UBC Research News Releases

The growth rate of seafood farming worldwide peaked in 1996 according to new UBC research, highlighting the importance of rebuilding wild fish stocks to feed future demand.

If we were to rely only on aquaculture to meet the demand for seafood by 2030, the world’s production would need to grow at three times the current projected rate, the study found.

If space is the final frontier, it’s food that will get us there in good shape, and UBC researchers are making sure that our food will be up to the task.

Dr. John Frostad, an assistant professor in chemical and biological engineering who studies the science of food, leads a team that is creating new ways of encapsulating omega-3 fatty acids so that they can go the distance.

Omega-3 is essential to mental sharpness. Even a couple of days without omega-3 in our diets may dull our brains and have us feeling less than our best. However, our bodies cannot produce it naturally so we must find it in the foods we eat, such as fish, flaxseed, or often by taking supplements.

For the first couple years of his life growing up in Syria, Ebrahim Aldalati was, as he put it, “a regular baby.” He had no health issues and was just like other kids. But by the time he was two, that all changed.

“My family started seeing that my left leg was not working. I could straighten it, but I couldn’t bend it,” recalls Ebrahim.

UBC researchers led by Dr. Patricia Schulte, Dr. Chris Wood and Dr. Colin Brauner are joining forces with community groups to find out if road salt in streams could be harming Pacific salmon. They are investigating the seasonal impact of road salt in more than 20 streams around the Lower Mainland as well as growing baby salmon from eggs in high salt water in the lab.

In this Q&A, Drs. Schulte and Wood discuss how citizen scientists can contribute and how the public can help reduce any potential road salt impact.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 27) is just around the corner so get inspired and join UBC students and faculty this Thursday as they share their work to combat climate change.

Featuring a keynote speech by Severn Cullis Suzuki, executive director of the David Suzuki Foundation, UBC climate researchers will share how their ongoing work contributes to the global struggle for our future in PechaKucha-style, seven-to-12-minute talks at VanDusen gardens, including:

Today, Peter Wall and UBC announced the launch of the Wall Research Awards and Wall Fellowships, which will be supported by the Peter Wall Legacy Fund, for a total of up to $4 million each year.

These Wall Research Awards and Fellowships will be offered to UBC faculty members and students. They will initially focus on research relating to sustainability in the areas of urban development, water, energy, transportation infrastructure, environmental protection of oceans and waterfronts, and resource-intensive industry. A celebration will also accompany the announcement of the awards and fellowships each year.

Too much screen time can slow children’s recovery from concussions, but new research from UBC and the University of Calgary suggests that banning screen time is not the answer.

The researchers looked for links between the self-reported screen time of more than 700 children aged 8-16 in the first 7-10 days following an injury, and symptoms reported by them and their caregivers over the following six months.

September 30 is both Orange Shirt Day and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It is a date to commemorate residential school survivors, intergenerational survivors and those who didn’t return home. It’s also a day to learn about and reflect on the history and ongoing impacts of the Indian residential school system and other colonial policies in Canada.

UBC experts are available to comment.

Brenna Bhandar Associate Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law Email: bhandar@allard.ubc.ca Interview language(s): English

UBC researcher Dr. Feng Jiang has developed a cellulose film that looks like plastic and behaves like plastic—but is biodegradable.

Dr. Jiang’s process breaks down wood fibres (sourced from forest waste) in a solution of cold sodium hydroxide combined with mild mechanical blending. The sodium hydroxide is then recycled. The result is a translucent, strong and water-resistant film.

Other researchers have also developed cellulosic films but the UBC project—funded by the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development—is the first to use small amounts of energy and chemicals in the manufacture.

Special blood vessels may protect whales from pulses in their blood that would damage the brain while swimming, new research has suggested.

Land mammals such as horses experience ‘pulses’ in their blood when galloping, where blood pressures inside the body go up and down on every stride. UBC researchers have suggested for the first time that the same phenomenon occurs in whales when they swim.

Stigma and discrimination associated with substance use, known as substance use stigma, contribute directly to significant harms and barriers to care. Due to widespread negative attitudes towards substance use issues, people are often treated in disrespectful or discriminatory ways in health care settings.

Now a team of researchers at UBC and Western University are offering a suite of tools and strategies to ensure that people who experience substance use stigma can receive better care in the future.

Humanity is set to make a return to the Moon with the Artemis program, in what NASA says is a first step to Mars. So, who gets first dibs?

Dr. Aaron Boley, a professor in UBC’s department of physics and astronomy, discusses the mission’s plans and why we need to sort out access and resource rights before we return to the lunar surface.

