Walking on time

Perito Moreno Glacier is one of those places where you can fully contemplate nature. While walking on the ice, one of the guides asked Felipe Almeida, "You do get that we are walking on time, right?". That struck him right away because, until that moment, he hadn’t stopped to think that some of deeper layers of the glacier are from many different ice ages long ago. What was life like back then? What animals were there? So many questions. Nature is indeed amazing.

Jury Prize

Calla lilies from a chemical garden

The flowers in this bouquet bear a remarkable resemblance to calla lilies. However, they are sub-millimeter-sized barium carbonate crystals. These microstructures require barium chloride “seeds” and sodium silicate to form. The addition of carbon dioxide into the solution causes the precipitation and spontaneous assembly of barium carbonate and silica (a major component of sand), resulting in the flower-like structures. This class of self-assembled microstructures represents the promise of one day being able to recreate bioinspired materials with the same control and perfection as is done by nature.

Jury Prize

Deep sea endeavours

An octopus (of the species Graneledone boreopacifica) is captured hovering over a lightly sedimented and fractured basalt lava flow 2,100 metres below sea level. This image was taken by members of a scientific research cruise aboard the Canadian Coast Guard Ship (CCGS) John P. Tully in 2016. The purpose of the cruise was to study the Endeavour hydrothermal vent fields and associated biological communities along the Juan de Fuca mid-ocean ridge, 300 kilometres off the west coast of British Columbia, within Canada’s first Marine Protected Area.

Jury Prize

Consequences of a changing Arctic Ocean

The Arctic atmosphere is warming more than twice as fast as the global rate. As a result, surface waters are also warming, and sea ice is retreating and freshening. This is due to increased water from melting sea ice and runoff from rivers. These changes are having profound effects on Arctic marine ecosystems, including shifts in nutrient availability, primary productivity, and microbial community composition. Knowledge of the structure and function of marine microbial communities is critical to assess and predict the consequences of a warmer, fresher Arctic ocean. Climate change monitoring programs, such as the Joint Ocean Ice Studies led by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, have documented large-scale changes in the Arctic Ocean through research missions conducted on Canada’s largest ice-breaker, the Canadian Coast Guard Ship (CCGS) Louis S. St-Laurent.

People’s Choice Award

Pollution-Busting Gut

Daphnia pulex is a tiny freshwater crustacean found in most of our lakes and rivers. This one has just ingested a population of Escherichia coli bacteria previously dyed with a blue fluorochrome. Researchers are looking at whether this water flea might be a dependable ally in the large-scale decontamination of waterways.

Jury Prize

Keeping an Eye on Corrosion

The inside of copper water pipes is coated with corrosion plaque. The iridescent copper oxide forms deposits on the walls of pipes when it comes into contact with water. The pupil of the “snake eye” shown here is actually the epicentre of a surface flaw. In spite of its frightening look, it poses no danger to health…

Jury Prize

Migration of Minerals

How do you locate a mineral deposit buried under thick layers of sediment using just one grain of sand? By observing its colour and analyzing its chemical composition. Each deposit is associated with “indicator” minerals, such as this grain of epidote found in glacial sediment. Follow the trail to large veins.

Jury Prize

Dazzling Galaxy

At the centre of the Perseus Cluster reigns the spectacular NGC 1275 galaxy, home to a supermassive black hole that is responsible for emitting powerful jets of particulates (shown in pink). Ejected far beyond the galaxy, it is thought that these particulates maintain the incredibly high temperature (60 million degrees Celsius) of the gases spread across the galaxies (in blue).

People’s Choice Award

Don’t bite off more than you can chew!

An American White Pelican captures a large fish while foraging in a southern Saskatchewan creek in the early spring. In many places throughout the world, birds and humans are in conflict over habitat and fisheries resources. The American White Pelican is a conservation success story, having recovered from a Canadian status of Threatened in the late 1980s. Pelicans and their distant cousins, cormorants, are often hated and persecuted because they eat fish. Christopher Somers’ research program uses a number of approaches to determine what resources these birds need, in terms of space and food, and how these relate to human needs.

Emerging structures in a liquid–solid tug-of-war

Water striders standing on the surface of water, hairs clumping together when wet, dew droplets clinging to a spider’s web — these are just a few examples of thin fibres interacting with the surface tension of a liquid. To better understand these interactions, an experiment was performed in which fibres thinner than a human hair were placed in contact with liquid droplets. After a tug-of-war between the fibre and the liquid, researchers observed the droplet spontaneously winding the fibre, generating tight coils that wrapped around the droplet. This unexpected result reminds us that, from seemingly simple ingredients, nature generates complex phenomena and beautiful structures.

In Flanders Fields

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have many remarkable properties, including strength 100 times that of stainless steel, the ability to carry a sustained current over 1 million times that of copper wires, and an aspect ratio as high as 100 million. This photograph shows the top of a vertically aligned array of CNTs made with a process called chemical vapour deposition. Using this technique, the researchers can study ways of achieving higher yield and greater consistency in terms of alignment, purity and atomic arrangement of CNTs. Slight variations in the chemical vapour deposition process can lead to interesting features, such as this effect resembling a poppy, shown in the photo.

