UNB startup company wins 60,000 dollars for invention

Kumaran Thillainadarajah demonstrating Smart Skin to a group of high school students.

Kumaran Thillainadarajah is one of the eight UNB  students and one professor in a small startup company, with one idea that is about to break through: smart skin. After winning 60,000 dollars at the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation competition and being chosen to participate in the CBC’s Dragons’ Den, he and his team are ready to go into the real world and sell their product.

“We’re the first people in the world doing this,” said Kumaran Thillainadarajah, creator of smart skin.

Smart skin is a material that is sensitive to touch because it’s made of carbon nanotubes that are conductive to electricity and that can measure the intensity of touch from a light stroke to a hard squeeze.

The students see their product as the next step in the video game industry because smart skin is closer to human skin, and it can make virtual interactions seem real.

Smart skin could be made to fit around a joystick, and when people play sports on the video game they could squeeze and have more functions. Smart skin could tell people if they’re playing tennis wrong, if they’re squeezing the racket too hard.

“This material is the key. Pressure sensors have been around for decades, but the difference between our pressure sensors and ordinary pressure censors is that our smart skin can go right where other materials can’t,”he said.

“A hundred thousand of those carbon nanotubes would fit on the head of a needle. That’s how small it is.”

Carbon nanotubes are cylindrical carbon molecules that are stronger than steel, but also flexible and soft, and they conduct more electricity than copper. These molecules are part of nanotechnology, a science that studies the matter of the smallest existing particles: atoms.

 

UNB student gets over 64 thousand hits on YouTube

When Coady Cameron bought his Macintosh computer, he wanted to see if the webcam on the computer worked, so he went online on YouTube and posted a video. Little did 18 year-old Frederictonian Coady Cameron know that his comment would receive over one thousand hits the very next day.

“I was really bored, I was extremely bored. We had just gone out of school, there was pretty much nothing to do,” Cameron said.

Cameron’s video was on the top ten videos of YouTube for about a month, and his video has received over 64 thousand hits from the day he posted it.

His video was a comment on a controversial pop song by Katy Parry called ‘I kissed a girl and I liked it,’ saying he doesn’t like the music and that it has no content.

Katy Parry fans from all over the world posted many videos attacking Cameron’s views, and Katy Parry herself made a comment about Cameron’s video on her website.

Cameron’s mailbox was filled with hate mail the first two weeks after he posted the video. Many blogs posted his video, half of them on his side and the other half on Katy Parry’s side. Even the famous blogger Perez Hilton posted a comment about Cameron’s video on his blog.

 

Fredericton man skies to the North Pole

Frederictonian Brian Jones is a business man, but he’s also an adventure lover.  And so he sets out to high schools in New Brunswick to talk about his journey from Norway to the North Pole.

 

Future journalists in the midst of economic turmoil

“These are uncertain times in the field of journalism,” my professor said. That stuck to my mind and to the minds of my classmates, and it hunts me sometimes in my sleep. We’re graduating in the middle of a crisis that’s accelerating the changes that were taking place in journalism. The newspaper form as we know soon will be extinct, and the future of journalism is in blogs like this one. But what’s going to happen to us, professional journalists? I talked to my graduating class to have them share their concerns and how they see what’s about to come.

Click here to listen.

 

Former students of murdered professor carry on his legacy

Bakesale at St. Thomas University's cafeteria.

John McKendy, on the far right, and his sociology students.

The man standing in line at the cafeteria has a long beard, the kind you might see monks wear in a monastery. His shoes are worn, stained with a beige hue from years of use. His brown khaki pants hang loosely from his body, matching a plain white t-shirt.

As he approaches the cash counter, he sees someone he knows. Putting his coffee down, he waves his hands and smiles. “How’s it going?” he says. The line has moved, but he doesn’t notice it’s his turn to pay. Then he suddenly shifts his eyes from his friend to the cashier and hands her some money. Taking some change in his hand, McKendy and his friend stroll into the cafeteria, with McKendy listening to his companion and nodding his head.

That’s how I imagine John McKendy even though I never met him. But ever since October 31, 2008, everyone at my university in Fredericton has come to know the bearded man as the pacifist professor who was murdered by his own son-in law. Many people already knew McKendy because of his volunteer work in Africa, or because they had taken a sociology class with him, but now everyone was talking about him – because of the horrible way he died.

But John McKendy’s students want people know who he was, not just how he died.

They want to keep his memory alive, through events on campus such as bake sales, coffee house concerts, and just by talking about what made him the special person he was.

“We all knew we had to do something,” says Karolyn Martin, a former student and organizer of some of the events to honour his memory.

