Uni. of Alberta researchers solve puzzle that baffled scientists for decades (opens in new tab)

(edmontonjournal.com)

53 pointsriphay9y ago25 comments

25 comments

16 comments · 5 top-level

mattnewton9y ago· 9 in thread

>> ... it was post-doctoral fellow Moe Rashidi, who immigrated from Iran, who deserves the credit.

>> "He really did all the brilliant work,” Wolkow said. “Tremendous people are drawn here … and become fantastic new members of Canada.”

That was one of the key takeaways here, a reminder of how important skilled immigration is to any country. That patent is owned by Canadians now.

slavik819y ago

There's a surprisingly large number of Iranians doing great work in Canadian universities. I'm not particularly well-versed in why, but it seems that smart people have both means and motive to emigrate.

rossng9y ago

Iran is a pretty highly-developed country with a population of 83 million people, so I don't think that's too surprising.

There's a perception gap due to the western world's treatment of Iran. Maybe we shouldn't have overthrown their government and installed a dictator in the 1950s.

farhang9y ago

Iran's brain drain is the reason

http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/02/02/why_does_iran_ha...

stuxnet799y ago

Can confirm this, and this spans all fields of study. They are doing great work. Canadian universities are choke full of immigrants of all kinds though (I'm one).

yichi9y ago

Actually Canada is a weird one when it comes to immigration. Work based skilled immigration to Canada is certainly easier than the US. But if you want to marry a Canadian and want to move to Canada as an American citizen, you have to wait 2 years for the visa to get approved, and there is no fiance visa or anything to speed up the process.

kspaans9y ago

Working on a spouse visa right now for me spouse, so I've got a slight clarification. As the non-citizen spouse of a Canadian you can VISIT (possibly by applying for a visitor visa like a normal tourist) and probably get that visitor visa extended as many time as you like while you wait for the Permanent Residency application to finish (average 2 year processing time). But you may not be able to work in Canada while you wait (there was some news about temporary work permits being issued to spouses who were inside of Canada while waiting for their PR).

nightcracker9y ago

Also a key takeaway that brain drain is real and incredibly destructive for any underdeveloped country.

muninn_9y ago

Skilled being the key word

GFK_of_xmaspast9y ago

Unskilled immigrants of today are parents of the skilled natural-born citizens of tomorrow.

4 more replies

jobu9y ago· 1 in thread

Here's a blog post with a little more technical information: http://www.physicscentral.com/buzz/blog/index.cfm?postid=822...

Link to the paper: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...

Also, A less click-baity title might be "Uni. of Alberta researchers discover the physical process behind negative differential resistance."

posterboy9y ago

pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06344

from https://sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/bobwolkow/publication...

the_duke9y ago· 1 in thread

As per usual for mainstream scientific articles... shallow, lot's of hyperbole, very little info...

Does anyone have a better source for this? Maybe a link to the paper?

nullpage9y ago

I believe this is part of it https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.06344v4.pdf

ChuckMcM9y ago

Additional comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337252

gohrt9y ago

what's the puzzle? mods, can you fix the title?

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