And it will also be my last.

After 82 editions of producing this independently, and years worth as part of my Comms career, I am putting it to rest. It is time consuming to get it right and and I have other projects I want to focus on. My short stories from songs turned out well and I want to focus on fiction now.

So, for one final time:

We crossbreed cattle, crops, and flowers to come up with more hardy stock or new varieties. Trying it with coral may help endangered reefs around the world and that is where we’ll start this final edition.

First a quick primer on coral. Despite what they look like in a picture or video, they are living marine invertebrates. They grow together in colonies and can be either a soft coral or a hard coral and when the hard coral colonies come together, they form a coral reef. Each of those little polyps you see in an image of a coral reef has a body, mouth, and stinging tentacles to capture food. These coral reefs are important for protecting coastlines and are key habitats for 25% of all marine life. The are sometime referred to as the “rainforest of the sea”. As climate change warms oceans, coral becomes too weak to compete with other marine life and they eventually die. They are also being killed off by pollution, human caused physical changes, and from sewage released into coastal waters or runoff filled with agricultural fertilizers. The International Union for Conservation of Nature said last year that 44% of reef building coral are on its Red List of Threatened Species.

Different types of coral live in different ecosystems, and this is where crossbreeding comes into play as part of the effort to save a coral reef off the coast of Miami which is dying off as the water warms up. Down in Honduras where the water is warmer coral is still doing well. Researchers from the University of Miami, the Florida Aquarium, and Tela Marine in Honduras came up with the idea of crossbreeding the coral from the two environments to come up with a variety more likely to adapt to the changing conditions in Florida. The coral were raised in tanks at the Florida Aquarium then transplanted into the Florida coral ecosystem. It is the first time international crossbreeding has been allowed in a wild reef. Selective breeding of coral has been an ongoing project in Hawaii since 2021, but the Florida crossbreeding program is unique.

A story in The Guardian last month said that many coral reefs in the world have been damaged passed the point of no return and more will follow as the climate warms.

I seem to have devoted a lot of space in this newsletter to the latest species or ecosystem that is either past the point of no return or teetering in the edge. This latest effort to save coral may be able to slow down what seems to be an inevitable fate.

An article in The Guardian earlier this month said that U.S. President Donald Trump is “waging war against the media and winning”. The latest win in what appears to be an ongoing effort to intimidate media, is a settlement with Paramount, which owns CBS News, to pay the president $16M US in the form of a donation to his presidential library. At issue was the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that he believes was done to paint her in a better light. Many media analysts and legal experts believe Trump would not have won the lawsuit, but the threat to Paramount was enough to convince the company to settle and which led the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes to quit over the decision. The President has called many media outlets “scum” and his Vice President has called for investigation into media for colluding against Trump in 2020 so the fear at least, was real.

When the leaders of a country openly work against media outlets that are critical of their work it inevitably trickles down to the public. Add in the outsized influence of social media, mis- and dis information, and an increasingly splintered and financially challenged media landscape, and over the last couple of decades we have seen trust in media institutions fall. A Gallup Poll last year found record-low levels of trust in mass media. 36% of U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media and another 33% said “not very much” confidence. An Ekos poll in Canada around the same time showed only 32% of us trust mainstream media (that number drops to 24% here in good ol’ Alberta).

There is a glimmer of hope however, but one that comes with the caveat that we will not let our political and personal leanings push aside critical thinking. (I fear that is a losing battle)

The 2025 Reuters Digital New Report released last month shows that while mainstream or institutional news outlets are losing ground, people are still hungry for news. They are just looking for their news in manty different places such as TikTok, X, YouTube, or podcasts. Many of those polled not only admitted to finding it difficult to sort out real from fake but consider mis- or dis- information a threat. The survey was based on 100,000 responses from people in 48 countries.

And the report found that in many countries (14% in Canada) we are willing to buy subscriptions to get our digital news. Across the world we also tend have a higher level of trust in the publicly funded news. In Canada the two of the most trusted sources are the BBC (60%) and CBC (62%). We Canadians also like to commiserate about the weather and in a Pollara Strategic Insights poll last year The Weather Network received a whopping trust score of +58 with CBC, CTV, and Global in the +40s. Like the Reuters study Pollara found that we still like to get news but are getting it online whether it is social media or sites run by media outlets and 28% are paying for subscriptions. Like the other surveys and polls, Pollara also found high levels of concern about accuracy.

Isn’t there an expression that the first step in dealing with a problem is to acknowledge you have a problem?

My fingers are crossed that as individuals we take steps to deal with it.

If you are reading this when it lands in your mailbox on Saturday, you may well be bracing for Monday morning already. For some, those Monday mornings come with stress and maybe a feeling that the weekend just wasn’t long enough. Forbes magazine said in 2023 that 80% of respondents to a survey considered Monday to be the most stressful of their work week. (Interestingly 22% said it was their most productive day.)

Turns out that the Monday morning blues are real according to a new study in the Journal of Affective Disorders which found that Mondays drive long-term biological stress. The study was led by researchers from the University of Hong Kong and in a media release the university said there was significantly higher long-term stress hormone levels in older adults who felt anxious on Monday mornings. This biological stress wasn’t just for those in the working world, but retired people felt it as well because of cultural “stress amplifiers” which remain ingrained even after leaving the 9-to-5 grind.

Oder adults in the study who reported Monday anxiety had 23% higher levels of cortisol which helps your body manage stress, regulates blood pressure, and plays a role in controlling our sleep-wake cycle. Monday also shows a 19% spike in heart attacks, likely linked to the dysregulation caused by the cortisol levels.

While the new study uncovered the biochemistry of your Monday morning stress, it did not dig into exactly why people find it a tough day, and the authors said that addressing Monday-specific stress could combat hearts disease and stress in older people.

Admittedly this may well be a first world problem with an established 5-day work week and 2-day weekend cycle. It also seems to be most disliked day by people with an annual income of more than $75,000 and better tolerated by those in the $50,000 to 75,000 income range according to a 2023 survey by the career site, Zety.

The Easybeats summed it up in 1966:

“Monday I'll have Friday on my mind”

As I write this newsletter there are 246 wildfires across Canada and 81 of those are classified as out of control according to the National Wildland Situation Report. There has been some decent rainfall over the last few weeks here in parts of Alberta, but it is warming up and warm dry conditions are forecast across the prairies. As we have learned over the last few years, smoke can be a problem and though it is not always visible, there are also dust and organic compounds and soot which scientists refer to as ‘black carbon’.

A Bloomberg article earlier this month pointed out that the rising hot air from wildfires carries this mixture high into the atmosphere where it can be blown over huge distances. The “hotter the fire, the higher it can be lifted”. Apart from the health effects when it hits urban areas, black carbon can make it to mountain glaciers, into Arctic areas, and in the case of intentional slash and burn fires in the Amazon, down into Antarctica. The Bloomberg story suggests that as we have focused on cutting fossil fuel emissions, we may have taken our eyes off the black carbon ball.

Where that black carbon ends up will determine its effect on the climate and on the ice surfaces below it. Lower down it will warm the surface. Higher up it may brighten clouds and reflect sunlight and reduce the rate of sea ice loss according to Phys.org and a study published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study suggests that boreal fires will “actually slow warming by 12% globally and 38% in the Arctic”.

Don’t think that somehow this is a genuine upside to wildfires. First off don’t forget that the increase in the number of fires and their ferocity is largely because of global warming which is hardly good news.

The science around the effects of wildfires is complex and has a lot to do with location and where soot ash ends up. Last year’s Jasper area wildfire dumped much of its soot and ash on the Athabasca Glacier. As we all know, dark surfaces heat up faster. What should be a bright white surface of a glacier reflects heat, but once it becomes grimy with dust and the fallout from a fire it holds the heat and can increase the ice melt by as much as 10%.

This could turn out to be another long hot summer so keep your eyes on the wildfire news because it comes with interesting, complex, and often devastating impacts.

Cannabidiol or CBD is one of the chemical compounds found in marijuana and hemp plants. Unlike THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) which is the part of the plant that gives the familiar high to users, CBD is often used to relieve anxiety, pain, and to help with sleep issues. I used it on a senior dog (with a vet’s supervision) to relieve his arthritis, and it seemed to help. CBD products became legal to buy in 2018 though CBD hemp oil was easy to find before that without having to find a dealer in a back alley somewhere. Since it became legal however it has become popular as a ‘natural’ remedy for many ailments. In the U.S. sales of CBD products could hit $4.16 billion CAD ($3.04 billion USD) this year and in Canada sales are expected to reach $300 million CAD ($219.2 million USD) in 2025. There is only one U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved CBD drug for human use. A 2022 study found that use of CBD drops, topicals, edibles, vapes, and capsules is common and on the rise in Canada and the US even though consumers had “relatively low levels of knowledge and understanding”.

While the sales figures are impressive and the fans and proponents of CBD products are many, a new clinical trial suggests there is little evidence of its efficacy and questions about its safety according to an NBC story earlier this month. The new study was published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The study evaluated CBD usage based on dosages reported by consumers of CBD products. Most of the people in the study did not show any problems but 5% showed signs of liver damage. That might not seem a lot, but participants receiving a placebo had no signs of liver damage and the authors considered the results significant.

While some claims about CBD's benefits are disputed, some research has indicated that it may have certain positive effects.

Over-the-counter CBD is marketed as a supplement and not as a medication which means the testing, rules, and regulations are different so as is the case with most supplements, the common sense rule applies: Consult your doctor before using this product.

As the talk of more pipelines ramps up in the halls of political and corporate power in many parts of Canada, there is no shortage of ideas about where they should run. Each route comes with questions about how it would affect the environment, the impact on Indigenous communities, and what it will mean to the bottom-line numbers for oil companies and for the economy.

One of those options started to get more attention back in February and this week a CBC headline said it may be time for Manitoba to prepare for year-round shipping access carrying everything from oil and gas to grain to construction materials. Almost unnoticed last week was a decision by the Canada Energy Regulator to allow liquified natural gas exports through Hudson Bay.

It seems to have become inevitable.

Hudson Bay and the Port of Churchill have a history dating back to fur trading days as a hub for import and export traffic because it is the shortest route from Western Canada to Europe. Though whaling and fur trading brought it to prominence, when a rail line was completed in 1929 (at a cost of $45M) it became a major centre for agricultural exports from the West.

Apart from the political and economic drivers of the renewed interest in the Port of Churchill, climate change and major advances in ship design is bringing it closer to become a year-round route to Europe.

The environmental cost of turning it into a major shipping route is significant.

A 2021 report prepared by Calgary-based Western Energy Corridor Inc. is worth taking the time to read both for what is says as it lays out the case for a corridor ending at Hudson Bay, but also for its glossing over of environmental considerations.

It ignores the ever-present threat of an oil spill or that the route will cross and likely alter or destroy wetlands and peatlands. Given that Churchill is famous for its polar bears and now equally for the environmental threat to those bears, the report does not say a word about it. Inevitably an energy corridor from the West to Churchill will increase shipping traffic and roads which will break up habitats and ecosystems. With greater access to a port, we’ll see increased fossil fuel development and mining which is of course the whole purpose of the corridor, but each one of those developments, regardless of size and scope, carry an environmental impact.

The threat to Hudson Bay land and marine life is not all down to increased shipping or pipelines. Much if it is climate change, pure and simple.

I may not be writing about it anymore, but I’ll be following the development closely.

My last story for my last newsletter is fittingly about something I have written about many times.

Coffee. (or any of the slang terms for your favourite brew)

Ground coffee has gone up in price by 19% since the start of this year. Considering we average 2.7 cups of coffee a day in Canada (Americans knock back 3 per day), that will start to hurt eventually.

We could blame the US tariffs for the jump but unless it passes through an American supplier, coffee is mostly unaffected by tariffs here in Canada. In the US however, if the 50% tariff on products from Brazil takes effect on August 1^st, there will be a lot of unhappy sleepyheads first thing in the morning.

Growing coffee is a risky business at the best of times but climate change has made it significantly worse, and it is the price of the green beans from producers that is jolting your pocketbook as much as the caffeine jolt you are after. A 2022 literature review in the journal Plants, said that temperature extremes, precipitation extremes (drought and waterlogging), and disease and pests are all driving down yields while demand continues to increase. Brazil, the top coffee producing country, is at one end of the spectrum with the worst drought in decades, while Vietnam has experienced severe flooding.

Coffee chains like Tim Hortons, which serves up 5 million cups a day, and Starbucks have full time departments focused solely on securing long term coffee supplies so you may not notice those price changes as dramatically as buying your home coffee supplies, but that too will not last.

What choice do those of us hooked on the black brew have? Well, there are coffee substitutes, which apart from not having the same taste, usually lack caffeine. I have tried several of the alternatives and the only one that I have stuck with is Camp Coffee, which is a blend of coffee extract and chicory that has been around since 1885. It doesn’t really taste like coffee, but it is pleasant tasting and does contain some caffeine. You won’t find it on the average store shelf and will need to track it down in shops specializing in British imports, but they tend to run out regularly.

So now that you have the final edition out of the way, pour a cup of what is increasingly becoming liquid gold, and listen this podcast from The Big Story. It has everything you need to know about the future of coffee in Canada.

Thanks for all your support over the years!

Now that’s a headline I didn’t see coming.

Taping your mouth while you sleep will give you more energy and improve your looks and there is even a specific tape to get the job done. At least if you rely on TikTok for your healthy living advice, that is.

Apparently, the idea is based on very slim evidence says an article by Jonathan Jarry from the McGill Office for Science and Society. Thank goodness I had not already stocked up on Joe Rogan’s favourite “hostage tape” before discovering the story.

The idea of mouth taping grew out of a 2020 book by James Nestor, called “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, which according to the author’s website will prompt you to “never breathe the same again”. It didn’t take long before it was a hit on social media, garnering 69.2 million of those hits when I last checked. A little push from people like Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t hurt. In fairness to Mr. Nestor, his book was more grounded in the science of genuine breathing problems than it was in hostage tape, TikTok, and the opinions of influencers.

Not wanting to miss out on what could be an easy path to health in my old age I did some digging. A paper from earlier this year in the American Journal of Otolaryngology conducted an extensive literature search and came to the same conclusion as Jonathan Jarry. Namely that “Most TikTok mouth-taping claims are not supported by the literature” and “more high-quality research is needed”. The DIY practice of mouth-taping may in fact be potentially unsafe for people hoping to treat their sleep disorder breathing or sleep apnea according to a peer-reviewed PLOS One article in May. No less an authority than Glamour Magazine on the other hand will give you a guide on how to tape up your lips.

What is true is that breathing through your mouth exclusively can cause problems which was part of James Nestor’s book. It can result in a more fragmented sleep, you end up snoring more, and there is an increased risk of dental problems. In a quick-fix world however, using tape at night, seems, well.. a simpler quick fix and not a long-term solution. As an asthmatic and a former competitive runner, I learned a long time ago how to use breathing exercises such as these ones recommended by the American Lung Association. The benefits of that approach are numerous because breathing is controlled by several muscles and organs. Your lungs, diaphragm, the muscles between your ribs, muscles in your face and neck which come into play when you exert yourself, and your windpipe. It is a complex system that is not controlled by your mouth.

