Last month, I told you about an AI program that can predict protein shapes. Just like the letters that make up a word, the amino acid chain makes up a protein, and the 3D shape it forms determine what a protein does in the body. If one of the amino acids changes, the shape changes…
Our bodies hold a mystery at the molecular level: how do the chains of amino acids that make up all our proteins fold into 3D shapes? When your body uses proteins, it does not read them from one end of the chain to another (like it does for DNA, or like we do when we…
LETTER TO THE EDITOR “Tam’s call to faith leaders (CC Jan. 25) to do her work is a bit of a stretch for me. How do these faith leaders know that Tam is correct in her guidance? How do I know she is correct?The role of Christian faith leaders is to promote the Kingdom of Christ…
In Genesis, one of the first things God says about humans before the Fall is “it is not good that the man should be alone” (2:18). We are alone in many ways right now. Ten months into this pandemic, in the midst of a long winter, many of us are feeling the effects of social…
From June 29 to July 2 this year, the American Astronomical Society held a virtual conference on satellite constellations’ impact on optical astronomy. The scientists were concerned that satellite deployment, particularly bright satellites in low-Earth orbit, will prevent us from collecting meaningful optical data from the stars. I grew up in Montreal and never realized…
In 2017, Alvin Plantinga, a Christian Reformed philosopher, received the Templeton Prize for his arguments that belief in God can be defended with legitimacy in today’s scientific world. We celebrated this event widely in our circles. This year the Templeton Prize was awarded to Dr. Francis Collins, the current head of the National Institutes of…
In a recent column (“Anti-Vax Reversal?,” June 8), I ended with the hope that a vaccine for COVID-19 might be developed quickly. Scientists are working on many possible vaccines in an amazing time frame. Our government has partnered with multiple companies to make a vaccine available for Canadians, and the Americans have implemented “Operation Warp…
Teachers lie. It happens more often than you’d think. We don’t want to do it. It’s just that telling the truth is hard. We lie for a few reasons. First, we may not know the complete story. Often, as an individual or a scientific community, we just don’t fully know how something works. It’s hard to teach half-truths, and so we massage the story to make it complete.
Most of us acquire our science from others either through classes and textbooks or on TV shows We learn about facts that are generally accepted by the scientific community. Then these facts are integrated into theories that explain our world within some overarching framework. This static textbook view of science may include the histories of current theories and the explanations they replaced, but the information is presented as final, accepted truth.
We are in the middle of a pandemic, and many things have changed. One change is that public events are no longer happening. Gatherings and activities that increase contact among people are shut down, and that means some health initiatives have been shut down too. I have talked before about the efforts to eradicate various diseases that have long been scourges of humanity.
At the beginning of the Bible, God asks man to name all the animals. As a child, I had visions of the mammals I knew lining up and being given a name by Adam. This task continues today as scientists discover new forms of life – not just plants and animals but many more levels of complexity. We are living through one of these complexities right now, involving a small entity called a virus (SARS-CoV-2) that has upended all our lives with the COVID-19 disease.
I write this in late March, and we are two weeks from the end of classes for the term, followed by exams in April. On Friday the 13th of March, the university I work at, and most Canadian universities, canceled all live, in-person classes. At Laurier, we canceled classes for a week, and we were asked to develop an online plan for going forward. No face-to-face contact or meetings were permitted, but students had to complete their term with academic integrity and meet all the learning objectives in the course. This online process could take different formats depending on the nature of each course.
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