Latest news with #SaintMarysUniversity
CTV News
7 days ago
- Science
- CTV News
Saint Mary's University students transforming seaweed into compostable plastic
Saint Mary's University students transform seaweed into compostable bioplastic that could be used to make grocery bags. A recent engineering graduate from Saint Mary's University is working to eliminate the use of single-use plastic. 'Last year, working on a research project, I wanted to change something from an idea into a reality and then from there we found 'Alaagi' where we are creating bioplastic using seaweed,' says Sheheryar Khan, CEO and founder of the group. Khan says Alaagi means change in Greek and that's exactly the message they want to convey. Their goal is to transform seaweed into a compostable type of plastic. 'Seaweed grows everywhere in the oceans and is a material that is free and governments pay us to use it, or to extract it and we can use that to make our plastics,' says Khan. Khan says they are ensuring the seaweed is harvested in a sustainable way. When the collected seaweed samples are cut halfway so the ecosystem is not disrupted. The team is currently able to make soft and flexible films, and eventually they plan to create hard and rigid plastics that are all compostable. 'We are testing for stuff like durability, barrier properties and then we would apply for certifications such as compostability and food safety and hoping to have that in before the end of the year,' says Khan. Bioplastic bags are the first product they are creating and those will be ready to hit the market in the next few months. But their end goal is to break into the food packaging industry. 'We are targeting the food packaging industry to remove plastics that are used in the single-use plastics industry, such as wrapping sandwiches, wrapping seafood and meat,' says Khan. Khan says none of this would be possible without the university providing the space and the professors, as well as the Enactus team and co-op students. 'When it's in the beaker, it's all liquid and the second you put it in the trays it gels and you can peel it and you can come back like 10 seconds later and it's an actual film, which is super cool,' says student Brianne Lawton. 'At the start I was just scanning through research articles, and doing all the starter stuff you have to do. But now going back and looking at my organization and all my notes versus my notes now, it's a crazy difference. Now I can identify all the important information that is going to be useful whereas before I was like, well, this could be helpful.' 'We are part of the Hult competition, we are the top 22 teams in the world out of 15,000 that participated and we are going to London, UK, with my teammates Vaishali and Tyler for $1 million in September,' says Khan. Khan's two teammates, Vaishali Sachdeva and Tyler MacLean, helped him and Alaagi compete against 56 international teams. Now it's on to stage four of the Hult Prize competition: the Global Accelerator. Khan says a victory would bring them even closer to their goal of removing plastics 'That one million would go towards creating more of these plastics and we would love to have our own facility to create these samples and supply the companies that we are in talks with and it would really mean a lot in terms of bringing people that have expertise in this field,' says Khan. The team just won the national Enactus competition and are heading to Thailand for their world cup this fall. 'A chance to have an impact on the lives of the people after us, the next generation and to help make science better and more innovative,' says Lawton. Sheheryar Khan Sheheryar Khan is the founder and CEO of Alaagi. (Source: Emma Convey/CTV News Atlantic) For more Nova Scotia news, visit our dedicated provincial page
Gizmodo
05-07-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
This Weird Pyramid Always Lands on the Same Face, Confirming 40-Year-Old Theory
'Bille' is the first-ever monostable tetrahedron, or a pyramid-like shape with four triangular faces that has one stable resting position. What this means is that Bille, no matter how you throw it and how it lands, will flip back on exactly the same side every single time. In a recent preprint submitted to arXiv, mathematicians revealed the first physical model of Bille, closing a decades-old theory proposed by the renowned British mathematician John Conway. Made of lightweight carbon fiber and dense tungsten carbide, Bille represents an array of ridiculously sophisticated engineering decisions—making this as much a technological achievement as a mathematical one. It's no surprise, therefore, that its self-righting property additionally hints at some exciting applications for the spaceflight industry—which notably experienced two recent landing mishaps with toppled-over lunar landers. In his initial conjecture, Conway surmised that a tetrahedron with unevenly distributed weight across its sides would always flip to the same side, although a few years later Conway himself rejected the idea. Some mathematicians still thought there could be something to it, however, namely study co-author Robert Dawson, who almost succeeded in proving Conway right in the 1980s using lead foil and sticks of bamboo. 