There are also a host of lifestyle habits that can affect your breathing while you sleep, ranging from caffeine and alcohol intake, to stress, to the temperature of your bedroom. And of course, social media influence which may send you down a whole different road. So, take a deep breath and put down the duct tape.

This is shaping up to be a good year for ticks in parts of Canada and the U.S. which makes it a bad year for people and pets.

Last week, Montreal’s public health department said that Lyme disease is now endemic on the island of Montreal and that people should take extra precautions to avoid contracting the tick-borne disease.

According to Tick Talk Canada, ticks are an arachnid like spiders, mites, and scorpions. They don’t jump, fly, or drop from trees. They get around by crawling. There are 40 species in Canada and while you may think of them as preferring more remote or rural areas you need a reality check if you and your dog want to stay tick-free. The little critters like wooded areas, tall grasses, and hide out in leaf litter. For me, that makes at least two city parks within walking distance, and my own backyard as an ideal tick hang out.

A tick can carry up to a dozen different diseases and because they thrive on blood can easily transmit one of those diseases to wildlife, pets, and you. The most common disease and the one that triggered the warning in Montreal, is Lyme disease.

Lyme disease has proved to be a difficult disease to accurately diagnose and treat. Symptoms can appear anywhere from three to thirty days after a bite. Stage 1 of the disease can mimic other diseases, but include fever, headache, tiredness, joint stiffness, muscle aches and pains, and swollen lymph nodes, and if left untreated it gets progressively worse. Even testing for the disease is not an exact science says the Canadian Lyme Disease Association.

Antibiotics are effective early on, but long-term antibiotic treatment is often required. The other complicating factor in treatment is that co-infections can arise along with Lyme disease. A specific enzyme is also being studied as a possible treatment. Unfortunately Lyme disease can remain dormant for extended periods of time – perhaps even years. A study published in April and funded by the Global Lyme Alliance said that the remnants of the Lyme bacteria can continue to cause inflammation long after treatment has been completed and other symptoms have subsided.

A CBC story in June said there is some hope for a vaccine that is undergoing clinical trials in 9,000 people living in the eastern United States, Eastern Canada and parts of Europe. You can get one for your dog already however.

In Canada there were 144 cases in 2009. In 2024 there were more than 5,000. As ticks bask in the warmth of climate change at least one expert says we could have half a million cases in Canada every year by 2050.

An NPR story from last month will give you a quick overview of ticks and how to handle a slow threat that needs quick action when you are enjoying your walk in a city park or a hike in the mountains.

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The 138^th edition of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships got underway this week, and for the first time will use the automated Hawk-Eye technology for line calls. Often referred to as the best-dressed line judges in the game, most of the 300 Wimbledon line judges that were part of the annual event will be out of a job. The tournament has used Hawk-Eye since 2012 for players to challenge line calls made by human line judges, but this year it is fully automated. About 80 or so people will be kept on as “match assistants” to be on hand if the technology fails.

The Hawk-Eye system at Wimbledon uses 12 high-speed cameras positioned around the court to track the path and position of the ball to within three millimetres. That’s 0.11 inches and if you have watched enough tennis, you’ll have an idea of just how difficult it is for the human eye to make a correct call on a ball travelling at 193 kph (120 mph). The information feeds into a computer system and if a ball lands out or there is a foot fault, a voice is triggered within milliseconds to shout out the call. That voice is an actual recorded human voice which the BBC says are those of people working behind the scenes including tour guides. Different voices are used on different courts to avoid confusion.

Hawk-Eye got its start in 2001 for cricket and has made its way into 23 major sport leagues since then. The pandemic gave it a big boost as sports venues looked at ways to keep events going while reducing the number of people needed to support games and tournaments.

Wimbledon had vowed to not put Hawk-Eye to full time use, but now that it has given in to the technology, the French Open is the last major tennis tournament to rely on people-powered line calls.

We’ll know next year if they remain the holdout.

AI can do a lot of things. What it can’t do is the work of tradespeople. It can’t crawl under your kitchen sink to fix a leak or sit on a backhoe on location to excavate the foundation for new homes or the trenches for sewers and pipelines. Those tasks need people who work in the trades sector, and 700,000 of those are set retire over the next few years. 245,100 of them in the construction sector alone. To bring more tradespeople in to the sector you need people to teach them and according to a CBC story, we also have a shortage of shop class teachers. In a bit of a chicken and egg problem, between 2016 and 2021 the number of tradespeople aged 15-24 dropped by over 31,000. Fewer students in shop class means fewer shop teachers, which makes fewer shop classes available.

One reason why young people are not rushing into the trades may be outdated stigmas as RBC highlighted in a 2021 report. The trades are often viewed as heavy, dirty work not suitable for “white collar students”. Back when I took shop (and I was bad at it!) fixing a car or manually turning a table leg on a lathe required skill and craftmanship but it was not the future that guidance counsellors steered us towards. Fast forward to today where a tradesperson needs a computer background to navigate the software in your car or to understand what is needed for a computerized lathe to turn out a perfectly cut piece of wood, and to understand a set of error codes flashing on your energy efficient furnace when it fails.

Skilled workers are getting older and retiring and the number of young people coming in to fill the gap is dropping and Canadian plastics said last week it is only going to get worse. They suggest that education programs are not aligned with market demand, that apprentice programs should be less rigidly time-based and more competency based, and that there should be tax incentives for employers to invest in more training and upskilling programs for those already in the workforce.

Our housing shortage is a real problem as well and no government policy is going to solve the problem if there are not enough people to build the house and develop the infrastructure to service a future housing boom. Remember those 245,000 construction workers set to retire? The Business Council of Alberta said recently in a Calgary Herald article that efforts to stimulate housing starts will fall flat without workers. Among the problems says the Council is one already noted in this story. “Some people tend to look down on blue-collar workers as not being as smart as other people”.

I for one never thought I could rebuild a carburetor or that a YouTube DIY video would help me fix my stove.
Give me a skilled tradesperson anytime.

In a recent Bloomberg podcast (you’ll probably need a subscription to hear the whole thing) about energy hungry technology, the guest was Mike Schroepfer, a former chief technology officer with Meta and now the head of the venture firm Gigascale Capital. The discussion covered a lot of ground, but much of it focused on where investment is headed as clean tech loses its luster and AI energy demand is attracting new energy investments. No sooner had I heard him say that it is generally not a good idea to bet on technology that doesn’t exist yet, than Google said it had agreed to buy 200 megawatts of fusion power from Commonwealth Power Systems, an MIT spinoff company that has yet to generate any fusion power. Nor has any other company yet to generate fusion power.

Despite the lack of success and no proven technology, the latest update from TechCrunch of startups which have raised more than $100M USD for fusion power has 12 entries. The list includes Canadian company General Fusion which has Jeff Bezos as one of its investors. Like many fusion startups it has hit a “rough patch” and laid off a quarter of its staff in May, less than a month after Intelligence Brief said it could “change the future of global energy”.

Which begs a question asked by The Washington Post last month – why spend billions of dollars on it?

The answer lies in what fusion power is and what it could be. While commercial fusion power is not a reality, fusion is very real. It is what keeps the sun shining at 100 million degrees Celsius. In the sun, light hydrogen atoms combine to form heavier atoms like helium. The process releases huge amounts of energy which could be harnessed to produce electricity. Science has been chasing the dream of taking a tiny amount of fuel to create a tremendous amount of energy since the 1960s. It didn’t take long to understand what fusion was and grasp its potential, but the problem lies in those extreme temperatures and containing the energy. Solving that problem puts the world on the path to a zero-carbon source of energy. In the case of fusion, it really is zero-carbon. Not carbon stored somewhere else or by the switcheroo of trading carbon credits. It uses an isotope of hydrogen as the fuel, generates no greenhouse gases, and operates continuously. Unlike nuclear fission reactors used now, fusion reactors would not generate long lived nuclear waste, and the process does not translate into a new type of bomb. Check the International Atomic Energy Agency’s FAQs on fusion for the complete lowdown.

Bottom line is that the potential is there but realizing it could be as far away as the next century according to a cosmologist writing on Space.com. Or sooner?!

Chances are you have a can of Del Monte fruit somewhere in your kitchen or your pantry. USA Today calls it an “iconic brand” and CNN refers to it as a “grocery staple”. Yet those headlines are accompanied by news of the 138-year-old company filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week in the United States. In a media release the company goes all-in on business speak and says it is announcing “Strategic Action to Strengthen Financial Position and Pursue a Value-Maximizing Sale”. The release also says it has secured financing to continue operations while it looks for a buyer.

Apart from its canned fruit products the company owns the Contadina tomato brand, College Inn and Kitchen Basics broth brands, and the Joyba bubble tea shop brand. Those products continue to perform well, but an Associated Press story quotes an analyst as saying that consumers are shifting away from preservative-laden canned food in favour of healthier alternatives. In a post on X , Sylvain Charlebois from the Dalhousie Agri-Food Analytics Lab said that to survive, Del Monte needs to pivot fast, as consumers shift towards fresher and healthier options.

While the taste of a fresh peach may be much better than opening a can of peaches, the cost and seasonality of fresh peaches in Canada works against the idea of skipping past the canned fruit (or vegetables) aisle in your grocery store. Studies have shown that the nutritional value of fresh vs frozen is similar. Consumers do still have to read the label and look for no sugar or salt added to make the best decisions. Dalhousie’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab has said that consumers can get high nutritional value at a lower price point by adding frozen produce to their shopping list. Its Food Price Report 2025 found that affordability was the most significant factor in food purchases which again, puts the lower price of canned or frozen produce as a reasonable alternative.

Fresh fruits and vegetables also account for 45% of food waste in Canada and the long shelf life of canned produce reduces the waste and saves money in the long run. The latest Canada food guide goes as far as to offer “10 reasons to buy frozen vegetables and fruits”.

While Del Monte may indeed have fallen victim to a shift in consumer preferences perhaps the real issue is about consumer perceptions of fresh vs canned or frozen.

A story this week from CBC is another example of how climate change and other human activity, is messing with the minds and migration of birds. The least flycatcher is a tiny bird that enjoys our Canadian summers and like many humans, head south for Mexico or South America when winter rolls around.

In a paper published in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology, Alberta researchers used 32 years’ worth of data from 7,000 banded birds to conclude that it was heading south two weeks earlier than in the past. The least flycatcher, like most birds, takes cues from its environment to decide when to make its migration. While heading out on the migration flight two weeks earlier might seem to be a minor deviation it is enough to cause problems. Leaving earlier in the spring may send the bird into heavier storms and while nesting, could face more extreme heat making it difficult for the young to survive.

This study adds to the growing body of evidence that changes to migratory patterns caused by climate change are putting increased stress on birds around the world. An MSN story notes that birds arriving early to their usual breeding grounds may face food shortages, exacerbated by insects changing their own life cycles because of climate change. Birds which rely on wetlands enroute to their destination are finding those habitats dried up, dug up, or paved over.

This disruption of cycles for birds, insects, and other biological events is called a “phenological mismatch”. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Animal Ecology linked the green-up of forest canopy trees, emergence of adult butterflies and the arrival and breeding of migratory birds. The result of the new human-made timing mismatch caused problems for bird and insect populations.

If you want a detailed look at the types of problems facing migratory birds in our changing world, this six-minute documentary is a well-produced look at whooping crane migration from Texas to Alberta and back again. The Whooper Highway was produced by Cornell Lab of Ornithology and uses data visualization to tell the story. I highly recommend this one.

Read, comment, subscribe, and share this newsletter.

Bes sure to check my series of short stories based on Chris de Burgh’s 1975 album Spanish Train and Other Stories.

As I work on other projects, 1 Week 7 Stories will continue to arrive in your Inbox every other week.

The Direct-to-Consumer genetic testing company 23andMe is facing tough times including a Chapter 11 filing under the US bankruptcy code. What will happen to the personal genetic and health information of its customers?

23andMe was founded in 2006 and I dived in shortly afterwards to have my genome sequenced by the company. I was working for a NFP biotech research organization, and I submitted spit kits to several companies and start-ups so we could compare results and see what this brave new world of genetic testing was all about. 23andMe is the second of the for-profit companies I have engaged with to be sold, one of the not-for-profit organizations folded, and the final two for-profits changed their business model considerably and I eventually cancelled my account with them.

As part of its information disclosure to 23andMe customers, Kroll Restructuring Administration LLC sent out an email with links to information including an extensive background to the case and a notice of the potential change of personal information from the bankruptcy court. None of the information sent out to customers suggested that any action was necessary by customers though many privacy experts have recommended deleting your personal information.

At the beginning of this week, 23andMe reached an agreement with TTAM Research Institute, a nonprofit public benefit corporation run by Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder of 23andme to take over the company. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals had been considered the most likely to win the bidding but according to a TTAM media release its successful bid has been approved by the 23andMe Board of Directors though it still needs court approval. The media release also outlined how TTAM has made binding commitments to “adopt additional consumer protections and privacy safeguards to enhance protections for customer data and privacy”.

Case closed now? Maybe not. Apart from the pending court approval, it is not clear how TTAM will turn around the balance sheet of 23andMe or what existing customers can expect to see in the future. Right now, as new information and research comes to light on how genetics affect our health and well being, customers get updates on how their genetic profile fits into the picture. The problems facing 23andMe have also raised numerous question about the privacy of genetic data and those questions remain no matter what happens next in this saga.

I personally have confidence in how my data will be handled, but like the other 15 million or so customers I will be keeping an eye on what comes next.

In 2018 Google dropped the phrase “Don’t be evil” from the opening of its code of conduct. It eventually was added to the very end of the document where it now says.

And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”

Well time to speak up.

Earlier this year Google dropped its commitment to not use artificial intelligence technology in weapons or surveillance. According to an article in The Conversation it came after the current White House administration revoked a Biden order to create a “safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of AI”. The company defended its AI decision by saying it had “over corrected” in some instances including when it withdrew from its involvement in the U.S. Air Force’s Project Maven in 2018. Google and its parent company Alphabet have been accused of firing employees who have protested the companies involvement in defence contracts and students from 120 universities have pledged to refuse work at Google or Amazon because of their contracts to provide computing services and infrastructure to the Government of Israel.

A paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that companies such as Google and Microsoft have found the U.S. military to be a “willing partner”. Large tech firms have become so involved in military applications of their technologies that Time magazine said last year they have turned the war in Ukraine into an “AI War Lab”.

A paper in the March/April edition of Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy points out that large digital platforms are dominating global R & D and are cornering patents on new technology including artificial intelligence. They have managed to achieve a choke hold on the “digital-military-industrial-complex”. These companies have benefited from government and military technology (think of ARPANET which made the Internet possible) and were subsequently handed a free reign to develop them for their own profit.

