Alberta government investing $100M to renovate U of A sciences building
Social Sharing
The provincial government is investing $100 million to renovate the decades-old Biological Sciences Building at the University of Alberta.
The announcement was made jointly by provincial and university officials at the U of A's Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science on Monday.
"For more than 50 years, this critical branch of science education has operated out of the Biological Sciences Building, which has become a landmark at the University of Alberta's North Campus," said Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney.
"But the building has never received any major renovations and is long overdue."
According to the province, the building has not had any major upgrades since its construction in 1969.
The funding will include major retrofitting and updating of complex utilities, controlled environments and advanced safety features.
Renovations will take place on levels 4, 5, 10 and 11 within the zoology wing to transform the space into a wet laboratory space.
The building will be renamed the Life Sciences Innovation and Future Technologies Centre — the LIFT Centre.
When construction is complete, it is expected to have 3,200 lab spaces, up from the current 1,600.
The project will add seats and increase capacity, allowing for nearly 2,500 new domestic students to enter undergraduate programs in the faculty of science.
In addition nearly 700 new domestic graduate students will be able to enter master's programs in the faculty of science and the faculty of agriculture, life and environmental sciences.
"The Biological Sciences Building has been a hub of innovation and discovery for over 50 years, but time is taking its toll," said university president Bill Flanagan.
"This much-needed redevelopment of the building has been a top capital priority of the University of Alberta since 2022."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Calgary Herald
29-05-2025
- Calgary Herald
Parker: Calgary's Cvictus sourcing coal for sustainable livestock feed
Article content Calgary-based Cvictus, a clean energy and biotech startup, is poised to transform the way the world's livestock is fed by providing a low-cost, low-carbon, sustainable alternative to fish or soybean meal — and it's doing it by tapping into an abundant resource: coal. Article content No, it's not digging it up. Cvictus is revitalizing a pioneering method of extracting beneficial gases to produce feedstocks such as methanol, from coal found deep within the earth's surface without mining. Article content Article content 'We have giant dreams and expectations for where this technology will go, but as a startup we can't feasibly employ the resources required to scale,' says Katrina Stewart, Cvictus director, biotechnology and carbon reduction. 'Academic researchers provide the innovation, expertise and drive we need to help move the needle forward on this exciting technology.' Article content Brought up in Calgary, Stewart earned her chemical engineering degree at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., before expanding her sciences understanding by spending a year in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she enjoyed studying for her Masters in Brewing and Distilling. Article content Article content Back home in Calgary she is converting that same drive in working with Mitacs-supported researchers to help Cvictus advance two separate, yet integrated projects. Article content On the clean energy side, they're contributing to commercialization of the company's large-scale hydrogen recovery platform at a cutting-edge facility near Red Deer. Hydrogen is produced from deep within a coal seam using patented technology that successfully sequesters carbon at the same time. Article content On the biotech side, Cvictus is tapping into cutting edge expertise at University of Alberta's Biorefining Conversions and Fermentation Laboratory under the supervision of professor David Bressler, and in consultation with experts who worked on the original technology.
CTV News
29-05-2025
- CTV News
Chubby cheeks? How a local paleontology student discovered a new muscle in dino jaws
Research by University of Alberta student Henry Sharpe shows dinosaurs may have had chubby cheek muscles. CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson has the details. Research by University of Alberta student Henry Sharpe shows dinosaurs may have had chubby cheek muscles. CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson has the details. Dinosaurs may have had chubby cheeks instead of horns, new research shows Our understanding of how dinosaurs looked and lived is evolving thanks to a recent discovery by a University of Alberta grad student. Paleontology master's student Henry Sharpe has found a new jaw muscle that could help complete the picture of how dinosaurs dined. Sharpe said he was working on his undergrad when something jumped out at him while studying a duck-billed dinosaur from Drumheller named Gary. 'I was looking at the cheekbone,' Sharpe said. 'And I was just thinking, 'This doesn't look right. There's this big kind of triangle coming down from it. There shouldn't be anything there.' 'It almost looks like a muscle attachment.' Henry Sharpe dinosaur muscle Henry Sharpe points to a triangular structure on a dinosaur skull. This particular shape led him to the discovery of a new jaw muscle many dinosaurs appear to have had. (Jeremy Thompson/CTV News Edmonton) Sharpe explained that, normally, in an animal without a cheek muscle, there is a straight line from the jawbone to the back of the skull. Gary's skull, with a flange on the jaw, got him thinking. But, because whole dino heads are rare, he had to scale down to start investigating. 'Thankfully, most of what we find are isolated bones,' Sharpe said. 