University of Toronto

In an effort to improve conditions for the more than 2.5 billion people worldwide with no access to safe sanitation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last year awarded grants totaling US$3 million to eight universities to reinvent the toilet. At the two-day “Reinventing the Toilet” fair held in Seattle this week, where Bill Gates was on hand with 50 gallons (189 l) of fake feces made from soybeans and rice to put the various designs through their paces, a California Institute of Technology (Caltech) team claimed first place for their solar-powered toilet.  Read More

Tissue engineering is definitely an exciting field – the ability to create living biological tissue in a lab could allow scientists to do things such as testing new drugs without the need for human subjects, or even to create patient-specific replacement organs or other body parts. While some previous efforts have yielded finished products that were very small, a microfluidic device being developed at the University of Toronto can reportedly produce sections of precisely-engineered tissue that measure within the centimeters.  Read More

Advancing solar technology is a trade-off between the efficiency of the cells themselves and the cost of producing and installing them. Quantum dot solar cells, which use nanoscale semiconductors to produce electricity, promise low-cost production and, because they can be sprayed or painted on, big benefits in terms of installation. In the efficiency stakes quantum cells don't score as well as silicon-based or CIGS solar cells, but a new efficiency record for colloidal quantum dot solar cells represents a big step towards narrowing the gap. This breakthrough isn't about the quantum dots though, it's about the wrapping.  Read More

A team of researchers from the University of Toronto has developed a new technique to produce OLED devices that they say will accelerate the adoption of OLED technology into mainstream flat-panel displays and other lighting technologies. The process involves engineering a one-atom thick sheet of chlorine onto the surface of an indium tin oxide (ITO) material, which is used as a standard electrode material in today’s flat panel displays. The end result is an OLED device that is not only more efficient, but also simpler and cheaper to produce.  Read More

A team of radiologists and retired US Navy sonar experts have used technology developed for submarines as the basis for a new device which offers quick detection, diagnosis and monitoring of stroke. Combined with a portable laptop based console, the head-worn device enables different types of stroke and brain injury to be discovered and located, differentiating normal blood flow from life threatening conditions and delivering an initial diagnosis in under a couple of minutes.  Read More

In one of the clearest demonstrations yet of the interplay of power, success and historical gender roles, a university study has demonstrated that Oscar winners in the Best Actress category are at a higher risk of divorce than nominees who do not win. A long line of best actress winners including Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Halle Berry and Kate Winslet experienced marriage breakdowns not long after taking home their awards. By contrast, Best Actor winners do not experience an increase in the risk of divorce after an Oscar.  Read More

Physicists from the University of Toronto and Rutgers University studying the effects of mixing two reactive chemicals have discovered a new phenomena which mimics the explosion of a type of supernova in miniature. The observation centers around two reactants which create a self-sustaining vortex ring without any external forces or additional catalysts. These kinds of reactions are occurring around us all the time in the atmosphere and oceans as well as stars, but this effect has never been seen and this new ability to study it will help further our understanding of the evolution of the universe.  Read More

Ornithopters, aircraft that fly by flapping their wings, are a staple at birdman rallies the world over, inevitably resulting in the pilots of such craft plunging headlong into the drink. Now, more than 500 years after Leonardo da Vinci sketched the first human-powered ornithopter in 1485, a team from the University of Toronto have succeeded where so many before them have failed and made aviation history by achieving a world record for sustained flight in a human-powered aircraft with flapping wings.  Read More

Imagine viewing concert footage where the foreground vocalist is in the same sharp focus as the background musicians. With the simultaneous, real-time, near and far field focus capabilities offered by the Omni-focus video camera developed by Professor Keigo Iizuka, such a thing may not be too far off. Using a new distance mapping principle, an array of video cameras and some clever software the technique brings objects at varying distances into high resolution sharp focus.  Read More