As Big Tech and the military sectors become more dependent on each other and vast amounts of tax dollars are spent on companies using our data, we need reconsider what we give away every time we point, click, and download.

In the science fiction novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling a very different Industrial Revolution takes place in the mid 1800s after mechanical computers powered by steam engines change the world in unimaginable ways. The extensive use of steam power fueled largely by coal also starts to change the environment and most of the novel takes place during The Stink which was a thick smog made worse by hot temperatures.

The novel is a work of fiction (and arguably a kick start to the steampunk genre) but new research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the real Industrial Revolution was already wrecking the climate. According to an article in Nature, today’s technology would have been able to link the burning of fossil fuels, the rise in CO2 emissions, and temperature rise as early as the 1860s. In the 1850s scientists were beginning to understand that carbon and CO2 could trap heat. The authors of the paper used historical data from these Victorian era scientists, new data from research on ice cores, and computer modelling, to pose what they call a ‘thought experiment’ to determine when scientists would have been able to realise “human-caused temperature fingerprints” had they possessed better tool.

I think I have the essence of my next short story!

“…if early warning systems had existed—and been taken seriously—society might have understood its role in climate change far earlier.”

Regular readers of this newsletter probably know that I like my coffee, especially first thing in the morning while catching up on the news.

A new study in the Journal of Nutrition has handed me a new reason to stick with my coffee habit. Better yet, a media release from Tufts University points out that it is my favourite black coffee that is associated with a 14% lower risk of mortality compared to no coffee consumption. The link was not seen in coffee with high amounts of added sugar or saturated fat. A separate study published in May in Nutrition, Metabolism, and Cardiovascular Diseases focused on adults with prediabetes, but seems to have arrived at similar results associated with total amount of coffee, sugar-free coffee, and caffeinated coffee consumption. Women fare even better when it comes to links between coffee and healthy aging. A New York Times article this month says that in a long-term study of 47,000 female nurses that began in the 1970s there was a lower risk of certain chronic diseases, and “healthy aging” associated with caffeine consumption.

Canadians drink an average of 2.8 cups of coffee per day and spend about $35.21 per month on coffee. The study found that at least one cup per day was associated with a 16% lower risk and that two or three cups a day to upped the number to a 17% lower risk.

Now the bad news. According to Dr. Roger Norton in this video, coffee prices are on the rise and are going to continue to rise. Demand is up and supplies are down and the market is making the decisions.

Drink up while you can!

The Strait of Hormuz has Iran on one side and the UAE and Oman on the other. It connects the Persian Gulf to the open sea. It is wide and deep enough to handle the largest oil tankers and in a post this week the U.S. Energy Information Administration said it is one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints ( narrow shipping channels that are critical to global energy security). Even a temporary hold up in the region will delay oil supplies and raise shipping costs.

As tensions in the Middle East escalate, the shipping lane is in increasing danger and this week two giant oil tankers collided and caught fire, adding to concerns. The Front Eagle, a 335-meter (1,000 foot) supertanker and a smaller vessel collided on Tuesday. According to Al Jazeera, the incident was not related to the war between Iran and Israel and was a “navigational” incident. Last week the UK Maritime Trade Operations issued a warning of increased electronic interference causing problems for vessels to report their position which could lead to more ‘navigational incidents’. (the UKMTO site also has a good interactive map of maritime incidents and warnings)

About a third of global oil supplies and a significant amount of LNG pass through the Strait and if the situation continues to deteriorate, we could see widespread energy disruption.

Deutsche Welle wrote this week that the waterway is only 33 km (21 mi) wide at its narrowest point making it a crowded passage open to disruption. The article also said shippers are tightening security or canceling routes.

We are already feeling the effects on gasoline prices according to GasBuddy which tracks gasoline prices and globally, oil prices jumped as soon as Israel and Iran began their open conflict. Keep your eyes on the news and your mouse hovering over your investments.

Even before he took on the role of Secretary of Health and Human Services in the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was vocal about wanting to see artificial dyes removed from food products. While he was still being considered for the job, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided to ban Red No. 3 dye in food and medications. Red 3 is what gives your favourite cupcake or Skittles, a bright, cherry-red colour. Another dye, Red 40 is found in 36,000 food products in the U.S., and your kid’s bowl of Fruit Loops contains Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Green 2, and Blue 1. The list goes on.

RFK’s new job is starting to have an impact without having to pass more regulations. This week Kraft Heinz said it would remove all artificial colours in U.S. products by 2027 and would not be producing any new products containing “Food, Drug, and Cosmetic colors” (the official designation). The company said it would replace the dyes with natural colouring, create new colours or shades, or simply remove some colours.

In April, PepsiCo said it would “accelerate” its transition to natural ingredients to replace artificial colours, Tyson Foods is moving toward total removal of synthetic dyes, and following an investigation by the Attorney General of Texas, General Mills has agreed to remove artificial dyes from its products.

A Washington Post story this week quotes Consumer Reports’ director of food policy as saying we may notice a “slight change in the color of some products, but it would be one of those situations where you really have to be looking for it.”

Evidence of the harmful effects of food dyes is still inconclusive and here in Canada we are somewhat ahead of the U.S. in managing how they are used.

As we are often reminded, “check the label” before you buy.

Looking for some peace and quiet, a place to escape the apocalypse, or just a chance to unplug from the pace of life in the 21^st century?
How about your very own private island?

For £5.5 million (a lot in any currency, but about $10 million Canadian) Shuna Island off the west coast of Scotland is yours – castle and sheep included. Such a deal doesn’t come around often – the last time the island came up for sale was 80 years ago when it was bought by Viscountess Selby who passed away in 2023.

According to the real estate listing you will also get eight residential properties and “1,110 acres with 81 acres of permanent pasture, 640 acres of rough grazing, and over 300 acres of native woodland and foreshore”. The settled history goes back 9,000 years and there are Stone Age burial mounds and Iron Ages sites on the island which The Guardian once called an “overlooked jewel”.

Looking for something closer to home? Private Islands Inc has lots to choose from to buy or to rent right here in Canada.

Happy island hunting!

Read, comment, subscribe, and share this newsletter.

I have a series of short stories based on Chris de Burgh’s 1975 album Spanish Train and Other Stories. The collection is now complete, and you can find them here on Substack.

There is a new kid on the COVID block. It is called NB.1.8.1 and it is getting special attention among the six new variants being monitored by the World Health Organization. But relax and don’t reach for your mask and hand sanitizer yet because public health officials say there is no reason to panic. In fact, despite a number of mutations seen over the last couple of months, none have moved from the monitoring stage to becoming a variant of concern.

The reason this new variant is getting additional attention is because while overall numbers remain low, there has been a significant rise in the proportion of the variant. It now accounts for 10.7% of the number of COVID genome sequences submitted to the WHO. It has been detected in 22 countries, but so far not in Canada though it has surfaced in the country south of us where recommendations for the COVID vaccine are being reduced. As we learned when COVID first hit, the virus doesn’t need a passport to find a new place to call home so we can expect to welcome it here soon.

Symptoms of the variant are the same as what we have seen in the past including a cough, fatigue, headache, change in your sense of smell, and diarrhea. Keeping it at bay is also the same as we have been advised in the past. If you have symptoms, stay at home until you feel better. Wash your hands, dig out your hand sanitizer, wear a mask if you are more susceptible, and get vaccinated because existing vaccine formulations will still help protect you against the variant. (A new Moderna vaccine has been approved in the U.S. and will be ready for the 2025-2026 respiratory virus season)

So yes, a new variant lives among us and we don’t need to be anxious about it. However the spread of the new variant is a reminder that COVID is now endemic, meaning that it is like the flu and will always be with is. It will also continue to generate new variants because that is one of the specialties of a virus.

Best way to keep it from becoming an epidemic again? A shot in the arm of common sense.

If you go to the corporate web pages for Meta – the owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger and WhatsApp – the company lays out its principles:

• Give People a Voice

• Build Connection and Community

• Serve Everyone

• Keep People Safe and Protect Privacy

• Promote Economic Opportunity

Open the pages of TechCrunch and it might surprise you to learn that Meta is now in partnership with defense contractor Anduril which specializes in ‘transforming the military with advanced technology’. According to the TechCrunch article, the two are set to venture into the “potentially lucrative” military VR/AR/XR headset market. I guess that at least qualifies at an economic opportunity.

Anduril was founded by Palmer Luckey who designed the Oculus Rift virtual reality head-mounted display and founded Oculus VR to develop and market the device. In 2014 he sold Oculus VR to Facebook for $2 billion US and by 2017 had founded Anduril which now has billions of dollars in government contracts. Breaking Defense news quotes Luckey as saying the new deal is part of his mission and long turn goal “to turn warfighters into technomancers”. For the uninitiated, the billionaire is referring to the idea of a magician who combines magic and technology. It has nothing to do with warfare or soldiers and more to do with video gaming, role playing games, and Dr. Who. And of course, a couple of rich guys who see warfare as an economic game to be won or lost. Perhaps even more disturbing about these boys and their toys is Luckey’s view that in the “world we live in, I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapons system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all."

The Washington Post says one of the first projects for the partnership will be the EagleEye Helmut for soldiers in the field which will give them “increased lethality, mobility, and situational awareness”.

The new venture may prove to be the next generation in improving battlefield weaponry, but augmented reality has been in the field for a few years now. Augmented reality rifle scopes provide real time information such as range, wind drift, target tracking, magnification, and low light assistance. It isn’t just to help the military. Weekend warriors who need an edge over low-tech deer can purchase them over the counter.

Some of these high tech systems such as SmartSight come with built in GPS and wireless connectivity to share and distribute information, and situational awareness to limit shooting within safety zones and to avoid friendly fire incidents.

In the 1800s a muzzle loader was considered accurate up to 90 metres or 100 yards though half that was practical in the heat of battle. Today a high-tech soldier can expect to have an accurate and lethal shot at 1,800 metres or 2,000 yards, which developers of new field weaponry say has the benefit of reducing loss of life on the battlefield.

We’ll stick with high-tech for a hit of space news about the plucky little Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 to fly by Jupiter and Saturn. It completed that part of the mission by 1980 and in 1988 had travelled far enough to become the most distant human-made object in space. It is still out there at 167.24 Astronomical Units or about 15.4 billion miles. It takes 23 hours for a signal to reach the earth from the aging spacecraft and its antenna has to be precisely aligned to get the job done. However, problems with the thrusters needed to maintain the orientation put that communication in jeopardy. The cause of the problem seemed to be internal heaters (it is really cold in deep space) which were considered dead in 2004. With complete failure a possibility, engineers puzzled through the problem and recently sent a series of commands to the spacecraft to restart the heaters. It was a nail-biting 23 hours to get the command there and another 23 hours to get the answer back, but the fix worked and for the moment at least, Voyager 1 has had “yet another miracle save”.

Meanwhile, no miracle save for SpaceX when its Starship prototype had another “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (how they say that with a straight face is beyond me). The rocket made it off the ground, but its first stage Super Heavy booster section blew up instead of splashing down into the Gulf of Mexico. The upper stage continued as planned but failed to open its payload doors to deploy Starlink satellite “simulators”, but it carried on until it sprang leaks and spun out of control. SpaceX put on a brave face noting that the upper stage flew further than the two previous flights so it was a “big improvement over last flight!”.

Against the back drop of reports of drug use by the company’s CEO Elon Musk and back lash to his role in cutting US government costs, the last few weeks have not been kind to SpaceX.

To date, NASA alone has invested more than $15 billion in SpaceX and there are ongoing contracts with other agencies including $1.8 billion to develop a spy satellite. Ongoing rapid unscheduled disassemblies could prove to be a financial problem as well as a technology issue.

I go to the gym at the University of Calgary several times a week. Campus life ebbs and flows over the year and right now the University is deep into convocation and graduation season. The gym hosts high school graduation ceremonies and the university’s own convocation events and facilities are booked solid for 2 weeks as everyone dons caps and gowns.

The tradition of the cap and gown began as a matter of necessity. Central heating is a relatively modern convenience from the 1800s, so 12^th century universities were cold places for students and teachers. When it came time for the ceremonial procession of medieval scholars, caps and gowns were designed and worn as a practical way to keep warm in large spaces. The cap we see today evolved from hoods (now worn over the shoulders) which were warmer but as heating technology improved, the uniforms of academia became more symbolic of academic success. After the diplomas have been presented, graduates are allowed to move the tassel on their cap from the right to the left to symbolize the transition from student to graduate. The tossing of the caps into the air is a modern addition to the ceremony and is attributed to graduates from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1912 when graduates received a new cap to signify their new status and tossed the old ones away in celebration.

Individual institutions may have their own variations for colours and styles but in Canada we generally follow the North American Intercollegiate Code for Bachelors', Masters', and Doctors' degrees as you’ll see in this comprehensive list from U of C. Most schools use black as the base colour and customize the look off that base.

As the graduates arrive to collect their degrees the music you most often will hear is Pomp and Circumstance first performed in 1902 to honour the coronation of King Edward VII. NPR has a great podcast from 2003 that explains it all for you.

I barely remember my high school grad and my university celebration is a blur, but thanks to smartphones and social media, graduation day is never likely to be forgotten again.

For some of us, that might be a good thing!

Take a deep breath. Maybe you can smell newly cut grass or burgers cooking on the neighbour’s BBQ. Or maybe the exhaust of cars. What you can’t smell is environmental DNA. The air is full of it and a recent study says we can track everything from elusive bobcats to illicit drugs by analyzing airborne DNA. Researchers sucked up air in two study locations, one in Dublin and one in a forest in Florida.

A media release from the University of Florida said that with compact and affordable equipment, a researcher can capture air samples and using gene sequencing technology, have the results in less than a day. The Dublin samples yielded signs of human pathogens, common allergens, and drugs such as cannabis and magic mushrooms. The Florida samples found bobcats and venomous spiders.

The idea of collecting all-inclusive samples of environmental DNA (eDNA) from soil and water has become well established because living organisms are constantly shedding genetically rich bits of skin, mucus, waste, or pollen. Collecting water or soil samples can yield a treasure trove of genetic information about what species are part of a given ecosystem. An important aspect of eDNA is that it can be collected in a non-invasive and cost-effective manner. In some cases the sequencing can be so precise that it can identify individual animals – or people.

The Nature paper from the University of Florida researchers noted that eDNA can not only track genetic biodiversity, but offer advance warning of potentially harmful disease pathogens, monitor pest species, find evidence of antimicrobial resistance, and aid in narcotic surveillance.

In Canada, 12 new projects worth $11.3M were announced last month by Genome Canada to use eDNA technology to monitor environmental changes to help policy makers address health threats and biodiversity loss.

And while the technology behind it is complex, all it takes is a good sample of our air, water, and soil to start the process.

Telehealth was already showing it could improve health outcomes in people and when COVID struck, doctor visits by phone or video took a sharp rise in Canada and the United States. A new study shows that pet telehealth is also on the rise and can benefit Fluffy the cat and your favourite Fido.

