“Traffic snarled due to a burst watermain near the Granville Aquaduct,” states News 1130.

Due to the estimated age of the infrastructure and pipe material, the City of Vancouver had slated the duct for replacement next year. A year too late for all those affected by today’s rupture.

In Canada, the replacement of pipes in poor and very poor conditions requires a total investment of about 25 billion dollars (Canadian Infrastructure Report Card 2016).

That’s why Mitacs Globalink students Friederike Floegel from Germany and Mireya Cervantes González from Mexico joined Professor Frampton’s lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax this summer. They had the opportunity to advance two new approaches for culturing cells that better replicate human tissue.

Friederike created temperature-responsive coatings to produce cells that can be detached to study the specific behaviour of cancer cells; and the coating will also make them easier to reproduce.

Under a multi-phase project supported by commercial and educational entities, Austin Engineering creates digitally fabricated dam models for hydraulic and seismic testing at both their own hydraulics lab and at the University of British Columbia’s Applied Laboratory for Advanced Materials and Structures (ALAMS) in Kelowna, BC. Their most recent phase of research was followed by a prestigious international presentation.

Although an earthquake can devastate in a few short seconds, restoration and reconstruction can take years to complete. In the 2011 Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake, there were only two major building collapses, yet 70 per cent of the city’s downtown had to be demolished because buildings were deemed uninhabitable. Restoration took five years. Earthquake recovery costs are huge. According to an Insurance Board of Canada study, an earthquake either in BC or Quebec would be nearly ten times as costly as the Fort McMurray fires, which cost over $8 billion.

Stargardt’s disease is a rare inherited ocular illness that affects the Canadian population. According to Fighting Blindness Canada, 1 in 8,000 Canadians suffer from Stargardt’s, a degenerative ocular illness that ultimately leads to vision loss. Typically, patients are diagnosed with the disease by the age of 13, and most experience progressive vision loss as they get older. It is not uncommon for patients to develop complete blindness by the age of 35. Still today, despite the many clinical trials taking place, there is no cure for Stargardt’s disease.

So, when Nutrien, the world’s largest producer of crop inputs, services, and solutions was seeking some out-of-the-box solutions for a safety technology at their Saskatchewan potash mines, they turned to Mitacs to access top research talent.

The resulting collaboration with the University of Regina has produced a new computer algorithm that more accurately identifies potential hazards in the roof of a mined-out cavern—giving workers advanced notice so that they can deploy safety protocols in a timely manner.

The province’s need to be prepared is even more urgent. An earthquake has a domino effect on infrastructure and services. It can knock out power, and damage railway tracks and bridges. It disrupts essential services that hospitals and emergency personnel need to do their jobs. Although on average 3,000 quakes occur in BC each year, the province has not had its readiness tested by a major event recently. But it could happen at any time.

Their systems help the makers of everyday technologies ensure that travel by road or air will be safe and reliable for Canadians and others around the world.

When they were approached by a major car manufacturer to develop testing systems for autonomous vehicles, OPAL-RT turned to Mitacs to connect them to the top research talent for their needs.