It’s not easy being yellow

The male neotropical yellow toad isn’t normally this colourful. Once a year, as the first rains fall in Costa Rica and transform dry streambeds into temporary pools, these toads make a stunning colour change from drab brown to lemon yellow as they gather en masse at the water’s edge to mate. The male toads fight among each other to latch themselves onto the backs of females so that they’re prepared to fertilize her eggs as she lays them. In only a few hours, after he’s finished fertilizing her eggs, he will transform back to his normal dull colour until the rains return next year. Currently, it is unknown how or why this species has adapted this trait. At the University of Windsor, through hormone analysis and reflectance spectrometry, researchers are working to determine the cause of this drastic colour change.

Magnification — zooming in on the cerebellum

Peering into the brain, and seeing the tiny wires that form within, one is struck by its beauty and organization. The golden sun-like network in this image represent bundles of axons of cerebellar Purkinje neurons, which propagate motor information to the rest of the body. The axons converge together here, in preparation for the divergent paths they will eventually undertake. Like the sun, the central branches are surrounded by radiating neurons of various types, guided and supported by the ‘gravity’ of the Purkinje cells. Together, the balanced organization of the cerebellar circuit fine-tunes our every movement, from speech to coordination. In an age of space exploration and of thinking BIG, small things are easily forgotten. That is, until you start zooming in, and see the beauty that is already within.

Microscopic neuron navigator

Many neurons face the challenge of having to reach across distances thousands of times their own size during development, such as when motor neurons in the spinal cord extend nerves to specific muscles. They accomplish this by producing special hand-like structures, called growth cones, at the tips of their axons (the purple “cables” that carry information). These growth cones extend little appendages (in green) to sniff and poke around their environment and find chemical trails laid down by the body to guide them to their distant targets. This image displays a bundle of axons from rat embryo motor neurons spreading out their growth cones to search for guidance. Through this research, we can better understand how the hundreds of billions of neurons in our nervous system connect and form the complex networks we need to function.

Modelling blood vessels

Endothelial cells line the inside of blood vessels in the human body. These cells are in direct contact with blood and alter their behaviour and shape based on interactions with other cells and changes in blood flow. In this image, endothelial cells coat a fabricated channel with a cross-section the approximate width of a human hair. Eleanor Gerson’s research involves developing fabricated channels of different sizes and shapes to develop more accurate microfluidic systems for modelling blood vessels. This provides useful ways to study drug interactions and characterize various vascular diseases.

Ordered fluids for technology

Liquid crystalline (LC) phases combine crystal-like order and liquid-like fluidity, creating materials with unique properties that have been exploited in devices such as your phone, TV, or laptop computer. LCs have also been explored as semiconductors for use in organic solar cells or thin-film transistors. The picture above is a polarized optical microscopy image of an LC material prepared as part of David Ester’s PhD research at Simon Fraser University. The observed “textures” give insight into the arrangement of molecules within the material. This particular focal-conic fan-shaped texture consists of layers of hexagonally packed molecules, the kind of highly ordered LC phases that are being targeted for high-performance organic semiconductors.

Progenitor male germ cells

Gonocytes are cells that are progenitors of stem cells found in the testicles of newborns. This image shows different gonocytes (coloured cells) after two weeks in culture, interacting with testis cells (grey cells in the background). Gonocytes possess various types of leaf-like, finger-like and membrane bleb extensions to help them migrate and communicate. In the developing testis, migrating gonocytes move from the centre to the periphery of the seminiferous tubules, where they become spermatogonial stem cells and produce countless numbers of sperm throughout adulthood. Research on gonocytes will provide valuable insight into their role in preserving male fertility.

Storms on giant planets

Researchers in geophysical fluid dynamics at Memorial University of Newfoundland are modelling convective storms observed by spacecraft near Jupiter and Saturn. A cylindrical tank containing water is placed on a rotating table to simulate a planet’s rotation while the curved surface of the rotating water models the spherical form of a planet near its north pole. Storms are generated by heating the bottom of the tank and observed from above with a system that uses the water surface as a mirror of a Newtonian telescope to amplify small perturbations caused by the flow. Different colours show the “topographic map” of the surface, where elevations are just a fraction of millimetre. These experiments allow researchers to understand the dynamics of the storms on large planets.

A “berry” enlightening experiment

Powerful flashes of white light can be used to eliminate microorganisms that cause berries to rot. Since light absorbed by berries leads to a small increase in temperature, an easy way to monitor the dose of light is by using an infrared camera. This method allows a quick visual check for even exposure by detecting slight temperature variations among the berries. In this picture, berries were treated with different doses of light on purpose, to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept.

Beauty from the inside out

This photograph shows a cross-section of the internal skeleton of the deep-water sea pen Umbellula encrinus, a type of cold-water coral. Growth rings can be seen in its skeleton, like those seen in clams, other corals, and trees. Ring formation in these animals is not yet well understood, but it seems likely that the rings are formed annually.