Researchers at University of California, Davis worked with pet owners in Canada and the U.S. to see how beneficial video calls are for pet owners and their pets. The study zeroed in on a specific condition for cats and a UC Davis press release this week said that 95% of those who took part said they would pay for telehealth visits. Arthritis is common in cats and rates can be as high as 64 to 92 percent in cats over 10 years of age. The telehealth sessions were not meant to replace in-person visits and focused on advice, not medicine, so a registered veterinary technician could conduct the calls without a veterinarian. The results of the study were published in Frontiers in Veterinary Medicine and suggested pet owners preferred the video appointments to get advice and learn more about managing feline arthritis in the home. With 6.2 million Canadian households with a cat and 37-40 million in the US, the implications are significant.

The potential is not lost on the pet care industry.

In the US, the online pet pharmacy PetMed Express and virtual veterinary care provider Dutch announced a partnership to cover the country with a membership model service to diagnose and prescribe virtual care for pets. The idea of telehealth for pets has become attractive enough that it is becoming a popular and effective add-on to employee benefit programs.

With veterinary care costs rising, telehealth can help reduce the financial burden. Not surprisingly, the virtual pet care advice has also captured the attention of AI startups who want to further those savings. Vet-Ai for instance offers AI driven consultations, symptom checker, and online medication services. Google searches for “AI vet” and “AI pet care” grew by 143% and 107% respectively in just the last month according to a story in StartupHub this week.

In Ohio where veterinary telehealth is not allowed, legislators voted this week to change the law to make it legal. The committee discussion also revealed some of the downsides when a veterinarian said she had “encountered countless cases where verbal symptom descriptions pointed to one diagnosis, but physical examination revealed a different condition — or multiple concurrent problems “. Other potential downsides to the virtual vet visit include a breakdown in the trust factor that develops over time with in-person visits, more subtle signs of disease, and the possibility of higher costs when an in-person visit is still deemed necessary.

The future is more likely a hybrid model where virtual visits become just one part of an overall approach to keeping our four-legged friends happy and healthy.

Before getting into this story, I’ll declare my bias. A cute little orange goldfish swimming around in a little bowl with a couple of cute underwater features strikes me as cruel for the fish trapped in that limiting environment.

Releasing them into the wild however, is not an alternative.

A 9.2 hectare pond near Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island is in danger of being invaded by those cute little gold fish that likely ended up in the pond after their owners got as bored with the fish as the fish were in their little bowl. The problem is, goldfish are an invasive species and once in the wild can grow to 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) and eat everything in sight including other fish, fish eggs, and insects while also digging up silt from the bottom of the pond. In short, they change the ecology of wherever they are and can end up in other waterways. A pond in Kitchener, Ontario is facing a similar problem, Sylvan Lake, Alberta has issued warnings about releasing goldfish, and in 2022 biologists said there were 20,000 goldfish in a stormwater pond near Toronto. Last year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported finding a 4kg (8.8 lb) goldfish in Lake Erie they nicknamed Megalodon.

Goldfish or Carassius auratus are not native to North America. They originated in Asia and became popular as an ornamental pet and traded across Europe. By the 1600s they had made it into the wild in the U.S. (likely by European colonists) and in the 1800s found a foothold (or is that finhold) in Canada. They have the rather colourful reputation of being “suck, spit, and pick” feeders. They suck in quantities of material from the bottom of the water. spit out unwanted bits, and then pick at the remaining food. This disrupts the existing ecosystem and spreads disease.

Getting rid of them isn’t easy. Netting, electrofishing (stunning them with electric probes), introduce predators, or treating the pond with Rotenone are options.
Better yet if you really do want to get rid of your goldfish try these alternatives.

We only have 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years left according to new research. (To save you from counting, there are 78 zeroes there) That is considerably sooner than previously thought. According to a media release from Radboud University in the Netherlands, about 10 to the power of 1100 (that’s a 1 with 1,100 zeros) sooner.
The researchers also concluded that the Moon and the Earth will evaporate in about 1 followed by 90 zeros years.
Those are mind boggling numbers but suffice to say it is a long time either way and no one reading this needs to fret about the end.

But it does beg the question, what happens then?

There are a lot of theories, and they will remain theories because no one will have their smartphone out to record the end and post it to TikTok.

Most of the theories lean into it not being an end as much as it is a transition into another state.

The one we might be most familiar with is the Big Bang (the science, not the TV series) where the universe started from a single point, but there is also a Big Bounce theory. That speculates that the universe expands until it reaches a maximum limit, then collapses back into a single point, then bounces back. Over and over again. This essentially replaces the Big Bang, which theorizes that the universe continues to expand forever but is so spread out that it becomes a cold, lifeless place lost in absolute zero temperatures. Then there is the Big Crunch. In that scenario, the universe continues to expand until it reaches a Big Freeze and then starts to collapse upon itself, perhaps resulting in another Big Bang.

Looking at it more philosophically, there is no mainstream theory which wraps itself around a state of absolutely nothing. Every ending still has something in it.

Enjoy your morning coffee while you consider that even the vacuum of space has, and always will have, structure!

While we are playing with numbers, lets go with 350 followed by 6 zeroes or 350 million years. That is the latest estimate of when reptiles first started to roam the Earth which makes it a full 40 million years earlier than previously thought.

Again, big numbers that are not easy to wrap your head around, but numbers that qualify as a significant change.

The new evidence comes from a site in Australia where clawed fossilized tracks are “most probably” those of a reptile according to a media release from Flinders University in South Australia. This was not a giant menacing creature, but more along the lines of a Komodo Dragon about 80cm (31in) long. The prints themselves are small, but were found by two non-professionals which the paper in Nature says is “a demonstration of the value of citizen science”. The two are included as authors in the paper as “independent researchers”. The full fossil track suggests that one reptile ran across the ground and two more ran in the opposite direction just before it rained. The ground later hardened and was covered in sediment, leaving the imprints intact. The new discovery makes these the oldest reptile tracks found – a claim to fame previously held by 318 million year old prints found in New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy.

To give you some context, the oldest known human or Homo sapiens footprint is about 153,000 years old and the oldest fossil ever found and dated is a 3.5 billion year old cyanobacteria found in Australia. UC Berkely points out that the oldest dated rock is only slightly older at 3.8 billion years.

And that I promise it the last story in this newsletter edition to tax your sense of time and space!

The idea of personalized medicine and the technology behind gene editing and gene therapy have been around for a couple of decades now, but last week the two came together in a giant step in the treatment of rare diseases.

A baby boy in the United States has been treated with a custom gene-editing therapy designed just for him and for his severe genetic disorder known as Carbamoyl Phosphate Synthetase 1 Deficiency. According to the National Organization for Rare Disorders, CPS1 is an inherited disorder where one of the five enzymes which play a part in the breakdown and removal of nitrogen from the body is either completely or partially absent. It requires a complex treatment to prevent the build up of ammonia in the body and half of all babies with the disorder die in the first weeks of life. Those that survive are faced with severe mental and developmental delays.

Unfortunately this is also where the economics of supply and demand come into play because what may keep goods and services moving, becomes a different equation in matters of life and death. Costs for gene therapies can be millions of dollars per patient.

CPS1 affects just one in 1.3 million babies, meaning that pharmaceutical companies are not investing large amounts of research and development money for a limited market and even at the pure research level, such rare diseases do not always receive enough grant money to find causes and develop cures.

In this case, baby KJ found a doctor and medical team willing to go out on a limb and the result may set the stage for treatment of other rare diseases. CPS1 is caused by a mutation in a single gene. Researchers used CRISPR, a precise gene editing tool, to correct that one gene in the baby’s liver cells. To borrow from the New York Times explanation it used a molecular GPS to crawl along the baby’s DNA until it found that one DNA letter among the possible three billion choices, and made the fix.

Highly specialized CRISPR is readily available, the procedure for infusing an organism with gene-edited material is well established, and research is ongoing for many rare diseases. If a qualified team can put this all together like they did for baby KJ, the need to wait for drug companies to create, patent, and sell a one size fits all treatment becomes less of a factor. Medical and research teams can create their own bespoke genetic repair tools.

Gene-editing and personalized medicine has been criticized as hype and hope over practice and cost. However, as a former official with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said about this new development, we could finally view this as a breakthrough and transformational step.

A Bloomberg headline this week is another reminder of the obstacles facing efforts to reach net zero.

India’s Dirty Furnaces Threaten Global Steel Net Zero Goal

(If you have a problem accessing that link try a similar ABC News story)

The story goes on to talk about India as the biggest steelmaker at 350 million tonnes per year, produced mostly in furnaces fed by coal, making it a major source of harmful green house gases. Meanwhile in the UK former Prime Minister Tony Blair said net zero policies are losing support, and since the start of the year Shell has cut back on its emissions goals and BP has said it is refocusing on its oil and gas priorities. Canada Pension Plan Investments said this week it is dropping its net zero by 2050 targets, but says it will still incorporate sustainability into its portfolio. In the United States the new megabill which squeaked through Congress this week will “cripple the domestic green energy economy” according to Earthjustice. Oxford Economics tracked the impact that the Trump administration has had on US climate policy so far through executive orders and its “drill, baby, drill” attitude to energy production.

All this adds up to a lonely road to net zero.

As Tony Blair and others have noted, while the polls show public support for the goals of net zero, when it starts to take a chunk out of their income or cause personal pain, voters run for the nearest candidate promising to go slow or go nowhere at all.

None of this looks good for the planet but giving up is not an option because climate change affects “every person, in every household, in every town and every city, in every province and every country in the world”.

With warmer weather in most of Canada (Alberta as always not falling in line), ‘tis the season for mosquitoes. In fact from May until as late as October, we can expect the bloodsuckers to torture us wherever there is warm temperatures and standing water – even a small puddle will do according to a CBC story.

Mosquitoes can be found on every continent except Antarctica and apart from being a pest can carry diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and West Nile fever.

But if you are in France, you may have noticed 40,000 extra Tiger mosquito males which were released recently, and there are plans to release millions more. There is a good reason however for the plan in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. First off, these males are all sterile, and secondly, the black and white striped mosquito is an invasive species and in just a couple of decades has successfully become part of the French landscape. Climate change is contributing to the spread of disease carrying mosquitoes, so we can expect any of the 3,500 species of mosquitoes on the planet to keep spreading. Female mosquitoes only mate once in their short life and because these released males are sterile (done via x-rays), it will start reducing the overall mosquito numbers. A single female can lay as many as 300 eggs so the impact of the biotech approach to control the population is significant.

The “sterile insect technique” has been tried elsewhere in the world and this particular batch of sterile males are produced on the insect farm of Terratis, a start-up spun out of Université de Montpellier. The technique has been shown to reduce the overall birth rate up to 80% according to a Nature report this month.

At a cost of about 52,000 Euros (81,500 Cdn) the biotech approach is viable and less harmful than large scale chemical spraying.

In case you are wondering about an extra few million mosquitoes biting there way around the countryside, no need to worry. Only female mosquitoes bite.

It may have escaped your notice, but Tuesday was World Bee Day as designated by the United Nations. As Associated Press noted, it probably slipped past the bees as well, but it should be a day where we all pause and think about pollinators.

While the day is set aside to pay attention to the state of bees around the world, they are just one of many pollinators which include butterflies, wasps, bats, and hummingbirds. Insects of all kinds are in danger around the world, but pollinators are of the most concern, and the “plight of the bumble bee” is of particular interest. Too much pavement, too many pesticides, and too many extreme weather events are harming a pollinator that is responsible for one of every three bites of food you eat. Even our lawns are close to being a “dead zone for pollinators”.

Pollinator Partnership Canada says that pollinators drive $233 billion into the global economy, and honeybees are a significant part of agricultural productivity. According to Alberta Farm Express, the agricultural value of pollinators in Canada is in the three-to-seven-billion-dollar range. You may immediately start thinking about honey production but that accounts for only about $300 million in Canada. The rest of the value comes from crop production that relies on pollination.

There are about 20,000 species of bees in the world and 3,600 of those call Canada and the U.S. home. 28% of bumble bees, 50% of leave cutter bees, and 27% of mason bees are threatened. If you want to help preserve bee populations, Nature Alberta has posted Native Bees 101 on YouTube full of information and tips.

As political and cultural sentiment in Canada swings against the country below the 49^th parallel, Kicking Horse Coffee asked coffee shops to change the name of an Americano to a Canadiano. The Kicking Horse Café says it has been using that name for many years now and wanted to show some Canadian pride by getting others to join in renaming the mix of espresso with hot water. The Daily Coffee News says that “Tariffs May Come and Go but the Canadiano Seems Here to Stay”. According to the story, the idea has gone over well across the country and some coffee shops say that Canadiano orders have doubled since the name change.

The history of the Americano seems to go back to WWII when American soldiers in Italy couldn’t handle the strong Italian espresso. They were used to drip coffee and had to cut the stronger brew with hot water to more closely match their preferences. Depending on how strong you want it, you can vary the amount of water. I used to stop for a double Americano when I was commuting in the morning which I suppose defeats the purpose of the Americano. Occasionally I went in the complete opposite direction and got a Red Eye, a high-test mix of espresso AND black coffee.

According to Forbes magazine the renaming of food for politics goes back to WWI. Sauerkraut was renamed “Liberty Cabbage” to distance itself from its German origins and when France opposed the Iraq War, some American restaurants turned their French fries into Freedom Fries but it never caught on in the same way as the Canadiano has.

What goes into the mug first when making a Canadiano? If you want to keep the espresso crema on top, the water goes in first. For a smoother drink, the espresso goes in first, but otherwise it doesn’t matter too much.

Whatever your preference, join the “quiet rebellion” and order a Canadiano!

That giant fiery orb we see every day is having a stormy week of sorts and that’s how we’ll kick off this week’s edition.

While we tend to think of the sun as being tremendously hot everywhere and all the time, it does have some cooler spots. Not cool, as in the ideal place for a vacation, but about 3,300C (6,000F) compared to the 5,530C (10,000F) elsewhere. These sunspots are caused by variations in the sun’s magnetic field.

Solar Active Region 4079 started to become active in April and is now 140,000km (87,000m) across which makes it is bigger in diameter than the Earth. It will be in a position this week where it will be directly facing us. If it erupts into a solar flare, we will take a “direct hit of solar energy and solar particles”. Never fear, this doesn’t mean we are going to be vapourized, as these geomagnetic storms are fairly common and are even part of the Space Weather report. It does mean however we may see some increased Northern Lights activity and if powerful enough, may disrupt your GPS signal and can even cause power grid problems.

Beyond the Northern Lights that it may produce, this sunspot is big enough that with the right equipment you might be able to see it.

I’ll include this caveat from Forbes magazine:

“Note: it is dangerous to look at the sun through anything other than a pair of certified safe solar filters (solar eclipse glasses) bearing the ISO 12312-2 international safety standard. Don’t make your own, don’t use sunglasses and don’t use welder’s glass.”

Forbes goes on however to give you some tips on how to safely observe the phenomenon.
If you have any doubts about it however, The Sky Live site has some good pictures of what 4079 looks like.