'But my recollection was that this only almost worked because of angular momentum,' Dawson, now a mathematician at Saint Mary's University in Canada, told Gizmodo. 'In the way that if a car comes across a bump in the road and it's already moving, it'll get over it thanks to angular momentum. But it might have a hard time starting up against that bump.' Ideally, the monostable tetrahedron shouldn't need another push to flop back on the 'base' side. For a while, it seemed like Conway's theory would end up in a box of really-cool-but-unlikely math ideas—until about three years ago, when mathematician Gábor Domokos and his student, Gergő Almádi at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, reached out to Dawson. Domokos, a long-time expert on tricky balancing problems in geometry, had already discovered the gömböc, a roundish object that balances only on two points like a roly-poly toy. While an impressive discovery, the gömböc, with its mostly round, multi-sided design, features relatively easy conditions for self-balancing, Domoko told Gizmodo. The fewer sides a figure has and the smaller the angles are on each side, the harder it is to make that figure monostable, he said. Picture the common six-sided die. 'If it is a fair die, it will land on each face with equal probability,' Domoko explained. Even if someone cheats and modifies the die by putting some extra weight on a couple of surfaces, the probability will shift slightly, but it should still be possible for the die to stand on all its faces. In that sense, the tetrahedron, with its pointy corners and tiny acute angles across its four sides, makes it the 'most difficult problem, the highest category' of shapes in terms of monostability—barring some kind of engineering miracle. Which really happened. After deriving a theoretical model to calculate Bille's dimensions, Almádi, an architecture student, spearheaded the quest to build a structure that, somehow, had one side made from a 'really heavy material, the lighter parts almost air, and an almost empty skeleton,' Domokos said. The team settled on carbon tubes for the skeleton and, for the base, dense tungsten carbide—a metal alloy twice as heavy as steel. Even after all that, an issue remained: For some reason, Bille kept landing on two different sides, not the one intended side. 'Then we looked at it, and there was a very small glob of glue which was sticking to one end!' Domoko exclaimed. Despite the chief engineer's assurances that it made no difference, Domoko insisted on removing the tiny blob of glue—the density and shape of which were also calculated with ridiculous precision. And—voilà. Bille made mathematical history. That said, the engineers played a huge role in making this possible, Domokos clarified. 'They were all part of the creation process—the geometry, engineering, and technological design. They all needed to click. If you take out any of these, it doesn't work.' To make sure Bille wasn't just a one-time dud, Domokos' team succeeded in making a second model—though this probably isn't something one could easily make at home. 'We wish good luck to anyone doing it,' Domokos joked. 'But somebody doing it now has a huge advantage compared to us, because we didn't know whether it would work.' Domokos is particularly excited to see what might become of Bille further down the line. One reason Domokos didn't want to stop at merely modeling Bille was because of gömböc, he explained. Like many aesthetically pleasing mathematical breakthroughs, gömböc got a lot of love from artistic communities and natural scientists drawing parallels between turtle shells and gömböc—which Domokos more or less expected. What he didn't expect was that Novo Nordisk, in collaboration with MIT and Harvard, would take interest in gömböc's design principles for an insulin capsule that self-rights itself once inside a stomach, eliminating the need for needle injections. 'And it sounded so outlandish—like science fiction,' Domokos said. 'Gömböc taught me that physical objects are crucial—there are many bright people out there who are not mathematically minded, but they can look at something and it will reflect in their minds many other things.' Still, it'll probably be a while—if ever—before Bille ends up in the blueprint for the latest lunar lander, which Domokos knows will be extremely challenging. 'When you develop something, you have to wait and technological innovation will catch up. Sometimes it takes 100 years, sometimes it takes 10 years. Mathematics is always a little bit ahead.'
