What students are talking about today (Sept. 25 edition)

1. In a Yale University study, 127 scientists were given information on supposed recent graduates applying for laboratory jobs. A  fake applicant named John tended to be viewed as more competent than a fake applicant named Jennifer, despite identical qualifications. The conclusion is that women will find it harder to get science jobs than men. The anti-female bias wasn’t limited to male professors; women were just as biased.

2. Feist, the only nominee to have been on Sesame Street, sung at the Grammys and been in an Apple commercial, took home the $30,000 Polaris Music Prize last night for her album Metals. Feist gave a humble speech and toasted fellow nominees Cold Specks and Grimes. Ironically, the Polaris Prize is supposed to be a counterweight to sales-focused Juno’s, where Feist tends to clean up (she has eight).

3. Bacon fans, you may want to be sitting down for this one. “A world shortage of pork and bacon next year is now unavoidable,” according the National Pig Association in Britain.

4. The University of Guelph has placed first in a new ranking of Canada’s Most Inventive Universities. The Impact Group measured, among other things, invention disclosures per faculty member. Also in the top 10 per faculty member are Queen’s, Victoria, McGill, École de Technologie Supérieur (ETS), Manitoba, UBC, Alberta, Montreal and Toronto.

5. Saudi officials are urging pilgrims visiting Mecca to take precautions to prevent the spread of a virus from the same family as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). The new coronavirus has been confirmed in three patients, two of them Saudis who have died. The third is a Qatari man who had visited Saudi Arabia. SARS killed 800 people in 2003 including 44 in Toronto.

6. Laurier University is “maxed out on space,” admits David McMurray, vice president of student affairs. While it’s not the first school reporting a shortage of places to pop open a textbook, it must be really bad there if students are complaining already. The crunch usually comes at midterms.

7. Waterloo has beaten Berkeley, Harvard and Yale in a new ranking—the pokerlistings.com Top 5 Poker Universities. “Given that the brainy and strategically savvy among us usually prove to be the most successful on the felt, it should come as no surprise that many of them are moving from the best schools in the world straight to the elite levels of high-stakes poker,” says the website.

8. Lethbridge Police have arrested a man in connection with the rape of a young woman in her Lethbridge University dorm room early Sunday morning. Scott Mervin Pylypow, a 19-year-old from Lethbridge who isn’t a student at the university, was arrested and charged with the rape.

9. Punk Rock Bingo, which originated in the 90s, has found a new home in three Calgary bars. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Prizes include an “eclectic assortment of band shirts, retro board games, Star Wars merchandise, comic books, Mexican wrestling masks, tastefully random paintings, and a variety of pop and nerd culture memorabilia,” reports The Weal student newspaper.

10. Keith Horwood, the Western graduate who hacked the University Students’ Council online voting website in February—he posted references to Justin Bieber and student erections—has been sentenced to pay $10,219.84 in restitution to the university, 100 hours of community service and a year’s probation. Horwood has already been punished by spending seven months banished from the Internet. To read more about the perils of online voting on campus, click here.