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Pandemic safety, physics ‘thriller’
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May 4, 2009
Game teaches pandemic safety
Staying safe in the face of a pandemic threat is the goal of an online game created four years ago by SFU education professor Suzanne de Castell and York University's Jennifer Jenson. Contagion was designed as a free online learning tool in response to the proliferation of such diseases as SARS, West Nile virus, the avian flu and HIV/AIDS. The researchers are now developing a follow-up project, based on social networking sites such as Facebook, called Epidemic. De Castell says once complete the researchers will compare the impact of covering the same content using different virtual approaches.
Contagion can be found at: http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/
Suzanne de Castell, 778.782.3148; decaste@sfu.ca
Art imitates science
A major motion picture to be released next week called Angels & Demons (featuring Tom Hanks, directed by Ron Howard) focuses on a plot to destroy the Vatican using antimatter made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - a gigantic machine spanning 27 kilometers in circumference - and stolen from the particle physics laboratory CERN in Switzerland. The machine is real, and scientists working on the global ATLAS project (the world’s biggest physics experiment) hope it will begin producing groundbreaking data this summer.
Meanwhile, scientists are taking the opportunity of the movie’s release to tell the world about the real science of antimatter and build excitement about particle physics research. SFU physicists Michel Vetterli, Dugan O’Neil and Bernd Stelzer are among 2,500 scientists involved in the ATLAS project (Vetterli is the project leader for the ATLAS Canada Data Analysis Centre, one of 10 connected global centres that will compute experiment results). Colleague Mike Hayden works on the Alpha experiment also at CERN (an antimatter experiment.) All can speak about the science related to the movie’s plot – and explain why we should care about colliding beams and results that could shed light on the origins of mass.
Michel Vetterli, 778.782.5488; 604.222.7442 (TRIUMF); vetterli@sfu.ca
Dugan O’Neil, 778.782.5623; doneil@sfu.ca
Staying safe in the face of a pandemic threat is the goal of an online game created four years ago by SFU education professor Suzanne de Castell and York University's Jennifer Jenson. Contagion was designed as a free online learning tool in response to the proliferation of such diseases as SARS, West Nile virus, the avian flu and HIV/AIDS. The researchers are now developing a follow-up project, based on social networking sites such as Facebook, called Epidemic. De Castell says once complete the researchers will compare the impact of covering the same content using different virtual approaches.
Contagion can be found at: http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/
Suzanne de Castell, 778.782.3148; decaste@sfu.ca
Art imitates science
A major motion picture to be released next week called Angels & Demons (featuring Tom Hanks, directed by Ron Howard) focuses on a plot to destroy the Vatican using antimatter made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - a gigantic machine spanning 27 kilometers in circumference - and stolen from the particle physics laboratory CERN in Switzerland. The machine is real, and scientists working on the global ATLAS project (the world’s biggest physics experiment) hope it will begin producing groundbreaking data this summer.
Meanwhile, scientists are taking the opportunity of the movie’s release to tell the world about the real science of antimatter and build excitement about particle physics research. SFU physicists Michel Vetterli, Dugan O’Neil and Bernd Stelzer are among 2,500 scientists involved in the ATLAS project (Vetterli is the project leader for the ATLAS Canada Data Analysis Centre, one of 10 connected global centres that will compute experiment results). Colleague Mike Hayden works on the Alpha experiment also at CERN (an antimatter experiment.) All can speak about the science related to the movie’s plot – and explain why we should care about colliding beams and results that could shed light on the origins of mass.
Michel Vetterli, 778.782.5488; 604.222.7442 (TRIUMF); vetterli@sfu.ca
Dugan O’Neil, 778.782.5623; doneil@sfu.ca