Features

Welcome to the University of Toronto on Instagram

Sub-title: 
Explore #UofT-tagged images
Author: 
Kristina Doyle and Brianna Goldberg

It's the most immediate, most social way the University of Toronto community is showing its pride: individual users uploading photos tagged #UofT to Instagram.

Snapshots of lectures, landscapes and library nooks are captured on smartphones and identifed with the #UofT tag. When these images are featured in the university's new Instagram account, they effectively document the real-time beauty and boldness of life across all three campuses each day.

Parsing Valentine's Day

Author: 
Jessica Shapiro

For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

Geoffrey Chaucer may have been the first to link romance to St. Valentine’s Day, in 1382’s Parlement of Foules, but hundreds of years later the day instantly evokes images of pink and red hearts, cards, chocolates and flowers.

What does it all mean? U of T News asks University of Toronto experts.

Who are you going to call before you dig?

Sub-title: 
Summer research opportunities for students
Author: 
Sean Bettam

When Carl Knappett embarked on a multi-year quest to unearth a Minoan palace at Palaikastro on the Mediterranean island Crete, he enlisted students in the Department of Earth Sciences to help him figure out where to dig.

Litigator and carillonneur: alumnus Roy Lee

Author: 
Lucianna Ciccocioppo

You’ve heard of lawyers who play keyboards, guitars or drums in rock bands. Meet a lawyer-musician of a different kind: alumnus Roy Lee.

Lee, who graduated from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law in 2004, plays the carillon at U of T — the only university in Canada with a carillon tower. The set of 51 bells, spanning four octaves, is housed in Soldier's Tower.

A Moveable Feast

Sub-title: 
Meet Darra Goldstein, food culture and Russian literature scholar
Author: 
Brianna Goldberg

Darra Goldstein is the Willcox and Harriet Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams College and founding editor of the journal Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture--named 2012 Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation.

A cookbook author, a lover of food, a pro at helping others to think about food in intellectual ways, Goldstein is also the Jackman Humanities Institute's Distinguished Visiting Fellow for 2012-2013 at the University of Toronto.

Welcome to Veggie Mondays

Author: 
Sarah Khan

For Ruth Midgley, it's all about supporting the environment.

“I pledge to go veggie on Mondays, because I care about the environment,” says Midgley, an environmental studies student. “Eating more sustainably, even for one day a week, makes a difference.”

Estelle Chettiar is a work-study student specializing in political science and human geography. Midgley and Chettiar have been working with Food Services, St. George campus, on a Veggie Mondays campaign.

U of T students making history at Large Hadron Collider

Sub-title: 
Hunting dark matter, subatomic particles
Author: 
Jenny Hall

Hass AbouZeid is starting to think about how to make something out of nothing.

The physics graduate student is close to the end of his PhD and is finishing a stint at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, where he’s been hunting a “heavy Higgs boson”—but more on that later.

What does he do if he doesn’t find anything? Does he still get a PhD?

It's fun to design for the YMCA

Sub-title: 
Architecture students win 24-hour challenge
Author: 
Amy Stupavsky

A team of master’s students from the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design have won a province-wide competition to revamp part of a popular downtown Toronto facility using recycled tires.

Dictionary of Old English: "a great Canadian enterprise"

Author: 
Barrett Hooper

Goldfinger: the word conjures up images of gold-smothered women, razor-hatted henchmen and giant lasers.

It’s the title of the quintessential James Bond story and reflects perfectly the villain’s obsession with the precious metal. But it’s unlikely that Bond creator Ian Fleming was aware of the fanciful title’s rather pedestrian etymology.

Explaining adrenal glands for Scientific American

Sub-title: 
Graduate student, alumni create winning video
Author: 
Jennifer Lanthier

The Scientific American challenge: create a two-minute video explaining a body part or process in a fun and engaging way using seven household objects – string, rubber bands, balls, pens, paper, cups and paper clips.

The winners: a creative team including University of Toronto PhD student Dorea Reeser, alumna Raluca Ellis,  alumnus Nigel Morton and alumnus Mike Ellis.

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