'So I just took isolated cheek bones and isolated jaw bones … cutting them open to see if I could find any evidence in the internal structure of the bone.' Muscles and tendons are soft tissue, meaning they would have been long gone a long, long time ago. However, Sharpe said, they leave enough of a mark to see millions of years later in large animals like dinosaurs. 'Connective tissues, like muscles and ligaments, will insert fibres, collagen fibres, into the bone itself,' he said. 'When the muscle degrades and all that stuff falls away … the fibres will still be in the bone.' Dinosaur bone muscle Connective tissue, like muscles, leave fibres inside bone that can be seen millions of years later under a microscope. (Jeremy Thompson/CTV News Edmonton) Sharpe said the more he looked at similarly shaped jaw bones, the more he found the fibre marks. When he shared his research with other paleontologists, they started finding the same thing. 'We brought all our findings together, we mapped it out in the dinosaur family tree, and we just found it was the same everywhere,' he added. 'It was a bit of a 'eureka' moment.' The discovery, Sharpe said, helps better understand how dinosaurs ate and calls into question the long-standing practice of modeling dino musculature after their closest living relatives. 'It's supposed to be you only reconstruct a muscle in dinosaurs if it's present in birds and present in crocodiles,' Sharpe said. 'We've provided an example of the traditional way of doing it, maybe not being so accurate, and we need to be a little bit more creative in how we go about reconstructing these things, because it has implications for not only what they looked like, but how they were going about chewing.' Dinosaur cheek muscle This rendering by University of Alberta paleontology student Henry Sharpe shows a previously undiscovered jaw muscle detailed in new research. (Supplied) Sharpe and his peers had their findings published in a scientific journal. While it's a big breakthrough, the cheek muscle is more a passion project for Sharpe as he works on his master's thesis on underwater reptiles. He hopes the research inspires more paleontologists to follow up on the findings – and perhaps consider there could be other similar discoveries ready to be found in dino remains. 'We want to make sure we're not missing anything because we're trying to be too restrictive with how we reconstruct (musculature and ligaments),' he said. 'We have to be more creative. 'We have to start looking at the bones first, and our modern relatives maybe second, because it's the bones that tell us the stories.' With files from CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson
CBC
20-05-2025
- CBC
How safe is it to ride an e-scooter in Edmonton?
Social Sharing The trees are budding, flowers are blooming, the geese are back: it's e-scooter season in Edmonton. But just how safe is it to ride one in Edmonton? A recently published study looked at how many people visited an emergency room in Edmonton for e-scooter injuries, over summers of 2019 to 2021. It found nearly 760 cases. Dr. Brian Rowe, who was part of the study and is an emergency room physician at the University of Alberta Hospital, said he wanted to see if the anecdotal rise in e-scooter injuries he was seeing could be backed up with data. "One in eight is a head injury," Rowe told CBC News. "We need to continue to publicize the fact that riding a bike, an e-bike, an e-scooter has the potential to leave you with life-long injuries to your head — and the simplest preventive strategy is to wear a helmet." WATCH | E-scooters in Edmonton: Edmonton e-scooters have sent hundreds to emergency rooms 20 hours ago Duration 2:57 The median age of those injured was 28 years old, the study found. Men and women were almost equally represented in patients. About three in five patients suffered multiple injuries, with fractures (32 per cent) and head injuries (17 per cent) being the most common, the study found. Few people (two per cent) wore helmets and roughly one-quarter of those injured had ridden while under the influence of substances, the study says. Adam Zarycki has injured himself on e-scooters more than once. His first wipeout resulted in, what the doctor described as, a "catastrophic" ankle sprain, he said. It happened after he'd been drinking, Zarycki said, and he hasn't ridden an e-scooter after having alcohol since. His second injury happened after an anti-theft mechanism kicked in on the scooter while he rode south of Whyte Avenue, he said. "It sent me over the handlebars. And unfortunately, my fall was bad enough that I bruised the femur on my right leg," Zarycki said. The numbers from the study are not at all surprising for Zarycki. He said he knows a few clients from his work on Whyte Avenue who have suffered bad injuries from e-scooters, particular near the High Level Bridge. "The walkways, the roadways get a little tighter. Definitely some crashes and bad injuries, for sure," he said. Zarycki has kept riding, though. He said now he travel a little slower and tries to be considerate of others using the road. He urged people to not ride with overconfidence. "You see a lot of folks zipping around cars, ignoring stop signs, areas where there aren't any restrictions on the scooter's use. Scooter users tend to disregard pedestrians and then they end up crashing and/or injuring somebody else," he said. Coun. Andrew Knack, who was a proponent of getting e-scooters to come to Edmonton, said the necessary safety infrastructure is there, but people need to be more safe in their behaviour. "[E-scooters] can cause injuries and we want people to be safe on them, but it's ultimately their choice of how safe they want to be," Knack said. "I cannot recommend enough that everyone — doesn't matter your age — should be putting on a helmet, should be taking those turns safely, should be ringing the bell when you're passing somebody." For Rowe, the emergency room doctor, a solution lies in more public education, and potential legislation on helmet use.