Staying up in space for one more story, Jeff Bezos and Amazon are set to take on Elon Musk’s Starlink service. I have written before about Starlink and its 7,100 (and counting) satellites circling the planet to provide Internet service. Starlink has a significant head start on the competition from home and abroad, but Amazon has deep pockets and hopes to make a dent in Starlink’s hold on satellite Internet delivery.

Amazon’s near Earth orbit Project Kuiper (named after the Kuiper Belt which by definition has nothing at all to do with near Earth orbits) launched its first satellites in late April with the eventual goal of 3,200 satellites providing broadband service around the world.

Also circling us in Low Earth Orbit are 600 satellites belonging to OneWeb, which is part of the Eutelsat Group, but it is facing some financial challenges and this week appointed a new CEO.

Internet satellites are an important part of bridging the digital divide facing people in rural, remote, and underserved parts of the world. They provide low latency service which simply means there is no significant delay between sending and receiving data. Without reliable high speed satellite services, video conferencing is nearly impossible. While streaming audio and video may not seem crucial, without a reliable and fast internet connection filing your taxes or applying for a passport online are important and many rural communities live in a digital canyon.

But our reliance on Internet services comes at a price. Scientific American points out that Project Kuiper and Starlink will fundamentally alter the “appearance, and usability, of the night sky—and we still don’t have solutions”. We will be in uncharted territory if Starlink ever reaches its goal of 30,000 satellites, which already need to perform 50,000 maneuvers every six months to avoid collisions with other objects (including its own satellites) every six months.

In 2009, a U.S. commercial Iridium satellite collided with an inactive Russian satellite resulting in thousands of pieces of debris which will remain in orbit for decades. As if we don’t have a big enough problem here on Earth, this fact sheet from the Secure World Foundation gives us a glimpse into how we are polluting the vastness of space.

Seems we have not learned our lesson yet.

Robotaxis are becoming more common in many parts of the U.S. and China, but look out, here come the robo-trucks.

According to TechCrunch, Aurora Innovation has a fleet of driverless trucks on the road in Texas. In a media release, the company says it is operating regular routes between Dallas and Houston with driverless trucks and will expand the service to El Paso, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona by the end of this year. The system that drives the trucks is called ‘Aurora Driver’, and the media release says, “In over four years of supervised pilot hauls, the Aurora Driver has delivered over 10,000 customer loads across three million autonomous miles”.

Aurora is not alone in the driverless truck business. Kodiak Robotics was founded in 2018 and made its first autonomous commercial delivery the following year. It has been making steady progress in its ‘Kodiak Driver’ system. In 2022 it started a pilot project to operate autonomous freight deliveries for Ikea and has a contract with the U.S. government to develop a Robotic Combat Vehicle. Being able to operate off main highways is a special challenge for autonomous vehicles because Google maps does not lend itself well to off-road terrain and the landscape is not clearly marked as it is in cities and highway.

In Canada we have a few projects underway. Loblaws has a daily 25km run underway in Etobicoke and Canadian company, NuPort Robotics has a pilot project to move goods for Canadian Tire in Toronto.

A Bloomberg News story says these latest developments signal that “autonomous trucking may have arrived”. It goes on to point out that driverless trucks do not have to worry about driver fatigue, can operate without rest breaks which means better range and delivery times, and are more fuel efficient.

What does this mean for truck drivers? For the moment at least, the American Trucking Association says jobs are safe and the Truck Driver Institute sees a hybrid future for the industry. In the U.S. there is also a shortage of truck drivers and driverless vehicles may only fill the gap over the short term. Canada is also facing a shortage of nearly 40,000 drivers by 2030, and the driverless truck fleet is a long way from making up the shortfall.

The robots are also coming to your surgery – and they are SuPER.
Specifically, to help with surgery at the Surgical Performance Enhancement and Robotics Centre at McGill University. A media release from the University Health Centre last week says it is Canada’s first robotics and artificial intelligence centre that can take basic research and move it into the clinic to improve our health and well-being.

A journalist from the Montreal Gazette was at the inauguration of SuPER and reported that it was a glimpse into the future of surgery “that, in some cases, is nearly here”. Robotic surgery can cover a range of uses such as realigning broken bones with better speed and accuracy than human surgeons to simpler but important tasks such as high-definition cameras to give the surgeon an enhanced, 3D view of the area being worked on during an operation. From a patient’s perspective robotic surgery can get the job done with smaller incisions, less pain, and a faster recovery. As you’ll read in this story from Global News , a robotic surgery has the surgeon sitting at a console while a team are at the patient’s side looking after anesthesia and ready to intervene if needed. A 2023 paper in the Journal of Thoracic Disease found that patients who had cardiac surgery using the system mentioned in the Global story shortened the ICU time and hospital stay, and improved patient satisfaction and their quality of life after the surgery. In a CTV story from last week, a surgeon says that using a robotic system has enabled her to perform surgery they simply could not have performed before.

The SuPER Centre at McGill brings together clinicians, engineers, researchers, students and trainees to collaborate on the design, development, testing and refinement of robotic surgery and is changing how surgery and arguably medicine itself, is carried out.

McGill is also home to an online hub for researchers, students, and professionals to connect with each other and share resources and research on climate change and sustainable development. The Sustainability Academic Network (SUSAN) was created six months ago and recently added a new objective to the volunteer run platform according to a story in the Montreal Gazette this week. It is now part of the effort to save important climate information and research from being lost because of new policies and orders coming from the White House. For instance, https://climate.nasa.gov/ is now https://science.nasa.gov/ , the USDA has removed website sections referring to the climate crisis, and portions of the United States Forest Service referring to climate change and the climate crisis are gone. A Guardian story says scientist are bracing “for the worst” as research data, studies, and papers are taken down to echo the Newspeak expert Syme in the novel, 1984.

That’s where sites like McGill’s SUSAN come in to try and save the destruction of words about climate change.

A BBC story describes the rush to save information as a global effort ranging from rescuing data, to replicating entire websites covering science information related to climate, environment, pollution, energy, greenhouse gases, weather records, ocean monitoring, and carbon dioxide monitoring.

By some measures the U.S. was already starting to fall behind some countries and the latest science purge will only make the situation worse. The cuts and changes to science funding will also trickle down to Canadian research according to Evidence for Democracy. Canada is involved in many collaborations with U.S. funded research agencies and institutions and often rely on access to U.S. data. We also benefit from jointly funded research projects and if one half of that funding disappears or is significantly stifled by ideological driven decisions both side of the border will feel the impact.

There is a danger that the “destruction of words” is only the beginning.

If you have a cup of coffee in hand while you read this, you are holding a pretty volatile product. It is subject to weather and climate change, the taste of the day with consumers, and now the whims of the 47^th president of the United States.

And of course, where you live. Already the line up for a latte in the U.S. is getting shorter according to a BBC story. The reason for the current jump in prices down south is largely due to the tariffs imposed by the current administration. Independent coffee shops are less able to absorb those tariff costs and consumers are reacting accordingly. The story says that coffee drinkers are buying smaller drinks, choosing a less expensive plain coffee instead of a specialty drink, or simply brewing more coffee at home. If you live at the edges of the supply chain such as in Yellowknife, your costs go up even more.

In Canada price increases are less affected by tariffs because we buy from countries that are not entangled in a trade dispute. That doesn’t mean we are off the hook. General inflation increases, minimum wage increases in some provinces, and in some cases sales volumes which never came back to pre-COVID levels, says Toronto Now. Tariffs become a factor when coffee shops or roasters buy their coffee through a U.S. based importer so we are facing a new look to the North American coffee trade according to The Perfect Daily Grind.

Apart from tariffs, inflation, and demand, weather is a major factor in the price of your daily caffeine fix. The July price for arabica and robusta coffee is up this week because of “lackluster rainfall in Brazil” and a drop in production from Vietnam because of drought. Brazil is turning to irrigation to keep up production levels, but that adds to the overall cost of doing business.

In Canada, 74% of us knock back at least one cup of coffee every day so drink up because by June or July, you may be drinking less.

On May 7^th, 1953, Hooker Chemicals sold a piece of land that had been originally envisioned as a canal by William T. Love, for water and hydroelectric power to the City of Niagara Falls, New York for $1.00. It turned out to be the worst environmental disaster anyone could imagine.

Work started on digging the canal in 1890 to link Lake Erie and Lake Ontario but never became more than a ditch and was described by at least one case study as a “useless hold in the ground”. For a while the locals used it as a swimming hole in summer and an ice rink in winter. A hole in the ground however is good for something after all – it is a good place to dump all manner of municipal and industrial waste. In the case of Mr. Love’s ill-fated canal, ideal for chemical waste, and in 1942 Hooker Electrochemical Corporation took over the site and started to fill that big hole in the ground with toxic waste from its manufacturing activities. By the time the company sold the land the hole was filled up with an estimated 21,000 tons of chemicals.

In 1953 the Niagara Falls School Board bought the land for one dollar. Hooker Chemical told the school board what was underneath, and that one-dollar bill protected the company from future liabilities.

By the late 1950s there were about 100 houses on the site and of course the school that had been the reason for the land purchase. All the construction activities however breached the containment measures and chemical leached into the ground. Rain helped the chemicals spread. By 1978 the problem had become an environmental disaster with “abnormally large cases of birth defects, miscarriages, chromosome damage, and cancer” and 800 families were evacuated from the area. In 1979 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said, “Quite simply, Love Canal is one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history”. In May of 1980 President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a national emergency.

Environmental regulations that could have prevented the tragedy of Love Canal were non-existent before the full extent of the problem was understood.

There was little in federal or state legislation to hold polluters financially responsible for cleaning up toxic waste, and the site met Environmental Protection Agency standards at the time.
That started to change with the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (informally referred to as Superfund). The disaster was a major factor in the rise of environmental activism beginning in the seventies.

The National Environmental Policy Act in the U.S. was adopted in 1978 in part as a response to Love Canal and other similar sites. In February, the current administration published an interim final rule repealing all of the implementing regulations for the Act.

Today, Love Canal has been classified as a safe place to live, though not everyone agrees. Either way it is worth remembering what happened and why we need to take care of the environment around us.

I am lousy at identifying colours. I’m not colour blind. I just can’t seem to differentiate between shades of any given colour. And it is about to get more complicated and that’s where we will start this week’s newsletter.

Scientist from University of California, Berkeley have discovered a new colour. ‘Olo’ is an “intense blue-green” according to a paper published in AAAS Science Advances. You are not going to see it in your next box of Crayola crayons or featured on a designer t-shirt because it lies outside the usual range of our lowly human eyes. A story in EuroNews said it is artificially created using laser pulses fired into the eyes of the five people involved in the study. (Three of the participants were co-authors of the research paper.)

That begs the question of whether it is a true colour.

A BBC article said some experts have said it is “open to argument” because the laser pulses are selectively stimulating the light perception cone cells in the retina. Without that direct stimulation, the colour does not exist independently. While the participants also described the colour as an “off-the-charts saturated’ greenish hue” we know that colour perception has a subjective component meaning my red, may not be your red.

Even the critics seem to agree however that it is a technological breakthrough. Scientific American quoted one expert who said that it could be used to stimulate different photoreceptors on human subjects to discover “really what a dog would see, what a mouse would see, what a goldfish would see…“Now this would be interesting”.

Last week if you wanted to catch the season opener of the Halifax Wanderers soccer club of the Canadian Premier League you could swap your blood for a free ticket. It was part of a joint effort between the team and Canadian Blood Services to get new blood donors and maybe new fans.

As of this week, Canadian Blood Services says they have a 23-day supply of AB+ and only a 4-day supply of O- to meet normal demand. Those numbers are not bad compared to some countries but overall, our global blood supply is facing some difficult times, in part because of climate change. A story from EuroNews says that natural disasters affect both the supply and demand for blood. In Europe, 25 million blood units are used every year. One unit of whole blood is approximately 450 mL (a little less than a pint) and can be used for whole blood transfusion or broken down into components such as platelets and plasma for specific needs. An article in The Lancet, Planetary Health points out that climate change emergencies can vastly increase demand for blood while limiting supply, challenge transportation, and disrupt distribution of new supplies and that we are not prepared for these changes. Bloomberg News pointed out for instance, that during Tropical Cyclone Alfred in Australia more than 3,500 blood donation appointments were cancelled.

One way to deal with threats to global blood supply is artificial blood. We have been searching for an artificial replacement for donated blood since the mid 1800s but have still not perfected an “artificial oxygen carrier” that can be used when donated blood is not available – especially in trauma-related emergencies. Often considered the “Holy Grail” of trauma medicine, artificial blood could held deal with the roughly 2 million global deaths every year attributed to the shock of blood loss. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. invested $46 M in a blood substitute research last year but imitating the function of human blood remains elusive and there are no approved products available.

It's easy to donate blood in Canada so give it try.

I try to buy eco-friendly products and like many Canadians right now I am trying to buy Canadian-made products, but it isn’t easy being green. Even planet friendly products often come in packaging which can only be disposed of in the garbage, and take-out food packaging can be especially challenging.

Enter a Canadian company featured on the Globe & Mail’s Decibel podcast this week, that is doing its part to produce greener packaging and that may turn out to be a company positioned to thrive during the trade war.

Founded in 2004, Eco Guardian produces packaging for the food service sector that is compostable. Much of it is made from re-purposed sugar cane and bamboo waste from other manufactured products. The company was importing many of its products, but the challenge of tariffs has been the impetus it to start up Canadian production lines for its products.

My biggest pet peeve and one that doesn’t seem to have an alternative at Eco Guardian or elsewhere is cellophane. I have abandoned Starbucks for a variety of reasons, but the sheer waste that comes out of a typical location is one of the main factors. Ordering a croissant for instance means getting a product that is made elsewhere in the city and delivered in bulk packaging that is mostly non-recyclable. Inside that bulk box are individual cellophane wrapped croissants. When I order one, the staff very carefully take it out of the cellophane package, throw that in the garbage, and put the croissant into a small paper bag. They then print out the little label with my name on it, stick it on the paper bag and hand it to me. Cellophane is not compostable in municipal composting programs or even biodegradable. Even though it is made from cellulose, it is coated after production and like other so-called bioplastics still contains petroleum-based ingredients. The Sierra Club says that studies have shown that bioplastics contain thousands of “chemical features”.

There are a few cellophane alternatives for home use, but from what I have been able to find, nothing to replace consumer packaging products.

Time for a food packaging re-think around the world. This BBC podcast looks at some possible solutions, but ultimately it is up to you and me as consumers to push for change.

While I’m in the subject of getting rid of waste, here is a new alternative to dispose of organic waste – the larvae of the black soldier fly. These tiny bugs can eat four times their weight and send it out the other end as a sustainable fertilizer. They larvae will mature in a couple of weeks and become a high-protein source of food for fish and livestock.

They are so good at their job that more than 200 billion are farmed around the world and in Canada the market could be worth $62.93 million by the end of the decade. What make this particular bug so attractive for commercial use is that it is native to North America and does not bite or sting.