CTV News
20-06-2025
- CTV News
‘You feel betrayed': Halifax professor sees spike in cheating by students using AI
Ed McHugh, a business and marketing professor at Dalhousie, Saint Mary's and Mount Saint Vincent universities in Halifax, speaks with CTV News on June 19, 2025. As artificial intelligence rises in popularity, one Halifax professor says he's noticed an unsettling trend over the last two years – students are using it to cheat on assignments. 'Having one student doing it is serious, but it's increasing,' said Ed McHugh, a business and marketing professor at Dalhousie, Saint Mary's and Mount Saint Vincent universities. 'I don't know the percentage, but it's more than one per cent.' McHugh recently posted about the issue on social media after he noticed a number of students cheated on an assignment. He could tell they had used AI to do the work for them. 'I was marking an assignment. They had to watch a video about a guy named Adam Smith and asked why he was treated the way he was. Unfortunately for them there was also an economist from the 18th century named Adam Smith and the answer that came back from a number of students was a history lesson on Adam Smith the economist from over 200 years ago,' explained McHugh. 'They didn't bother to watch the video. They just saw the words Adam Smith, did AI on Adam Smith, and gave me back a paragraph about Adam Smith the economist, which had nothing to do with the assignment.' Several commenters shared similar frustrations on McHugh's post. He says he's not alone in this and many other educators feel the same way. 'I feel disappointed any time a student cheats. As an educator you feel some sense of sadness and anger because you feel betrayed and you feel that they think you mustn't be that bright to catch some of this stuff,' said McHugh. However, McHugh says there are ways for educators to detect the use of this software, and some uses of AI are obvious. Another thing he's noticed as a professor is the decline of grammar skills over the last 30 years, which he says can actually be useful when trying to determine if someone used AI. If a student who struggles with grammar hands in a perfectly-worded assignment, McHugh says they likely used AI. 'When you have an email that is not written very well grammar-wise, but the attached assignment is in perfect English,' adds McHugh. McHugh also says the AI software he's noticed students using follows a certain format in its answers, so when someone copies the responses from it, it's noticeable. 'But then after that it gets really tricky and it comes down to your word versus the student's word,' he says. But there are ethical ways to use the software in schools. Some students like Juliette Savard use AI to enhance their writing and fact check. 'I think AI, when it is used the right way, is actually a really great tool,' said Savard. 'I use it all the time as a Google replacement because sometimes Google, it just links you to articles and it doesn't find you what you actually are looking for. And ChatGPT is really great for that because it will find you what you are actually looking for.' But when it comes to using AI to write her assignments, Savard says she would never take that chance. 'I would never use it to do my actual work because it's really stupid, if I can be honest. Give it a math equation, it doesn't know how to solve it,' she says. Her brother Gabriel Savard, who is in his third year at Dalhousie University, says English is not his first language, so for him, AI helps him better understand assignments. 'Usually when I see it, it's to get a better understanding of what the question is asking and put them in my words,' he says. 'English is not my first language so it helps to get that understanding of what is being asked of me.' Serena Dasilva is a third-year psychology student at Dalhousie University. She feels AI is useful for certain programs, but not all. 'For the arts specifically, I feel like it hinders your learning because you are relying a lot on social views, specifically how people interact with other people, and I feel like relying on AI kind of takes away from that,' says Dasilva. As for the rules of using the software in schools, they vary from classroom to classroom, and across different education levels. McHugh says, in post-secondary schools, professors should highlight their AI policies in their course outlines. 'So far, all of the policies I have read are not strong. The policies need to be stronger and a lot of them are discouraging the use of other softwares to detect whether AI has been used because those softwares aren't perfect either,' says McHugh. In general, one rule across the board is no plagiarism or cheating on work, whether using AI or not. If those rules aren't followed, there are serious consequences for students. 'On your first assignment, if you are caught and it's proven, you get zero for the assignment,' explains McHugh. 'If you're caught again in the course, you get zero for the course.' At the end of the day, McHugh says AI can be a great tool when used appropriately, but students who rely completely on AI are hindering their own learning. 'People go to school to become critical thinkers and that's why we teach because we want the generations behind us to be better thinkers and to make the world a better place,' he says. 'In some ways this helps, but in some ways this is being a deterrent to creating stronger students in the future.' For more Nova Scotia news, visit our dedicated provincial page
