With a hearty greeting of what sounded like “Nee How!”,  Dr. Ed Nicholson drew in his PROBUS September audience with fascinating information about living and teaching in the enigmatic nation of China. Dr. Nicholson is now in his 55th year of teaching, the last sixteen of which have been in China, primarily Shanghai.  He has…

Those of us who came to the August 5th PROBUS meeting expecting to hear only about the history of fisheries in B.C. were treated to much more fascinating information:  Did you know, for example:  It’s perfectly OK to eat farmed salmon Recent studies have de-bunked the myth that sea lice from farmed salmon have caused…

Kat Albrecht, our PROBUS July 8 speaker, kept her audience spellbound with the story of her evolution from California police officer, trained in Search and Rescue, to VanIsle (Nanaimo) resident whose mission now is to form a nationwide team of mainly volunteer “Junior Pet Detectives”.  Kat’s career came about through a series of events which…

At our meeting on June 3, Paul Kolodziej spoke about supporting the STS-132 mission of the NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis, explaining the behind the scenes processes and technology, a brief history of the Shuttle program and amazing images and video from that mission.   Paul was assigned to the Entry Systems and Technology Division at the…

On May 6th, Dr Ghazi Farooq presented an overview of the global Syrian refugee situation. It was interesting to learn that the Canadian private sponsorship program is unique in the world and one that is suggested as a model for other governments to use; 9,000 of the 26,000 refugees are privately sponsored. Dr. Farooq went…

Are you aware that you share 98% of your genes with a chimp, 44% with a fruit fly and 18% with a plant?  Our April speaker, Dr.Ed Ishiguro, back by popular demand,  shared with us some of his fascinating research, his subject this time being the decoding of the human genome project and the way…