consult on Project Blue Book, a systematic study of UFO sightings. Hynek proposed a classification system for the different types of reports. His system divided the accounts into categories such as Daylight Discs, Radar/Visual Reports, or Close Encounters. The Condon report, a USAF-sponsored paper published in 1969, reviewed Project Blue Book data and concluded that there was no scientific knowledge to be gained from the study of UFOs.

After Condon was published, the USAF stopped all official investigations into UFOs. Other world governments, however, have shown less apathy toward the subject. In 1958, the Almirante Saldanha, a Brazilian ship, observed a strange object flying over Trindade Island, in the South Atlantic Ocean. Almiro Baraúna, a submarine photographer onboard, took pictures of the object, which were then analysed exhaustively by the Brazilian Navy’s Aerial Reconnaissance Lab, explained Donderi. “No piece of evidence, like a photograph, is worth anything at all without information about how it was taken,” said Donderi. At the behest of President Juscelino Kubitschek, the navy released an official report on the incident that included the photographic evidence.

As Donderi explained, however, one of the major problems in the study of UFOs is that even if one establishes the reliability of eyewitness accounts to form empirical evidence, there are limits to what can be explained given our current understanding of the universe.

Dr. Albert Bregman, Emeritus Professor from McGill Psychology, for example, remarked during the question period at the end of the lecture that UFOs defy our notions of Newtonian physics.

“If [UFOs] are solid objects, they violate some fundamental physical laws such as momentum,” Bregman said.

Donderi argued that the inability to explain UFO phenomena using current scientific understanding does not necessarily preclude the problem from having a solution.

“Everyone talks about the speed of light being a limiting factor [in interstellar travel], but how long is it [travel to Earth] for them? It’s not about how long we live, but how long they live,” Donderi said.

After the lecture, Tom Gibbs, U0 Political Science, said that he was surprised there were so many scientific considerations in the exploration of UFO sightings.

“What struck me the most was that I had never considered the physics involved in a possible Earth landing. It makes me ponder the foreignness of extraterrestrial biological make-up, and our possible comparatively quaint scientific advancement,” Gibbs said.

Donderi’s third lecture, “Close Encounters,” is on March 18 in room N2/2 of the Stewart Biology Building at 4 pm.

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