A few weeks after McKendy was killed, Martin and Amanda Jardine started talking about ways they could raise money – and soon they were sharing their ideas with other students who knew McKendy and who also wanted to do something the remember him.

“That’s what he was really about, people coming together, communities coming together,” Martin said.

 

“Art is the first thing to go”

Theatre St. Thomas' actors, and student actrice Sarah Sovedt on the far right.

With economic crisis and recessions, arts funding is the first to be cut.  Although art is not as essential as health care, it still plays a key role on people’s lives. But what’s the real importance of art? What function does it serve?  I talked to some artists in Fredericton to find out why art is a part of our lives.

Click here to listen.

 

Nine year-old boy raises money for a friend with cancer

Marilu Hynes and her son Matthew.

There’s something about Matthew Hynes and Mackenzie Carr. At school, they spend lunch in the classroom, sitting together, hanging out. Sometimes Mackenzie draws, but not always. They’re both shy, often grinning and blushing, drawing their arms forward in an awkward way. They don’t waste words. They talk when they have to – their friendship is that simple.

They’ve been friends since they met each other, five years ago, and now they have more reasons than ever to stick together. Mackenzie – a little ten year-old girl, with bright blue eyes – has a rare type of ovarian cancer, and her friend Matthew is campaigning to help her fight the disease.

The campaign is called the ‘Road of Hope.’ Matthew says the distance from the school to Mackenzie’s house is 56,313 inches. Since a loony measures an inch, he wants to collect that many loonies to cover the distance. So far, Matthew has collected 7,350 dollars for Mackenzie.

“There’s enough people in Fredericton that can spare a loony,” Matthew said.

 

Irving’s promise to repair the train station leaves many skeptical

The Irving company says it will repair the train station, and that it’s looking for tenants to start the work on the property. “I’ve heard it all before,” said Tim Scammell, member of the Friends of the Railway. The Irving company doesn’t keep its word on fixing the York Train Station, he said.

 

A night in the life of a Fredericton cabby

Mike Gillen pulled over the parking lot, grabbed a cigarette from his pocket and put his arm on the window. On it was the face of a girl with fine straight hair and clear eyes.

Gillen is a large man. He looks like he’s built up of tires, a larger tire on the edge of the seat and a slimming one at the top. He wears square rimmed glasses and has straight fine hair like his daughter did. He’s quiet and only says what he has to. But he’s straight forward, says what he means.

When I asked him about his life, he said “I’m just a cab driver”, and turned back to the road. He’s the kind of guy that keeps his eyes on the road and his arms on the wheel.

When his 16 year old daughter died in an alcohol related accident, his doctor suggested he keep a journal to help him cope with the loss. The journals developed into an internet blog called “A night in the life of a Fredericton cabby”.

“There’s something intriguing about what goes on in the cab,” Gillen said.

 

Hotel organizes candle light event for Earth Hour

Earth Hour is moving from homes to restaurants and hotels. Establishment owners are picking up the idea of saving the environment as a strategy to attract the public to candle light events with cocktails and fondue.  The Earth Hour movement, that started in Sydney in 2001, asks for people to turn their lights off for one hour to save energy.

 

Government cuts Arts, sees them as unecessary

Art. Is it a tune, a note, a word, a sound, a scribble, a hue, a shade, a blur or a movement? Is it the rays of the sun at dawn, the wind rustling the leaves on the trees, the view from the top of a mountain, the sound of the waves breaking at the bay, or the silence of the stars speaking to men? All it takes is a glance or a sound – a moment consisting of a fraction of a second – for Art to cast a spell on the human mind.

Pianists choose the tabs on the piano with care, changing the intensity of touch, and with their hands they transform notes into melody. Painters paint the sky even if they cannot reach it, and actors on the spotlight tell the audience secrets they would never share with their friends. Artists are magicians, full of nonsense that makes perfect sense. They perform for the neglected soul of humankind, in the hopes people will stop and listen.

In a time of economic crisis, of stripping the essentials, the government crumples art into a ball of paper and throws it away.

“We know from experience that Art is the first thing to go,” says drama student Sarah Sovedt.

During the elections, Stephen Harper announced a cut of 45 million dollars in art’s programs, claiming ordinary people don’t care about arts funding.

Art isn’t considered a necessity, Sovedt said.

 

United against St. Valentine

What do you do on Valentine’s Day? Most people buy flowers or chocolates for their loved one, and then make a reservation at the fanciest restaurant in town to make sure they have a table for V-Day. But now the new trend is to get together to despise the love day.