Oberland Agriscience is a major producer of black soldier fly larvae and its byproducts in Canada. The company says the larvae are high in calcium and a good source of protein so can be used as a quality food supplement for “backyard, broiler, and egg-laying hens”. It also produces dehydrated larvae that are incorporated into pet foods. The poo that the larvae produces is called frass, and can be used as a soil amendment or fertilizer. According to the company’s website the frass has been successful in fertilizer trials with strawberry plants, bean plants, and vines for wine production.

The soldier fly may be the latest poster bug for breaking down organic waste but it certainly isn’t the only bug being put to use. A 2024 paper in ScienceDirect said that crickets, yellow mealworms, superworms, house flies, the flesh fly and blow flies were already in common use around the world.

The paper did note however that social acceptance of bugs as bio-converter is still an issue. Let’s face it, if you saw ‘black soldier fly larvae’ on the list of ingredients for your pet’s kibble, you just might but the bag down and move on.

Globally, the cost of solid waste management is about 375 billion dollars and if we can put bugs to work to reduce the cost and produce beneficial by-products, we are doing the planet a favour.

It took a large team of scientists and more than 30 authors for the resulting paper, along with a major contribution from the Mars Curiosity rover, to discover iron carbonate on the Red Planet and proof of an ancient carbon cycle. The SUV sized rover has an onboard drill that can drill down 3 or 4 centimetres (1 to 1 ½ inches) and analyze the chemical and mineral composition of the samples. The iron carbonate was in the form of siderite, a brown, yellow or gray mineral made mostly of iron and carbon. On Earth, siderite can be found in places where hot water moved through rocks a long time ago, leaving behind minerals as it cooled.

The discovery suggests that the Martian atmosphere contained enough carbon dioxide to support liquid water on the surface at one time. Ben Tutolo is an associate professor with the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary. He was the lead author of the paper and is part NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover team. In a media release from the U of C he said the results show that the planet was habitable at some point. Exactly when and why that changed requires more research.

The Curiosity Rover is climbing a mountain inside the Gale Crater on Mars, about 34 km (21 mi) from where it landed in August of 2012. It has collected 42 rock samples with the drill on the end of its robotic arm. The original life expectancy of the rover was 2 years and it is now expected to last into 2026.

As the U.S. – Canada trade war continues, ‘Buy Canadian’ is becoming a force to combat tariffs. Sometimes however, buying Canadian is a challenge, especially in your weekly trip to the grocery store. You’re never going to find a grown in Canada banana and some produce like strawberries are seasonal fare in Canadian fields.

Modern technology and the buy Canadian spirit is starting to change that.

A story in the Globe & Mail this week looks at one company trying to change how the humble strawberry is grown by harnessing AI. Plant genetics are complex to and it is no small task to identify the molecular markers needed to grow a strawberry under greenhouse condition that can produce quality fruit all year round. Traditional breeding techniques can take years to sift through all the traits and select for generation after generation of plants. Artificial intelligence can parse the data and predict what plants or seeds meet a grower’s requirements in a short period of time.

Like strawberries, lettuce grown in farm fields is seasonal and subject to the whims of weather. According to a Maclean’s story 90% of our salad greens are imported. The story goes on to point to a new, fully automated greenhouse facility north of Toronto which could produce 4,500 kgs (10,000 lbs) of lettuce per day. The lettuce does not see a human hand from seeding to harvest with irrigation, climate control, and lighting handled by a central computer system.

Meanwhile out in the traditional fields of soil, sun, and weather, automation and AI are having a similar impact. AI is working to improve plant genetics and automation handles irrigation, seeding, and fertilizing.

According to a CBC story, Canada did a better job of producing its own fruit and vegetables before the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement. Since then, it has been not only easier to import from the U.S., but many growers in Canada simply moved south where it year-round production was possible.

Might be time to re-think those decisions.

Ready for coffee and cake?

We’ll start with coffee and how physicists have found a way to make your morning Java Jive better and cheaper. With the price of coffee beans going up, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania embarked on a project to make good coffee with fewer beans (I’m also guessing they wanted to improve the quality of the coffee they drank in their lab!). The results of the team’s work were published this month in the journal, Physics of Fluids. They experimented with the pour-over filter coffee method which is probably the easiest way to make coffee. It simply means the water is poured directly over the ground coffee and filters through to your cup. According to a UPenn press release they started with silica gel particles and a glass cone and using a laser and a

\high speed camera were able to observe how the water flowed over the particles. After studying the fluid mechanics of the process, they moved on to using real coffee.

They concluded that the most efficient and best tasting results came from using a gooseneck kettle and pouring the water from a height that creates the strongest mixing effect. Pouring from too high breaks the water stream apart and pouring from too low reduces the ‘avalanche’ effect which is key to stirring the coffee particles and water together to extract the flavour. The gooseneck kettle ensures more control over the flow of the water, so you do not pour too quickly. The overall goal is to increase the contact between the water and the coffee grounds, so you’ll need to experiment a bit to perfect your own technique.

As for the cake?

French pastry chefs used 4,000 eggs, 150kg (330lbs) of sugar, 415kg (914 lbs) of cream and 350kg (771 lbs) of strawberries to make the world’s longest strawberry cake. It was 121.8 metres (399 feet) long and weighed 1.2 tonnes.

Should pair well with your coffee.

Okay, time to address an existential question - are we alone? The SETI Institute has been tackling it for years and that is the starting point for this week’s 1 Week, 7 Stories.

The SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a California based non-profit organization which was incorporated in 1984 and began its search for life beyond Earth the following year. NASA already had a similar small-scale project on the books, but having a dedicated non-profit doing the work was considered to be more efficient and the Institute has been searching ever since. Its website says there are “potentially billions of locations outside our Solar System that may contain life”.

So far, its own work and the data accumulated from advanced telescopes and other scientific instruments sent into space have not found any signs of life.

In an Open Access paper in the Astronomical Journal this week, the authors ask the question that we may need to face some day.

“What if we Find Nothing?”

The paper tackles the question through a mathematical analysis of the number of planets we need to study before the absence of detection becomes statistically meaningful. The paper uses Bayesian statistical analysis which I don’t even pretend to understand, but a media release from the SETI Institute lays it out nicely.

“If scientists examine 40–80 planets and find no signs of life, they can confidently conclude that fewer than 10–20% of similar planets harbor life.”

From there they can start to draw conclusions on upper and lower limits to findings.

All this with a few, ‘but wait there’s more’ statements.

First off, the statistical analysis is based on similar planets to the ones studied. To date, scientists have found many planets orbiting their own stars but have not found a truly Earth-like planet.

Then there is the matter of what we are looking for. We are generally looking for water and gases like oxygen and methane that indicate biological activity, which means we are only searching for something like us.

Finally, we need to be 100% confident in our measurements. Uncertainty in data collection over millions and millions and millions of miles needs to be taken into account.

And now we arrive back at the existential question. If the answer over the coming decades continues to be a “null result”, what are the implications of us being truly alone.

The Big Think and Ars Techinica both say we should embrace the fact and allow it to spur us on to explore even more of the mysteries of our universe.”

Mount Spurr is on code yellow according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO).

A volcano is the landform that occurs when magma from the Earth's interior rises to the surface and forms a cone which can erupt with molten rock, ash, and gas. Think of it as a giant pressure cooker which needs to release its built-up energy. Mount Spuur appears to be ready to release that energy. The 3,350 metre (11,000 feet) volcano is in the Aleutian volcanic arc and on a good day is visible from Anchorage. As of this writing on April 11^th the AVO says that “unrest persists” and seismic activity is elevated with hundreds of small tremors over only a few days.

The last eruptions were in 1953 and 1992. According to the Daily Sitka Sentinel in July of 1953 eyewitnesses in Anchorage who “stepped outside to get a glimpse of the eruption were covered in fine ash within a few minutes”. The 1953 eruption was a one-day one-off event, but the 1992 eruption lasted several days and was preceded by several weeks of seismic activity – much like the current conditions. (If you want an ‘out there’ analogy to today, a psychic counselor quoted in the Anchorage Daily News after the 1992 eruption said it was “one more example of worldwide shifts in the fate of earth and its inhabitants” and that emotional lives were in “as much flux as the guts of Mount Spurr”. Make what ever you want of that!)

The volcano is in a remote region with the closest community of Tyonek being 64 kilometres or 40 miles away. However as the likelihood of an eruption increases people in the Anchorage area are stocking up on buying goggles and masks for themselves and their pets to help protect themselves from any ash fallout as you’ll hear in this interview from NPR.
For a close-up of the volcano here is a short helicopter tour and if you wondered about preparing for the ash fallout the checklists are already appearing online.

In the movie, The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s character Ben is taken aside by a friend of the family who says he has one word of advice for him: “Plastics”. It has a double meaning in the movie, but in 1967, plastics were indeed the future. Today that family friend might have a new one-word piece of advice.

Copper.

The average car has about 29kg (65 lbs) and there can be 181kg (400 lbs) of the metal in a new home. When I worked at the CBC, we often joked that if we needed to raise some cash all we had to do was mine the miles of copper out of the ceiling and in the studios. Copper prices and demand has resulted in a 400% rise in copper wire thefts since 2022 according to the Canadian Telecommunications Association. As Bloomberg News said last year the world needs more copper. Lots more.

Despite the current focus on the rare earth minerals, the world ‘needs rewiring’ and because copper is only second to silver when it comes to conductivity, it is vital to the process. Those rare earth minerals may be needed for microchips, but 90% of a completed circuit board is copper and current copper production is struggling to keep up with the demand according to an NPR report last month. As we watch the stock market gyrations right now, copper prices this week may be sending an economic signal. Last week the price of copper was at nearly an all-time high. This week it is an all-time rout.

It may well be a mixed signal.

Demand over the long term is not going away. Last year the world used 20 million tonnes of copper and despite some renewable energy slowdowns in the U.S., the demand for copper in electrification, plumbing, construction, communications, and renewable energy is not abating.

I am not an economic pundit, but new advice for Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate might yet prove to be copper.

Colossal Biosciences knows how to generate hype and how to raise money.

In 2021 Colossal said it had raised $15 million USD ($20.5 million CAD) with the aim of bringing back the Woolly Mammoth within 2 to 4 years. Then in 2023 it said they had raised a further $150 million USD ($206 million CAD) in Series B financing to bring back the Dodo. Then in October of last year it announced the formation of the Colossal Foundation, a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization to stop the extinction crisis. It also said at the time it wanted to bring back the Tasmanian tiger from extinction which had nothing to do with stopping any further extinction.

This week the company says it has brought back the dire wolf species from extinction and has lots of cute white wolf cub pictures to prove its point. Because of its track record of hype over results, the Colossal claim is being met with skepticism.

The dire wolf lived in North America almost 12,000 years ago, but lives on as a character in the TV show, Game of Thrones. That was immediately incorporated into the Colossal announcement with a picture of the show’s creator George R.R. Martin holding one of the pups. The company touted its achievement as a rebirth of the extinct wolf and the “World’s first successfully de-extincted animal”.

To be a fully revived animal however requires a full genome sequence to be copied and reproduced. The 13,000- and 72,000-year-old DNA samples the company worked from were unlikely to have been complete. They then worked to edit the genome of the gray wolf, which the company determined was closest living relative of the dire wolf. Next step was to perform an embryo transfer as a surrogate to carry the genetically modified wolf pups to term. As a CBC headline puts it they have “sort of” brought back the wolf. ‘Sort of’ meaning it is probably just a “grey wolf with a few tweaks”. “

In an article in AAAS Science, one paleoecologist said the work was done with “such a casual disregard not only for the truth but for life itself is genuinely abhorrent to me.” In a BBC video, another expert says,

There is no peer-reviewed scientific paper to back the process which makes the company’s claim more difficult to prove, or perhaps to disprove.

What is also troubling for many scientists is what now? If it were to prove to be a real dire wolf, it has no natural habitat. That all disappeared tens of thousands of years ago. It could only exist in the wild by displacing an existing population which raises a broader question. Why go to such effort and expense to bring an extinct species back while we witness the habitat destruction and extinction of the animals we have on our planet today.

Jeff Bezos and his Bezos Earth Fund may be catching up to Canadian researchers. In a media release this week, the Fund pledged to put $19.3 million into a research initiative across North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Oceania to help livestock herds emit less methane. Research grants will help develop tools to first identify the traits of low-emission cattle and sheep, and then manage breeding programs to select animals that are more “climate efficient”.

When it comes to greenhouses gases, methane has a shorter atmospheric lifetime but traps more heat per molecule so reducing methane emissions is key to reach our climate targets. There are about 940 million cows in the world and together they belch nearly 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

Canadian researchers have been leading the pack for years in both mapping agricultural methane emissions and studying how to control the problem primarily by the same method the Bezos Earth Fund is pursuing – natural selection. For instance, late in 2024 a federally funded project at the University of Alberta got underway to examine the genetics of beef cattle to help producers select for less methane production from their herds.

The advantage to using generic selection and breeding for climate friendly traits is that it does not raise a warning flag for consumers. It does not involve gene editing or genetic modification. It won’t bring methane production to a screeching halt but with some basic on-farm research, we already making headway in dealing with the problem.

Depending on where you live in Canada, tick season has arrived or is no more than another warm spell away.

As the Merck TickMaps site says, “Think thermometer, not calendar”. The result can be seen on its map showing elevated tick activity already found in many locations across the country.

According to the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, Canada has 40 tick species and a few of those species can transmit Lyme disease. The two most common disease carriers are the deer tick (which will still gladly bite people) and the Western black-legged tick which can carry a number of diseases, but Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever tend to be the ones we hear about most often.

We have always had ticks in Canada, but warmer winter temperatures and environmental changes have made them more prevalent. The black-legged tick in particular has been able to increase its range northward and westward across the country. There is an economic cost that comes with that expansion and the subsequent higher number of tick-borne diseases.

A tick is a tiny insect, roughly the size of a sesame seed, though once they have filled themselves with a host’s blood, they are much bigger and more visible.

Now that tick season is here there are a few things you can do to protect yourself and your pets.

The are tick repellents on the market for people and dogs. Just in time for tick season, CBC had a story this week on research being done at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. Lemongrass has been long used as a ‘natural’ repellent and the new research bears out its efficacy. In tick prone areas limit the little beasts access to your skin by wearing long sleeves and tuck your pants into your socks. After coming in from a walk or hike check yourself, your children and your pets for ticks. The Weather Network has a good story outlining everything you can do to keep ticks at bay and CanLyme has a solid explanation of what to do if you find a tick embedded on your skin.

If you want to get involved in tick-related research you might want to become a citizen scientist and help out the eTick initiative from Bishop’s University. Not only will you be helping researchers, but if you use the App you’ll receive information back on the type of tick you found, its medical relevance, how to deal with the tick, and information tailored to your location. Information on the project and the relevant links are on the Bishop’s University website.

