Romantic relationships play a key role in happiness but keeping the spark alive over time in relationships is challenging. One route to maintaining passion and desire is to engage in self-expanding activities with a partner. Although novel, self-expanding experiences tend to promote desire and passion, introducing novelty into a relationship can be intimidating. In a recent study, we found that individuals who were asked to engage in exciting sexual activities over the course of two-weeks reported greater passion and sexual desire, though there was no influence on intimacy.

Driven by climate change induced water scarcity, further enhanced by rapid urbanization and population growth, potable water reuse initiatives are gaining interest. Potable reuse involves the indirect or direct use of highly treated municipal wastewater as a municipal drinking water source. Historically, the most commonly installed potable reuse train consisted of microfiltration, reverse osmosis (RO), and ultraviolet (UV) as treatment stages.

As the dominating power supplies for current electric vehicles (EVs), the state-of-the-art LIBs are yet sulfuring from severe challenges in terms of safety, lifespan, and energy density due to the adoption of liquid electrolytes (LEs). Accordingly, developing next generation solid-state lithium(-ion) batteries (SSLBs) is considered to be a feasible approach to achieve safe and high energy density power supplies for future EVs with long driving distance and short charging time.

Natural channel design practices are continually evolving, but monitoring the performance and success of these urban river engineering projects is often limited to sparse point measurements of streamflow, stream morphology, and species inventories during the 2 - 5 years following construction. The result is relatively few data on the overall performance of natural channel design projects, both in terms of the original project goals and geomorphic function (no net erosion and deposition).

Melanoma is the most lethal skin cancer, accounting for 2% of all skin cancer types, yet approximately 75% of skin cancer deaths. It often evolves from clear skin or existing moles, making it difficult to diagnose at early stage. Besides, the treatment of melanoma is a complex decision making process, which is affected by a large number of internal and external factors, e.g. disease location, staging, etc.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have become a key player in the growing need for electric vehicles (EVs). State-of-the-art LIBs, using liquid electrolytes, still have significant challenges in their safety, lifespan, and energy density. Accordingly, solid-state lithium-ion batteries (SSLBs) have recently been attracting increasing research and industrial attention due to their ability to overcome intrinsic disadvantages of flammable liquid electrolytes used in current LIBs. The objective of this proposed research is to develop safe and high-performance SSLBs with sulfide-based electrolytes.

Current Heavy Rare Earth Element (HREE) processing techniques are expensive, environmentally-challenging, and slow. Kinetic models predict that the rate of acid permeation of a mineral is the rate controlling step. Therefore, permeation rate controls the acid quantity and residency time of the mineral in the acid bath; impacting costs. Kinetic models are based on structural assumptions including the uniform distribution of elements within a mineral. This study proposes to employ atom probe tomography on the HREE-mineral gadolinite: an ore mineral in the resource at Strange Lake, Quebec.

Cellulose is a commercially important biopolymer. Due to its abundance, biocompatibility and renewability it has shown important commercial applications in food, pharmaceuticals, biomedical. Depending on the origin and the processing methods used, the resulting fiber dimensions, structure, crystallinity and molecular weight (MW) can vary over a broad range. MW is one of the most important parameters in polymer characterization as many of its properties depend on it. Gel permeation chromatography (GPC) has been the technique of choice for determining these properties.

This proposed project focuses on American ginseng (AmG), a natural herb native to Canada that has been used as a traditional medicine for many generations. Southern Ontario has become the World’s largest producer of AmG with annual sales of over $400M at the farm gate. Polysaccharides (PS) are a major active component of AmG showing various biological activities including anti-carcinogenic, anti-aging, immunostimulatory and antioxidant effects.