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Today is the Research Day at University of Alberta Dentistry where dentistry and dental hygiene students present their research in the poster format. This year UAlberta Dentistry Student Research Day was held in Snell Hall inside UofA hospital. There was one poster from second year dentistry student and one poster from third year (that’s me. ). All the others are from fourth year dentistry and third year dental hygiene.

Below is my poster. I did my research in the summer of 2005 at University of Western Ontario with two oral pathologists, Drs. Mark Darling and Tom Daley. The research was funded by NORTH dental research. Click to enlarge it.

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This Saturday I went out with a whole bunch of my med friends—the same ones that I went together to Med Formal Night. It was a very busy day in West Edmonton Mall. I mean it was really busy. Usually West Ed Mall (WEM) doesn’t have that many people even on the weekend. We speculated…probably it was the spring break and many high school students were having days off.

We went to Julios Barrios (a Mexican restaurant) for dinner first. Boys, we had to wait for 45minutes to get a table! It was busy, like I said. By the time we got our seats, it was around 17:10. The food was very good. We even asked for a Jalapeno dip for our nacho. It was definitely very spicy. If I feels it’s spicy, I mean it’s not the ordinary spicy. It’s hot hot hot. Good that the soft drink was refillable!!! Very nice indeed. We finished dinner around 18:20. I think we ordered too much food. We didn’t even finish our nacho. My tummy was so full.

Afterward, we went to Silver City to see a movie “V for Vendetta”. Wait…I think it was probably a bad idea after my tummy was stuffed with food and then had to sit in a theather for another 2 hours. It was like a couch potato. Well, we went ahead to the movie. There was some distance from the restaurant to the cinema. We walked, walked, walked to exercise and burn off the calorie, but we decided to take the elevator near the end of the walk. The movie was ok. I mean, the idea behind the scene was not original. Instead of French Revolution, it’s just a British Revolution in a modern time. Some good actions and humor, and that’s pretty much about it. Anita didn’t go; she was on call that night in her pediatrics rotation. That was smart. Maybe she knew the movie plot?!

After the movie, we went to have some coffee and ice cream at Death By Chocolate. I couldn’t believe it. The restaurants were still open inside the mall. I thought all stores inside West Edmonton Mall were closed at 21:30. It was good to discover the restaurants were still open. Night clubs and bars were probably still open too. Anyway, we went to Death By Chocolate. I’ve never been there, and it looked like most of us have never been to this coffee & ice cream shop. We took a table, browsed through the menu, and were amazed with a number of menu items and pictures that the restaurant comes up with. Very creative dishes. The first one definitely is “Death By Chocolate”—a coffin!!! Others include Broken Heart (a heart with bleeding blood), “Between The Sheets” (this one, you have to see it yourself , here is the picture ), etc. There are a few more interesting ones. I’ll let you discover it.

By the time we finished, it was 23:20. Time to go home.

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Matter vs Electron

This movie clip illustrates the behavior of electron vs matter—a mysterious phenomenon that still puzzles the quantium physicists around the world. Is electron a particle or a wave??? This is the puzzling question. In some instances, electrons behave like a particle; yet, in others, they are like a wave. How can something be a particle and at the same time a wave? For those physics geeks out there, this is a movie you’ve gotta watch.

But wait…I think there is a major flaw with this experiment. I’m not sure how exactly the experiment is done. If it’s done in a vacuum environment, there won’t be any gas molecules and electrons in the air. If the experiment is done in a non-vacuume condition, certainly there are hundreds of electrons and gas molecules in the air. Even if only a single electron is emitted from the electron gun, that electron can interact with free floating electrons in the air and/or electrons orbiting around the gas molecules. This can potentially create a chain reaction, leading to many electrons passing through the double slit as a result of a single electron fired from the electron gun.

The problem doesn’t end there…as yet. If the experiment is in a bright environment, photons from any light source (eg, sunlight, lamp light, light from camera detector) can also interfere with electron, leading to the wave pattern observed in this single electron experiment.
View this weird Double Slit Experiment puzzle..

Read the rest of this entry »

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TOKYO — Move over Toronto: Japan’s major broadcast networks are nearing completion on plans to build the world’s tallest tower in Tokyo, a Japanese newspaper reported Tuesday.

The tower — to be 600 metres tall — will be used for terrestrial digital broadcasting at a cost of some $420 million US, the national newspaper, Yomiuri, reported. It is scheduled for completion in 2011.

Officials from Japan’s public broadcaster NHK and five Tokyo-based commercial broadcasting companies are involved in the project.

Kinji Terada, a spokesman of NHK, said officials are now “in a final stage of co-ordination” in picking the location for the tower in Tokyo’s old entertainment area in Sumida ward.

The tallest free-standing structure in the world currently is the CN Tower in Toronto, which was built almost 30 years ago and soars just over 553 metres.

Source: canada.com

Well, currently the world tallest free-standing building is still the CN Tower, Toronto, Canada, but maybe not by 2011. Japan is aiming to build a new tower. Here are my photos of CN Tower; they were taken during my NORTH dental research at UWO, London, Ontario in summer 2005.

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A 17-year-old Newfoundland girl is believed to have died from toxic shock syndrome - and the infection that killed her may have resulted from a nipple piercing, the province’s chief medical examiner says.

If body piercing did lead to the teen’s death, it will underscore warnings from medical experts about the need to ensure such procedures are done by trained, experienced operators with sound infection control practices.

The St. John’s teen, whose name has not been released, died Thursday after being admitted to hospital two days earlier “with medical problems that were quite complex,” Dr. Simon Avis said Friday in an interview from St. John’s.

Source: canada.com

Here is the latest news regarding body piercing associated complications. Once again, think twice before having any sort of body piercing. Read my previous two articles about body piercing complications: article 1 | article 2.

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