And lastly, a catch-up on space news, starting with news from terra-firma that will likely influence the future of where we are headed after leaving our own planet.

Elon Musk wants the U.S. to aim for Mars, Jason Isaacman the White House nominee to lead NASA said during his confirmation hearing this week that he would making returning to the moon a priority. As has become a common reading of the picks for key U.S administration positions however it may not be that straightforward. First off Isaacman is a billionaire business partner of Musk’s and secondly his opening statement to the committee made no promise to land on the moon and supported a crewed mission to Mars according to Politico.

This week we also got a look at the first X-ray taken of an astronaut while in space. Whether astronauts are bound for the moon or Mars, the ability to take X-rays in space will be important for diagnosing medical conditions and to study the effects of space travel such as decalcification. The X-rays were taken during the SpaceX Fram2 mission and was made possible by Canadian technology from KA Imaging, a spinoff from the University of Waterloo. CBC has the complete story and an interview with the founder and chief technology officer of KA Imaging.

And to wrap up this edition of 1 Week, 7 Stories, data centres may be going to the moon. What could be more physically secure and with an unlimited supply of solar power than a stack of computers storing and processing data in a remote location, far from prying eyes. Lonestar Data Holdings of Florida said it sent a tiny data centre to the moon on the Intuitive Machines’, Athena Lander. It was really tiny – the size of a hard-back book – but it was considered a proof of concept. With no environmental concerns or nosey neighbours a moon-based data centre could be part of the future use of the moon. Also being consider are orbiting data centres. A feasibility study by a joint French-Italian aerospace group says a medium-sized data centre equivalent to 5,000 servers could be build in orbit using existing technology. No word on whether tech support will make an on-site visit in there is a problem. Read more from the BBC.

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In one of my communications roles in the biotech sector I had my genome sequenced by several direct-to-consumer companies including Navigenics, deCODE, Ancestry.com, and 23andMe one of the pioneers in consumer genetic testing. Navigenics folded, deCode was bought out, and now 23andMe may be disappearing and with it my genetic data.

Last week the Attorney General of California issued a consumer alert to customers of 23andMe saying the company was in “financial distress” and that there was substantial doubt as to whether it could carry on. The alert went on to suggest ways that customers could delete their genetic data and revoke certain permissions. By the weekend, the company had filed for bankruptcy and its co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki resigned. Last November, a media release from the company said it was re-structuring, but that turned out to not be enough to overcome its problems.

So where is my genetic data?

As an early adopter and because I used it as a communications tool to help explain genetic testing and all my raw data and subsequent consumer-oriented reports since then are on my computer. However, that data and even my original ‘spit kit’ is still with 23andMe. How that will be handled seems to be a bit murky. According to an ABC News report, in the U.S. at least, the privacy laws governing electronic health records and your doctor’s records do not protect “information that you gave freely to a private company.’

Direct-to-consumer tests are exactly what they seem to be. They are genetic testing services sold directly to people looking for information to help them in ancestry research or for health reasons. Once you lay down your money you have an exhaustive amount of privacy information to wade through that comes with an important caveat: You may not like the information you receive. For instance, you might come across health risks that frighten you, or in the case of ancestry data discover that one of your parents or relatives are not quite who you thought they were. Once you are clear on the risks and agree to the terms and conditions, you receive the testing kit that calls for either a cheek swab or spitting into a vial. I had to do my spit kit on camera for a local TV station and you would be surprised how fast your mouth can become dry! Then come your results and ongoing reports. Mine had no surprises though it did suggest I would have early male pattern baldness which has still not happened.

With the demise of 23andMe the question of genetic privacy is once again in the spotlight because the company was one of the first and one of the biggest. If you are a customer, check the California AG link in the first paragraph of this story and follow its advice.

Warning- creepy time ahead.

A story in TechCrunch says that a Norwegian startup company plans on putting test versions of its humanoid robots in homes by the end of this year. 1X is the name and “your personal assistant and companion” is the aim. Like something out of science fiction, the company says its Neo Gamma robot needs to “live and learn among us” and the company’s website features robots vacuuming the house (with a Dyson vacuum by the way) and washing windows.

But as an article in Quartz this week suggests, the world may not be ready for a helping hand from humanoids. The argument in favour of humanoid design is that our world is built around the human form so if we want to put robots to work for everyday tasks they need to live in that world. The counter argument is that it is preferable to adjust our world to incorporate simpler machines. (that are likely cheaper and less prone to failure)

The robots that are being marched out so far are clumsy compared to real life biological units such as you and me but that is not getting in the way of investment. Meta is working on the “Android of androids” and Agility Robotics is heavily into humanoid robots for the workplace. We’re familiar with videos of industrial size robots working in automobile assembly factories, but Mercedes-Benz is adding humanoid style robots to the mix and after ‘training’ from Mercedes’ employees they are able to work autonomously.

The times they certainly are a ‘changin and the CEO of NVIDIA said this month that the “humanoid robot revolution is closer than you think”. For a rundown of the top humanoid robots in use right now, the Built In tech website may surprise you with just how much we are changing.

I’ll start this story off by saying why would we want to remember being a baby. Let’s face it, those first couple of years are a bit messy and weird.

With that in mind, researchers from Yale University believe they have the answer to why we recall little from those early years. According to a media release from the University, the previous theory was that our still developing brains cannot encode those infant memories. In a research article published this month in Science, the researchers put forward a new theory for what is dubbed ‘infantile amnesia’.

When an infant sees an image for the first time their hippocampus (the region of the brain which stores memories) is more active. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with awake infants they were able to conclude that as early as three months of age we are tucking away memories. There are different factors that may be at play as to why we lose them. In our early years “statistical memory” is more important to help us learn about our environment and learn language and concepts. “Episodic memory” about specific events comes later. That episodic memory simply may not be converted into long-term memory. The researchers also believe that some of those memories may still be there, and it is just a question of accessing it. A Scientific American article about the study explains it in search terms we might be more familiar with – it is a mismatch between how the information was stored and the search terms our adult brains use to retrieve the information.

I for one am quite content to leave some bits buried in my neural filing system.

We may be facing another battle in the war of wills between Canada and the United States so brace yourself.

Who invented the fish stick?

I heard a podcast from the St. John’s Morning Show about William Hampton, the first president of the Marine Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1964. The Institute is celebrating its Centennial Anniversary and according to the podcast and Memorial’s website he was awarded the patent for the fish stick in 1955. At that time, he was working at General Seafoods in Halifax where he and an assistant developed a method for freezing large units of fish which could then be cut into sticks, deep fried, and frozen again.

I did not know Canada was home to such a basic staple of North American freezers so decided to dig a little further.

Quartz magazine said in a 2022 story about fish sticks that they were the invention of frozen food pioneer Clarence Birdseye and marketed by the U.S based frozen food company, Birds Eye. They made their way to the U.K. in 1955 as fish fingers.

Sorry to say that the more I read about the history of these breaded bits of fish, the less likely it seems that Canada can take credit for bringing it to market for the first time.

That’s does not mean there is not a Canadian connection.

William Hampton does appear to have been granted a patent, but it also seems that Clarence Birdseye got his inspiration while on assignment with the United States Agriculture Department in Labrador in 1912. According to Rigby’s Encyclopedia of the Herring (yes there is such a thing), Birdseye learned how to ice fish from the local Inuit and saw how fish froze quickly at -40C and that when thawed, the fish had kept its texture and flavour. Canada also had a hand in its marketing success by subsidizing processing plants and the building fishing boats and supported food processing technology. When the Trans-Canada Highway opened in 1962 (it was not completed until 1971) transporting frozen fish sticks across the country helped ensure its national availability.

Whether you have a hankering for fish sticks in North America or fish fingers or herring savouries in the UK or dress them up with hot sauce or ketchup, chances are you have some of “the ocean’s hot dogs” in your freezer.

Enjoy, and let the war begin over who really can take credit for their invention.

I am not going to wade into the politics of the SignalGate scandal taking up the headlines and grinding down the gears of the White House spin machine, but in a world of hackers and high tech eavesdropping there is one aspect of the incident worth an extra look.

Namely a SCIF or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. A functional real life version to replace the Cone of Silence used in the spy spoof TV series and movie, Get Smart. You would need to be of a certain age to get the reference but suffice to say that the Cone of Silence and its portable version were meant to keep classified conversations, well, classified.

The Washington Post wrote about SCIFs in 2023, but in light of SignalGate updated its article this week. The SCIF is a secure room or compartment for top-level officials. Computers and cell phones are not allowed in and the communications technology inside the SCIF is designed to meet government security requirements and to be hack proof. When they are located in government buildings in the U.S. and abroad, they usually have high levels of physical security, much like a panic room. However a soundproof and secure SCIF can, and are, built into the home of officials and politicians who need to communicate at a high security level. SCIF Global Technologies will even build one in your own home or office if you feel the urge and provide consulting services to help maintain secure communications. Something which the Michael Waltz ‘Houthi PC small group’ could easily have used and or read about if they had really wanted.

SCIFs have been around for decades and as far back as 1988 they were used by government, the military, defence contractors, and even high level real estate brokers. The Center for Development of Security Excellence has self-directed courses for government SCIF users which starts out with this overview:

“Because the United States Government has placed its trust in you, you have been given access to SCI. Whether you’ve had access to SCI for a long time or just received it in the past year, you know that when you protect SCI, you are protecting our nation’s security along with the war fighters defending the American way of life.”

It is probably fair to assume that national security adviser Michael Waltz and his Signal chat group skipped that part of the get-to-know-your-new-job day at the office.

The downside of a SCIF is that you need to be physically present near one and sadly cannot play with social media at the same time, nor can you access a SCIF on the hands-free equipment in your car. JD Vance was apparently in Michigan, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth was travelling in Indo-China, and Ukraine and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow (he claims he had no access to his personal devices until he returned from his trip).

Judging by the high school nature of the chat about a very serious issue, the participants had read the 21 Signal Hidden Tips & Tricks You Should Know but did not take to heart the motto of SCIF Global Technologies, “Results. Not Excuses”.

There is a new kid on the paleontological block thanks in part, to an associate professor at the University of Calgary. Darla Zelenitsky was part of a team of researchers working in the Gobi Desert in 2012 when they found the remains of a therizinosaur. As you may have learned from past newsletters, science can move exceedingly slow when it comes to verifying and announcing discoveries and the results of this find were only published this week in iScience.

One of the factors that may have slowed down the process is that only a partial skeleton was recovered because it was unearthed during the construction of a water pipeline and the team had both time constraints and a limited search area. What was recovered intact however, were two complete hands and a preserved claw which proved to be unusual and needed further study and confirmation. Therizinosaurs were dinosaurs that lived 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. They are sometimes referred to as giant sloths that walked on two legs, had a long neck, small head, long arms, and usually three fingers with three claws. This new find only had two fingers and claws so is a new species that has been dubbed Duonychus. It probably weighed about 260 kg (570 lbs) and was about 3 metres (10 feet) tall.

The Gobi Desert in Mongolia is considered one of the planet’s richest areas for dinosaur fossils, in particular for the Cretaceous Period, however illegal excavation and poaching is becoming a problem.

According to a National Geographic story when the team made the new find one of the researchers said his first reaction was “holy crap”.

Good to know that even seasoned paleontologists can still get excited about new discoveries. “

And speaking of new kids on the block, the neighbourhood around Saturn is experiencing a population boom.

This month, astronomers confirmed that 128 more moons have been identified orbiting Saturn. The small moons were spotted by the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (located on a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaiʻi). Now that these new moons have been confirmed by the International Astronomical Union it brings Saturn’s official count to 274 natural satellites.

They are classified as "irregular moons," meaning they were captured by Saturn during its formation rather than forming in the planet's orbit like our own moon. It is believed the Earth’s moon was “born out of destruction” when something – perhaps as large as Mars - crashed into the Earth 4.5 billion years ago and hurled molten and vaporized debris back out into space. The debris then coalesced into a single orbiting moon. Our humble man-in-the-moon is the 5^th largest in the solar system behind Ganymede (Jupiter), Titan (Saturn), Callisto (Jupiter), and Io (Jupiter) and is considerably larger than any of the newly confirmed moons of Saturn. There have been 111 missions to the moon (with and without crews) since 1966 and only 62 of those were successful. If you pull out the numbers for missions with people on board, there is a 98% success rate because we take fewer risks with human cargo.

We won’t be visiting any of Saturn’s new moons any time soon and with our current track record of successful missions to our own moon, don’t expect any human footprints on Mars this decade – no matter what Elon Musk tells us.

We are facing a deluge of information and news. Conflicts, tariffs, environmental scares, shock at the rising cost of groceries, and global political upheavals. I am not quite ready to turn off the news, but we all need to find a way to cope and that’s where we will start this edition of 1 Week, 7 Stories.

TechCrunch is not where I would expect to find some advice on how to avoid doomscrolling because the sites thrives on addictive tech, but this week they have some tips to helps us all “stop staring into the all-consuming abyss”. One thing we need to understand is that unless you have managed to find a world of sunshine and lollipops, your newsfeeds can have a real effect on your well-being says Harvard Health. TechCrunch says that isn’t your fault. Technology is purpose built to get you hooked, because without your constant attention many of these companies would not be profitable. Like some sort of dystopian science fiction world, we are at the mercy of corporations.

As with many addiction recovery programs, admitting you have a problem is the first step to kicking the habit. As my weekly screen time crept up and I was finding it harder to work on my short story fiction, I started to cut back. Since the beginning of the year, I have cut my screen time between 10 and 13 minutes every week. Not even close to where I want to go, but screen time is dropping. TechCrunch says one way to stop the scroll is just do something else. Read a book, play a word games, go for a walk, or go to the gym (and workout without your phone in front of you).

Getting hooked on news headlines can lead to a “feeling of learned helplessness” as we are overloaded with bad news we cannot change. It began during the pandemic and has not let up since. We all need to step back from social media as well. Apart from the firehose of information, just trying to sort out what is true, what is false, and navigating the area in between is exhausting.

Since I started writing fiction, I had to deal with information overload and simply alternating this newsletter between news and short stories has made a difference.

Forbes magazine says many of us are stressed and afraid and that we can’t be our best at anything if we are overwhelmed. The article suggests a few reasons why it is happening and how to deal with it. Give it a go – who knows what you might discover in the process.

Sometimes the Government of Alberta gives me a gift when it comes to preparing a new edition of 1 Week, 7 Stories, and on Thursday I received this gift from Todd Loewen, Alberta’s Minister of Forestry and Parks, when he said in a CBC Radio interview:

“… anything we can do to improve the opportunity for hunters to aim and take game in a safe and responsible manner is something we should be doing…”

In a media release, the proposed amendments to the Wildlife Act outlined in Bill 41 are dressed up as improving wildlife management and even suggest it is also about accessibility for hunters with disabilities. In reality it is about exactly what the minister alluded to in his interview. Shoot and kill.

For instance, the permitted use of laser aiming devices have been expanded. In that CBC interview when asked about laser sights, Minister Loewen said:
“they are purely an aiming device, it does nothing else other than helping the person aim”.

