Category: public posts

First-generation immigrants face numerous challenges when adapting to new cultures: language barriers, discrimination, invalid credential recognition, and growing mental health concerns. While some of these challenges may be temporary, a long-term issue that remains unresolved within the immigrant population is the growing prevalence of allergic diseases (Lombardi, Passalaqua, and Walter Canonica 2009).  Surprisingly, a potential…

Humans are constantly learning new information whether it be from school or just day-to-day life. Even before leaving the house in the morning, many will consume information on the time, the weather, traffic reports, recent news and other daily details. Between the constant exposure to new information and the conscious efforts many individuals make to…

The lives of infants consist predominantly of eating, sleeping, and playing. While eating and sleeping are physiological necessities, playing games is essential for a child’s social and physical development. The importance of play as a foundational need is underscored by its inclusion as a right of every child by the United Nations High Commission for…

The Canadian Association of the Deaf reports that there are 357,000 culturally Deaf Canadians and 3.21 million hard of hearing Canadians, many of whom rely on American Sign Language (ASL) for communication (Canadian Association of the Deaf 2015). Culturally Deaf people are born into the deaf community and use sign language, regardless of their hearing…

Technological developments have allowed us to uncover the identities of mystery substances with increasing accuracy. From applications in forensic research to artifact analysis, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) combines two methods used in modern analytical chemistry to provide an effective means of identifying chemicals. GC-MS is an analytical technique often used to identify and measure the…

The idea that wine is good for the heart sounds too good to be true, and scientifically, it might be. As of 2022, cardiovascular disease was the second leading cause of death in Canada, just after cancer (Public Health Agency of Canada 2017). The build-up of plaque inside arteries, or atherosclerosis, is a main underlying…

What if the haze clouding your thoughts was not just metaphorical, but a literal consequence of air pollution? Pollution and climate change have been prevalent issues in recent years, casting a shadow over health and well-being. Epidemiological research has indicated neurological effects on the central nervous system (CNS) from ambient air pollution (Xu, Ha, and…

Bacteria in the gut microbiome are roughly equal in number to human cells, with estimates around 1:1 (Sender et al., 2016). This raises an intriguing question: are we humans with a lot of bacteria, or bacteria having a human experience? Twenty-five years ago, few people talked about ‘autoimmune disease’ or ‘gut health.’ However, today, these…

Imagine standing at a busy intersection in downtown Hamilton. You can hear tires screeching, and the smell of exhaust fills your nose. In fact, it fills a lot more than your nose: it fills your lungs, possibly causing severe respiratory conditions like asthma (Gillissen and Paparoupa 2015). Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease that can…

Substance use disorder (SUD) claims an estimated 67,000 lives annually in Canada, highlighting the devastating impact of the drug epidemic (CAMH 2025). SUD is a chronic illness that causes symptoms of impaired judgement, impulsiveness, drowsiness, nausea and vomiting, and mood changes. These symptoms can lead to significant impairments in health, social function, and voluntary substance…