There’s a push to have a sustained presence on the Moon by many players, including the United States, China and Russia. One such effort is NASA’s upcoming Artemis 1 launch, a three-part mission that starts with an upcoming unmanned launch and results in returning people to the lunar surface.

A team of University of British Columbia researchers working on developing oral insulin tablets as a replacement for daily insulin injections have made a game-changing discovery.

Researchers have discovered that insulin from the latest version of their oral tablets is absorbed by rats in the same way that injected insulin is.

“These exciting results show that we are on the right track in developing an insulin formulation that will no longer need to be injected before every meal, improving the quality of life, as well as mental health, of more than nine million Type 1 diabetics around the world.” says professor Dr. Anubhav Pratap-Singh (he/him), the principal investigator from the faculty of land and food systems.

As children head back for a fourth school year with COVID-19, many parents are hoping their kids will be able to enjoy a mostly normal school experience. But with new variants circulating and respiratory virus season on the horizon, many also have concerns and questions about what the new school year will look like.

We sat down with Dr. Manish Sadarangani, a pediatrics professor at the UBC faculty of medicine and father of three, who shared his perspective and advice for parents.

A new UBC study highlights that help-seeking behaviours in professional men’s ice-hockey is heavily impacted by cultural and systemic factors.

Katie Crawford, who completed the study as part of her master’s degree in UBC’s school of kinesiology, has always had some insight on the high and low points of the profession. She grew up in a hockey family where her dad was a former coach and brother currently works in the National Hockey League (NHL).

Summer is almost over, but that doesn’t mean mosquitoes aren’t still searching for their next meal—and you might be next.

A new study co-authored by UBC’s Dr. Ben Matthews suggests humans may just be the most sought-after delicacy for the pesky insects. A common type of mosquito, the globally invasive Aedes aegypti, literally sniffs out humans, driving them to bite us even over other animals.

Watch out, Vancouver. The PLUME van is coming soon to a location near you.

An “air pollution lab on wheels,” PLUME will be used to measure concentrations of air pollutants across the city including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ground-level ozone, black carbon, methane, volatile organic compounds, and various sizes of ultrafine particles that can affect air quality.

PLUME, which stands for Portable Laboratory for Understanding Human-Made Emissions was developed by Dr. Naomi Zimmerman, a professor of mechanical engineering who studies air quality and its impacts on health and the environment.

Food recalls could be a thing of the past if artificial intelligence (AI) is utilized in food production, according to a recent study from UBC and the University of Guelph.

The average cost of a food recall due to bacterial or microbial contamination, like E. coli, is US$10 million according to study co-author Dr. Rickey Yada (he/him), a professor and the dean of the UBC faculty of land and food systems.

We spoke with Dr. Yada about how AI can help optimize the current systems used in the food processing industry, and how it can help make our food supply safer.

Researchers at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and BC Cancer have developed a new blood test that provides unprecedented insight into a patient’s cancer make-up, potentially allowing doctors to better select treatment options that will improve patient outcomes.

The technology was outlined in a study published today in Nature.

The popular stereotype that men don’t want support during a breakup, separation or divorce is simply not true, according to a new paper by researchers at the UBC school of nursing.

In reality, many men do seek out help by accessing online resources, coaches and self-help books, or they reach out to friends, family and community-based groups, and some engage professional counsellors.

A transformative experience working with very sick children changed Paul Bucci’s mind about how robots used in human therapy should be designed.

Bucci, a doctoral student in UBC’s department of computer science, researches how robots can be used in therapy to help comfort humans, like PARO, a cute seal pup robot that wiggles and blinks and is used in dementia wards for companionship. After spending time at Canuck Place Children’s Hospice, he says designers of therapeutic robots can take lessons from therapists – and leave the actual therapy up to humans.

The endangered southern resident killer whale population isn’t getting enough to eat, and hasn’t been since 2018, a new UBC study has determined.

The animals have been in an energy deficit, averaged across spring, summer and fall, for six of the last 40 years—meaning the energy they get from food is less than what they expend. Three of those six years came in the most recent years of the study, 2018 to 2020. The average difference in energy is 28,716 calories, or about 17 per cent of the daily required energy for an average adult killer whale, the authors say.

Black people in the U.S. are twice as likely as white people to be coerced into procedures during perinatal and birth care, and to undergo them without their explicit consent, according to a new study by researchers at UBC’s Birth Place Lab and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Pregnant people of other minoritized racial identities also experience pressure from providers at higher rates than white counterparts.

