Funds decline for agriculture

That’s what DotEarth, the New York Times‘ blog on environmental issues, wonders. Andrew Revkin points to declining funding for basic research in key areas like agriculture and energy as a troubling example of how the U.S. fails to promote innovation.

Revkin concludes,

“Societies and economies today are built on advances in technologies and practices in fields like agriculture and energy that were spurred by significant public investment a few decades ago. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the current generation is willing to keep filling the innovation pipeline for successors.”

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Challenge Zone at the Ontario Science Centre

How do you inspire a culture of innovation so that we can make a difference?

Almost forty years ago, in 1969, The Ontario Science Centre and San Francisco’s Exploratorium both threw open their doors to a whole new way of experiencing science. At the time, they were revolutionary. Unlike conventional museums, where everything was under glass and visitors walked quietly among exhibits, these centres encouraged kids and adults to touch, make noise, listen to and interact with what they encountered. Since then, experiential science centres have opened up around the world: 540 science centres are members of the Association of Science-Technology Centers.

World Congress
This year, leaders from these institutions are meeting here in Toronto for the 5th Science Centre World Congress, June 15-19 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, hosted by the Ontario Science Centre.

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Intestinal bacteria, calling your body “home”

You can wash that man right out of your hair, but you can’t scrub your inner elbow free of bacteria. In the forthcoming issue of Genome Research, Julia Segre and colleagues catalog six types of bacteria that thrive in the inner elbow.

Call it biodiversity with an ick factor. The research is part of the NIH Human Microbiome Project, an effort to identify and analyze all the bacterial colonies that call the human body home.

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En-meshing Angels

Mesh was a standing-room-only event this year. The only complaint that I heard around the lunch tables was that it is really, really hard to choose an afternoon session because all the sessions were so good. I chose the angel investing presentation by Austin Hill, a Montreal-based serial entrepreneur and angel investor. One of the highlights of Austin’s talk was a discussion about who angel investors are. And, no, don’t look at the list of the richest people in Canada.

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Get a Web 2.0 clue

These days, it’s becoming ever more important for social change organizations to “have it together” online. The opportunities for outreach and engagement offered by online web tools and services are huge, and success stories abound. Many organizations find themselves with more questions than answers, however. Where is the greatest return for your investment? How can you make the most of the increasingly limited attention spans of your constituents? Do you need to be “techy” to do it right? Twitter, Drupal, Facebook, Ning… ack!

Luckily, Web of Change and MaRS have created the Social Tech Training to help you keep it simple and do it right. Social Tech Training is a unique, hands-on Web 2.0-oriented learning intensive for people working in the social change sector.

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Experience Mars in a whole new way

If you could travel to Mars, would you? Even we at MaRS are interested.

Space jokes and anecdotes about the planet Mars are in circulation here, being our home planet and all. But this is pretty cool. The Science Centre is opening “Facing Mars,” a hands-on, interactive exhibition, on June 9th.

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Medicine 2.0 Map

In part one of our Medicine 2.0 series, we talked about what Medicine 2.0 means. In this interview, Dr. Gunther Eysenbach, Senior Scientist at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, talks about why Medicine 2.0 is so important and what factors make it relevant and pertinent to scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs.

Read on for the second in the Medicine 2.0 series of interviews with Dr. Eysenbach.

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Inky with the latest CIX Award

Some very interesting companies could be found among the presenters at the Canadian Innovation Exchange event this week. It was great to see a range of companies hitting the stage. They included brand new players such as Sandy Ward, founder of local search startup Homezilla and the always colourful, angel investor and company builder Mark Dowd of Brainpark. Mark is building a peer to peer collaboration platform to tackle the very big and lucrative problem of managing knowledge within the enterprise. CIX also had a share of more established, venture-backed players such as Butch Langlois who presented the online travel site PlanetEye and Ron McKenzie, CEO of the online collaboration platform Octopz, a MaRS tenant.

Among many solid and “entertaining” presentations at CIX, Ron McKenzie and the Octopz team stood out as the choice of attendees when the votes were tabulated. They took home top honours for the best presenting company at the event. This win follows on the heels of the amazing debut of Octopz’s latest software at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week where over 10000 attendees packed the Moscone Centre to see the latest stuff.

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Prestigious award funds innovation

On Tuesday evening, the research and innovation community came to the MaRS Centre to celebrate the 2008 Premier’s Innovation Awards — three prestigious awards programs that support and promote ideas and discoveries that build on Ontario’s innovation strengths. The Premier’s Innovation Awards include the Premier’s Catalyst, Discovery and Summit Awards. The Premier’s Summit Award program is administered by MaRS on behalf of the Province.

Premier Dalton McGuinty and Minister of Research and Innovation John Wilkinson joined MaRS Board Chair John Evans and our CEO, Ilse Treurnicht to celebrate some of the best and brightest minds in Ontario’s research and innovation community.

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Blindness

In the world’s first clinical trial of the treatment, gene therapy restored sight within six months to people affected by a severe, inherited form of blindness which begins at birth and has no effective treatment.

Teams in the US and Britain were able to restore vision to four young people with Leber’s congenital amaurosis, a group of recessively inherited forms of blindness that gradually destroys the retina and leaves patients completely blind by their late 20’s. Caused by the mutation by several genes, including RPE65, surgeons from University College London (UCL) and Moorfields Eye Hospital injected a harmless virus containing a healthy copy of the RPE65 gene under each patient’s retina. The virus then ferried the healthy gene into nearby cells, which then began working normally.

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