Abstract: The Future of Science

Welcome back. Here's Chapter 2 , so get ready to hear the words "potential", "ion channel" and "potassium" repeated a great many times. If you think you would benefit from a rap song like this for all of the chapters, please send me an email at abstractcast@gmail.com so I can gauge interest. If I hear from enough of you then I will gladly write the rest, however, if this doesn't appeal to a large...

As humans change the way we interact with animals and the environment, we are faced with increasingly common spillover events of infectious disease from animal to human. These events have led to human outbreaks of Tuberculosis, Influenza, Ebola, COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS, among others. As there is no way of knowing what the next big outbreak will be, new platforms are needed to quickly develop customi...

And we're back with Part 2 of 2 with Owen Dunkley. This time we've got an alliterative bonus episode covering COVID, CRISPR and COVID! Here are some of the subtopics we hit on within each: CANCER : Mutations, somatic vs. germ-line cells, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, personalized medicine and the future of drug therapy.  CRISPR : Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, t...

Our guest this week is Lani Cupo, a multifaceted and tempestuous PhD student in Neuroscience. In this episode we discuss the seduction of the cognitive sciences, the integrated program in neuroscience offered through the Montreal Neurological Institute, the effect of perspective-taking on the perception of Native American art using priming, quantitative and qualitative analysis, the suppression of...

Dear McGill PSYC 211 students, I graduated from McGill in Cognitive Science back in 2018. I am volunteering some time this semester to create a rap album that accompanies your course material this fall: here's the first chapter! This course changed the way I thought about science and the world at large; you will get out of this course exatly what you put it, so pay attention and enjoy the process....

Our guest this week is dedicated and cooperative PhD candidate Nadine Bekkouche, studying the structures and processes of graduate education. We cover a plethora of topics of the show this week including, but not limited to: the limitations on human linguistic abilities, two consciousness-changing insights having to do with learning, the importance of a nurturing supervisor (especially at the begi...

Our guest this week is fun-loving, energetic and tenacious Phd student Daniella Marx. Daniella is working towards her degree in Biomedical Engineering at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario. We take a deep dive into the nature of bone and what makes it solid, building bone tissue in a petri dish, bioactive bone cements and their biological effects and applications, the cutting edge in implant t...

Our guest this is week is none other than expert listener and pattern-seeking PhD candidate William Scott Thompson . Will is interested in understanding recurring motifs in the brain, rather than its specific functions. He is currently working in a lab at a research institute in Sweden, contributing to the longterm multinational goal of mapping the human brain! On today's episode we discuss the Hu...

On this week's episode I sit down with ambitious, caring and creative postdoc Ryan Persram. We discuss the nature of sibling conflict, the general and three specific sub-types of trust, tools for conflict mediation, the importance of promoting positive interactions with other people, empathy, collaboration, friendships, family dynamics, nesting, identify development and we close it out with a deep...

Our guest this week is self-professed "fairly laid back" PhD student Eitan Bulka. He is rapidly approaching the end of his PhD at McGill University, where he has spent over half a decade developing a breadth and depth of knowledge in robotics -- and he shares that with us in an hour of blissful pedagogy! We talk about how airplanes generate lift, the benefit of a high thrust to weight ratio, the k...

Our guest this week is PhD candidate, professional procrastinator and aerospace industry expert Andrea Cartile! In a nutshell, she does stuff with airplanes, but more specifically she optimizes communication in the domain of aircraft modification. Her research lies in information management, and she seeks to answer questions like "how do you take an existing airplane and make changes to it?" and "...

Our guest this week is the ever optimistic Austin Trudeau, the man who inspired this very podcast. He is our second graduate student business owner after Shauna (Ep. 4), and he has been studying emotional decision-making in a marketing context. His focus is on the phenomenon of delayed discounting -- which he breaks down for us in great detail -- and the effects of sexual imagery on people's spend...

Our guest today is the curious Mr. Alex Pace, a recent Master's graduate from Concordia University's Environmental Geography program. He's been studying the history of climate through the analysis of tree-rings in Quebec. We run the gamut on the climate crisis,  outlining its 5 main components: climate science, impacts on humans, impacts on nature, individual solutions and systems solutions....

This week we're treated to the likes of Jacob Buckman,  a PhD canditate researching Reinforcement Learning in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. We begin by defining AI: a relatively new phenomenon with the primary goal of automating specific tasks. Where the industrial revolution lightened the load of physical labor for humans, some people believe AI will soon take over the more burdenso...

As a master's student, Michael became a full-time virtual-reality entrepreneur. Solving the problem of engagement on three different levels. In virtuality, immersion is everything, and Michael worked to take immersion to the next level with his Cross-Platform Asymmetric Virtual Reality Communication Game. It's not just another game: it's innovative, pushing VR forward and even introducing a perfor...

Alexandra is a quirky, curious, ambitious, and high-energy Master's student at Concordia University. Groundbreaking research is happening everywhere all the time, and Alexandra's lab is no exception. She's studying the role of dopamine in learning using optogenetics - or the manipulation of genes using light! On today's episode we discuss everything from neutransmitters to models of Pavlovian cond...

Our guest today is a passionately curious hobbyist and the first of hopefully many graduate-researcher-business-owner guests we'll have on the podcast. She is studying how stress and anxiety can affect decision-making skills in the world of sport and how to reduce injury risk in your athletes through mindfulness and meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, and imagery! Oh yeah, and you should all...

In this episode, Eliza Dutemple weaves together a rich and coherent picture of the three predominant theories of Theory of Mind (ToM), aka. the ability to assess others' thoughts. Follow us down the ToM rabbit hole, and learn about Change Blindness, Violation of Expectation, and staying organized, in and out of academia! Reach out to Eliza on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DutempleEliza

Sean just finished his Master's degree in Psychology, where his research focus was on the role of individual differences in decision making. On today's episode, we discuss the Practicality Crisis in academia; Ego Depletion and self-control; cognitive effort and the Effort Paradox; what your pupils tell us about how hard you're thinking; and the importance of making daily progress towards your goal...

Alexandra Chisholm is a Ph. D. Candidate in Experimental Psychology at Concordia University. Her research explores the neural mechanisms involved in heroin seeking and relapse using a new technology that uses receptors designed to be exclusively activated by designer drugs. What happens in the brain that affects drug seeking behavior? Lets find out! Want To Improve Your Academic Writing For Free?...

Here on Abstract we're translating months and years of graduate research and reading into 40 minutes of accessible knowledge. New episodes are released every Sunday on a brand new topic, with a brand new guest! If you're a graduate student and interested in talking about your research in a way that's accessible to listeners from all backgrounds, drop us a line at abstractcast@gmail.com. If you lik...