The number of programs and prescribers offering safer supply to reduce risk of overdose increased dramatically in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study looking at services across Canada.

The findings, published this month in the International Journal of Drug Policy, suggest capacity for further rapid scale-up of flexible safer supply prescribing to address the increasing toxic drug supply.

Researchers have mimicked a corn plant’s make-up in the lab to investigate ‘corn smut’, opening the door to finding a cure for the disease. 

Ustilago maydis or ‘corn smut’ is a fungus that presents as soot-like tumors on corn cobs, and can only exist on a host. It costs the United States’ agricultural industry $1 billion annually by disrupting corn seed production.

It’s also considered a delicacy in Mexico. Known as ‘huitlacoche’, it’s prized for its rich, smoky flavour and has been served in dishes since the time of the Aztecs.

Canada ranks third in the world for animal movement between protected areas, finds new UBC research.

Researchers created the first global map of where mammals are most likely to move between protected areas, such as national parks and nature reserves. Lead author Dr. Angela Brennan, a research associate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, says she hopes the data will help countries measure their success at protecting biodiversity over time.

Pretend the COVID-19 pandemic never happened.

People still would have died across Canada, and the number of deaths would have been somewhat predictable based on data from previous years.

Dr. Kimberlyn McGrail, a professor in UBC’s school of population and public health, examined all “excess deaths” across Canadian provinces during the first 19 months of the pandemic, and how many of those were attributed specifically to COVID-19.

Excess deaths are deaths above and beyond what would have been expected under normal circumstances.

The end of plastic pollution—in the oceans, on land and in our air—could be within reach with two UBC ventures working hard on solutions that could make this vision a reality.

“Tonnes of plastic waste pollute our land and oceans,” says Dr. Jordan MacKenzie, co-founder and CEO of Bioform Technologies, a UBC start-up that is working on bringing a completely compostable bioplastic to the market.

“We use the world’s most regenerative materials to create products that sustainably eliminate plastic waste without the green premium.”

Covered in the red dust that sealed its fate, the NASA InSight lander is slowly shutting down, more than 250 million kilometres from home.

With its solar panels now obscured by the red planet’s debris, the four-year-old robot is running out of power. One by one, its instruments are being taken offline: its robotic arm moving into ‘retirement pose’, its seismometer likely to be turned off sometime in June.

Dr. Catherine Johnson (she/her), co-investigator on the InSight science team and professor in the department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences, discusses what the team discovered, what questions are left to answer, and just what will happen to the little lander that could.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) have received $1 million from Canada’s Stem Cell Network to conduct research and a clinical trial for one of the world’s first genetically engineered cell replacement therapies for type 1 diabetes.

The researchers say the study is an important step toward developing a potential functional cure for type 1 diabetes.

The novel investigative treatment, developed by biotechnology companies CRISPR Therapeutics and ViaCyte, is designed to enable type 1 diabetes patients to produce insulin through a small medical implant that contains millions of pancreatic cells derived from CRISPR gene-edited stem cells.

As Canada faces a sixth wave of COVID-19 infections, researchers at the UBC faculty of medicine are urging people who are pregnant to remain vigilant based on data from Canada’s first national, peer-reviewed study on COVID-19 in pregnancy.

The findings, published today in JAMA, show that pregnant people who catch COVID-19 are at greater risk of being hospitalized, being admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) and experiencing an early birth.

University of British Columbia researchers have found a ‘silver bullet’ to kill bacteria and keep them from infecting patients who have medical devices implanted.

The team from UBC and the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute has developed a silver-based coating that can easily be applied to devices such as catheters and stents. Their novel formulation, discovered by screening dozens of chemical components, overcomes the complications of silver that have challenged scientists for years.

You might be surprised to learn how rarely health research accounts for the fact that male and female bodies are different.

Researchers from UBC’s women’s health research cluster and department of psychology have published an analysis of 3,193 neuroscience and psychiatry studies from 2009 and 2019. They found that:

Some elementary school children may be better equipped than others to form cross-racial friendships, new research from UBC’s department of psychology suggests.

The study, just published in Child Development, looked at the relationship between cross-racial friendships and academic and social adjustment among 583 children in Canada and the U.S. at both ends of a recent school year.

We spoke with the study’s lead author, PhD student Hongyuan (Vivian) Qi (she/her), and UBC professor of psychology Dr. Amori Mikami (she/her) about the research, which they conducted with Dr. Julie Sarno Owens of Ohio University.