UBC Reports | Vol. 51 | No. 1 | Jan. 10, 2005

In the News

Highlights of UBC Media Coverage in December 2004

Compiled by Brian Lin

UBC Student Wins Rhodes Scholarship

UBC 4th-year biophysics student Michael Rivers-Bowerman has been awarded a 2005 Rhodes Scholarship, worth more than $100,000.

The award enables Rivers-Bowerman to spend the next two years at England’s Oxford University, studying politics, philosophy and economics.

“I’m kinda surprised. I never thought I would wind up at Oxford,” the 22-year-old told The Vancouver Sun. “This is just a tremendous opportunity for me to broaden my education, and at one of the finest universities in the world.”

Rivers-Bowerman plans to return to UBC after the scholarship to study medicine and specialize in radiation oncology.

Postpartum Depression often Overlooked

As many as 80 per cent of women suffer from postpartum depression, making it the most commonly encountered illness following the birth of a baby, UBC psychiatry, ostetrics and gynecology professor Shaila Misri told The Globe and Mail. “Yet it’s one of the ones easily missed.”

While in most cases, baby blues fades after a couple of weeks, for 10-13 per cent of women, it can turn into lasting depression that features intrusive thoughts of harming their baby.

“They might see a knife in the kitchen and think: ‘What if I stabbed this baby?’ They might see the microwave and think: ‘What if I put this baby in the microwave?’ ” said Misri.

To learn more about this serious form of depression, a screening tool of 10 questions will be distributed to general practitioners and family physicians across B.C. over the next few weeks.

Get the Laptop off your Lap

New research published in the journal Human Reproduction shows that laptops, combined with the thighs pressed-together posture needed to balance them, give off enough heat to raise the temperature inside testicles by nearly three degrees Celsius (5.4 F).

This increase could endanger the production of healthy sperm and lead to infertility, says study leader Yefim Sheynkin, a urologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

“If [Dr. Sheynkin] can measure that difference in temperature [with laptop use], it is significant, but it needs more study,” male-infertility expert Victor Chow, a consultant with UBC’s Centre for Reproductive Health, told The Globe and Mail. “We need to know if it actually lowers sperm counts . . . or [if] the only thing you can say about it is that laptops heat up testes.”

Daycare Centres Promised

Commenting on the federal government’s recent commitment to build a national daycare program, UBC early education professor Hillel Goelman, who is a supporter of the universal model, says communities ought to be able to decide at the local level how best to deliver child care.

“We don’t want to drop daycare centres all across the country. We have to ask ourselves, ‘What do we need?’ ” Goelman told The National Post.

UBC research director Julie Wagemakers and computer science profesor Karon MacLean both have children at UBC’s newly renovated daycare centres.

Wagemakers says she never would be able to give her two young daughters the resources they get at daycare at home.

“They’ve got a zillion musical instruments -- drums, ukuleles, xylophones, everything,” Wagemakers says. “Our two-year-old loves music, and that’s not something we would have known had she been at home . . . It’s a whole world built for little kids,” says MacLean.

Orchid Centre Stage at Smithsonian

The Smithsonian has published a book called Ultimate Orchid to accompany the recently opened “Orchid Express” exhibit at the Natural History Museum Saturday, reports The Columbus Ledger-Inquirer.

The exhibit and book provide interesting facts and stories about the flower, including one where a Virginia collector bought an interesting plant from a roadside stand in Peru in 2002. He was sentenced last month to a $1,000 fine and two years probation for bringing home an orchid protected by the Endangered Species Act.

“The site where it was first found has been stripped of these orchids by unethical collectors, and it is now locally extinct,” said a report from the Botanical Garden at UBC. “Happily, a population has been found elsewhere in a very remote location.” The university did not name the place.

UBC Rhodes Scholars

Former Prime Minister John Turner (BA ’49), who recently led a delegation of election observers in the Ukraine, is one of UBC’s better known Rhodes Scholars. Over the years many UBC students have earned this widely recognized and prestigious honour, established in 1902 to bring outstanding students from across the world to study at Oxford University in the interests of promoting international understanding and public service. Since 1979, eleven students from UBC have won the scholarship, currently valued at more than $100,000.