Does he seem to think that we imagined engaging in Star Wars level laser killing devices? The statement made little sense other than to highlight the use of laser sights for one thing and one thing only. Shoot and kill.

The new amendments also allow children as young as age 12 to shoot and kill without adult supervision. Of course, they too must have a legal hunting permit which is hardly reassuring.

In the media release and in the CBC Radio interview the minister talks about how we lived in Alberta 500 to 1,000 years ago and relied on hunting, fishing, and trapping. He went on to say, highways and high rises are the unnatural state of things, and appeared to be suggesting that these regulations would restore us to those days of yore when we shouldered our high-powered rifles with laser scopes, hopped onto our ATV and bravely scratched out a living from the land.

A living off the land which has been very beneficial for Minister Loewen. Until he became the minister he was listed as one of the owners of Red Willow Outfitters. He disclosed that conflict of interest and the company is now owned and run by family members, including his wife. Every decision he makes around hunting regulations affects the family business whether he is on the masthead or not. The ‘stakeholders’ he often refers to when he justifies expanding hunting and trapping include his family business and very likely the business associates he came into contact with before getting his current portfolio.

The argument being made over the last several months to loosen regulations and increase wildlife kills are becoming increasingly weak given his connection to the very industry he regulates. Unless you are someone who makes a living in the hunting and guiding business.

In its regular feature on federal lobbying in Canada, iPolitics noted that the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA) had taken on a consultant to help the organization advocate for additional support and investment for libraries because they are essential parts of the social infrastructure of communities.

Even with the uncertainty around when there will be a federal election and which party will emerge on top, many organizations, including the CFLA have prepared their pre-budget 2025 submissions. In its submission, the CFLA is recommending more funding for libraries as an essential part of communities, more investment for accessible reading services, and increased support for Indigenous libraries and Indigenous library workers. There are over 3,350 libraries in Canada and according to the submission, for every $1 invested in Canada's urban libraries, $6 is generated in community economic impact.

Somewhere along the way, the simple act of making books available for people to borrow at no cost has become a political issue and as Public Square Magazine suggests, librarians no longer wear the mantel of a benign profession. Now, says an article this month in The Walrus, libraries and librarians are caught in the middle of “quiet and systemic” book banning. The idea of banning books is not new. What is new about removing books from library bookshelves is the role played by well-funded special interest groups and the prevalent role that misinformation and disinformation plays.

In the United States a survey found that about half of Americans did not read a single book in 2023. About half of all Canadian either read print books or listen to audiobooks in their leisure time and only 6% of Canadians read no books at all.

Libraries and librarians are there to provide books. All books, not just those deemed to be in the public interest. Canadians visit libraries more than one million times every year. How much impact federal funding can have on ensuring library users can find the book they want to read without political influence might be open for debate. Keeping them open and a viable part of their community should be a given.

What goes up, must come down even when you send it into space.
Just asks the folks over at Elon Musk’s company Starlink.

According to a story in TRTWorld, in January alone, 120 satellites re-entered the earth’s atmosphere and burned up. Most of them belonged to Starlink. The lifespan of a Starlink low earth orbit satellite is about 5 years and with 7,086 satellites in orbit today there are lots coming down and replacements going up. (I recommend this Space.com link for info on Starlink satellites) If the company reaches its goal of 42,000 orbiting satellites, there will be no shortage of satellite fireballs in the sky and each of those fireballs are releasing metallic fumes into the atmosphere. The Meteored website calls it a gigantic, uncontrolled experiment in atmospheric chemistry. According to a study published in June of 2024 the main byproduct of these burn ups is aluminum oxide which is a catalyst for ozone depletion. The study found a typical 250 kg (550 lbs) satellite produced around 30 kg (66 lbs) of aluminum oxide nanoparticles on burn up which can hang around in the atmosphere for decades. The result is ozone depletion – a 1970s and 80s problem we thought we had dealt with as MIT News noted last week. Ozone is an important part of our atmosphere. It absorbs a portion of the radiation from the sun in particular the UV portion which has been proven to damage crops and lead to higher skin cancer rates. The Royal Aeronautical Society says the potential damage from satellites burning up could “trigger climate change 2.0”.

And as we are talking about burn up, I should point out another source of atmospheric pollution. SpaceX’s latest Starship test flight ended in another explosion last week which grounded flights at Orlando International Airport.

What goes does indeed come down. Sometimes in a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.

As we mark the 5-year anniversary of COVID and the subsequent lockdown I came across a gem buried in in the research around the effects of COVID that is worth noting as we get closer to hockey playoff season.

There is an advantage to playing before a home crowd.

Scenes of sports teams playing in empty stadiums with cardboard cutout fans gave researchers the chance to study real life natural experiments. There was already plenty of evidence that the home team had an advantage over the away team but take out the fan factor in lockdown era games and home field advantage dropped by up to 64% according to a paper in Journal of Sport Economics. The research was based on European soccer games, but are likely transferable to North America. Another study in the Journal of Physical Education and Sport looked at Euro League basketball and found that Home Audience Advantage (HAA) resulted in home teams winning significantly more games with an audience in comparison to away teams. However, they lost that edge when there was no audience because of the lockdown.

Researchers seem to love these natural experiments so there is more.

Back to the Journal of Sports Economics which compared results across the professional soccer tiers. In the lower tiers where teams were more likely to play before smaller crowds, teams were better able to weather the lack of a home audience because the fan factor was less dramatic.

In March of 2020 the NBA hit pause on its season because of COVID before coming up with an alternative to have some sort of end to its season. Starting with exhibition games in July, 22 teams played in a “bio-secure bubble” at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. With no travel and no fans a report in Nature said there was a natural experiment where the “impact of travel and home-court advantage could be systematically examined”. Those researchers concluded that it was likely that travel disruptions were responsible for the away team’s reduced performance during regular season, non lockdown games. It all comes down it seems, to “circadian disruption”.

As they used to sing during the 7^th inning stretch more than a hundred years ago:
“Let me root, root, root for the home team” because it turns out that it may just help them win.

Last week, commuters in France had a surprise when traffic was stopped because of a 500 kg (1100 lbs) bomb. No, it was not a terrorist threat - it was an unexploded WWII bomb containing 200 kg (440 lbs) of explosives. Even 80 years after the war, Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) are found regularly on construction projects in the UK and Europe sometimes resulting in injury and death. In Okinawa this week, Japanese troops detonated 24 WWII U.S. shells which was the third disposal this month. (You can read more in Stars & Stripes but you may need to register) Even here in Canada, the Okanagan Indian Band said in early March that there are still large swaths of its land that are off limits because of the danger of UXOs left over from live-fire training years ago.

Apart from the immediate danger from old bombs and shells exploding, there is a toxic side to UXOs as well. A paper published in February in the journal Chemosphere says the south-western Baltic Sea has about 3,000 kilograms of dissolved toxic chemicals released from UXOs. The levels were below health risk thresholds, but the authors say it highlights the need for clearing UXOs around the world because the current levels in this one area could last another 800 years. In some parts of the world, oysters have become the “canary in the coalmine” when they are tested for residues from UXOs.

The Government of Canada lists about 800 “confirmed or potential UXO legacy sites” waiting for us when we are out for a walk.
That just might scare you into staying on the couch instead of enjoying the warmer weather.

Megalodon.

The very name sounds ominous. It has been portrayed in fact and in movies as an enormous prehistoric great white shark.

New research published in Palaeontologia Electronica however says the perception is all wrong though I still doubt you would want to encounter one. The prehistoric predator was more comparable in shape to a lemon shark and weighed about the same as a blue whale. According to a media release from University of California, Riverside, that puts it at about 24 metres in length (80 feet) and weighing about 94 tons.

The oldest fossil of Otodus megalodon dates back 20 million years and it is believed to have become extinct 3.6 million years ago. When the climate of our planet started to change the megalodon was not able to adapt. It needed close to 1,000 kgs (2,000 pounds) of food every day and as their food sources moved away the apex predator was left without enough prey.

There are no complete skeletons to measure, so its size and shape were best guesses based on tooth size. The latest research added in studies of the vertebral column and comparing it to living and extinct shark species. The new body size and shape is believed to create a more accurate picture of how it hunted as well. The previous image was conducive to short bursts of speed while the new profile is more efficient and able to cruise at moderate speeds for longer periods of time.

Despite the new research conclusions, megalodon was still a force to be reckoned with. A newborn megalodon pup was nearly 4 metres (13 feet) long and was “taking down marine mammals shortly after being born”.

Cue the music from Jaws!

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Thanks to technology and entrepreneurs the ‘Buy Canadian, Bye America’ movement has been made a little easier and I am starting this edition with my experience using a new shopping app.

A story from the University of Calgary about an app called Maple Scan sent me on the hunt for the app because as we have discovered over the last few weeks, buying Canadian is not easy.

For a start, what is and is not Canadian is not entirely straightforward. To qualify as a "Product of Canada" at least 98% of the content must be made in Canada by Canadians with little in the way of imported elements. “Made in Canada” has the same criteria except the threshold is at least 51% up to the 98%. Then we have “Assembled in Canada”, “Packaged in Canada”, “Distilled in Canada”, and of course because we don’t grow coffee in our home and native land we have” Roasted in Canada”. And good luck in the case of fresh produce such as apples when you have to look at the teeny, tiny writing on that irritating little label. I have seen people in the fruit section carrying magnifying glasses to see what the country-of-origin label is.

I got the chance to help beta test the Maple Scan app (anyone can sign up, check the story link above). Like similar apps you need to have it on your phone, then scan the product you are looking at. In the case of this app, it provides relevant information about the product and company so you know where it stands on the continuum of Canadian content, includes a ‘tariff potential alert’ where applicable, and suggests Canadian alternatives. The developer also has a sense of humour. While it is processing the scan it flashes up messages such as “toque compatibility”, “checking for leftover snow”, and “does it say ‘eh’”.

The app recognized everything I tried in my local Co-Op but the limitation to any app is that they are only as good as the dataset informing the scan.

I have not tried out other apps yet, but here are some suggestions:

• Buy Beaver – iOS only so far, but there is a web version to help you compile your shopping list.

• O SCANada – available for Android and iOS

• Shop Canadian – Android and iOS

• Buy Canadian – Android and iOS

• Is This Canadian – Android and iOS

• Made in CA – a searchable website which is updated regularly.

If you have tried out these or any others, please let me know or share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

On the surface this story doesn’t look like a bad idea and given looming tariffs, one that could be on our own to-do list here in Canada. The United Kingdom is throwing its procurement weight behind British food products. It has more of a political motivation than our current ‘Buy Canadian’ push, but it could still have a positive result. The UK government imposed an inheritance tax recently which the National Farmers’ Union says could adversely affect 70,000 farms. The criticism of the tax is not letting up, so the government had a political reason to announce it would be revising public procurement rules to favour higher-quality British food produced to relevant standards. There is up to £2.5 billion (about $4.5 Cdn) at stake for products destined for public institutions such as schools, prisons and hospitals.

According to the media release from the UK Government this is the first such effort and the plan is to go beyond the procurement initiative and include more competition across the supply chain and support for food production at the farm level. This notion is not new in the UK however. In 2023, an MP from a rural British constituency launched a campaign for a ‘Buy British’ section on supermarket’s online stores, but having it become policy makes a difference. Similar calls to action have also been linked to building a more resilient food system that is less subject to disruption across the imported food supply chain.

There is also an ethical consideration to how we spend our food dollars. Imported food is often less expensive but behind that lower cost may lie a production system that is less well regulated, pays lower wages to its workers, and uses more chemical inputs.

The past week has brought us some news from space, starting with a Perfect 10. Not the movie, but the nickname name for the 10^th Blue Origin flight with people on board. It was a lightening suborbital trip for the paying passengers launched into space by the New Shepard booster vehicle. About 12 minutes. The ticket window for a Blue Origin flight doesn’t exactly post its prices but it is believed to be in the $600,000 range for a few minutes of weightlessness and what is still a rare view for most of us - the Earth on it journey through space.

Another rare sight that comes much cheaper than $600,000 is a planetary parade with Mars in the lead followed by Jupiter, Uranus, Venus, and Neptune, with Mercury and Saturn bringing up the rear. My description is oversimplified as they are not all queued up in a nice line, but the appearance of all 7 of our planetary neighbours is still a rare site. It is called a “great planetary alignment’ and occurs because the planets in our solar system occupy roughly the same orbital plane and on occasions such as this are all on the same side of the sun. Science Alert has a good explanation of how it happens.
You’ll need to get away from city lights and hope for a clear sky, but you can see Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury with the naked eye and a pair of binoculars will bring in Uranus and Neptune. You’ll need a telescope to see Saturn but because of its closeness to the sun it may still not be easily seen. Time and Date will help you pick the best time to venture out to catch a glimpse of the alignment. An even better option is to look around locally for sky watching events like this one in Calgary hosted by Mount Royal University.

And lastly, Intuitive Machines, another private space company, launched a new mission to the moon with help from a SpaceX rocket. Last year the company put its Odysseus lander on the moon, but it settled into rough terrain and tipped over which severely limited how much data it could collect and transmit back home. The new launch has gone without a hitch so far and is scheduled to touch down on the moon on March 6^th. There are several scientific instruments on board the Athena lander and a “hopper” rover which will hop around the surface to test the idea. All they need to do now is stay upright!

Bad news continues to pile up for the transition away from fossil fuels towards green energy.
BP (formerly British Petroleum Company) said it would cut its renewable energy investments and increase its investments in oil and gas by 20%. In a media release on Wednesday the company called it “Growing shareholder value: a reset bp”.

Shell reduced its renewable energy spending in 2023 which Mother Jones magazine said would end up with us “paying the price” and earlier this year Norwegian based Equinor (originally Statoil) announced it would be cutting its renewable spending in half. As those two energy giants reduced their green spending, BP share prices were falling behind its competitors which made BP’s decision inevitable.

Given the size of these 3 companies, it certainly feels like a chill is setting in on the renewable energy sector which will eventually trickle down to regional contractors and suppliers specializing in renewables. Behind the shift is a focus on creating shareholder value which Sustainability Magazine points out is a problem when value is “defined only in monetary terms”. The move away from green to black gold has also received a boost from U.S. President Trump who has used executive orders to boost oil and gas production and reverse green energy policies.

Decisions by energy companies involve billions of dollars to pull more resources out of the ground, but in the end you and I have our hands in the decision-making process as well. We burn fossil fuels in huge quantities resulting in equally huge emissions. We burn it in our cars, use it to heat our homes, and rely on it to generate electricity to power up the very device you are using to read this newsletter. Our energy consumption here in Canada is among the highest in the world with three quarters coming from coal, oil, and gas and only 24% from carbon-free sources.

As long as we continue to buy it, energy companies will continue to drill it, refine it, and sell it.

A headline from the Saint John Telegraph Journal in 1998 held good news for the future of childhood diseases. “Progress against measles spurs hope for global eradication”. Thanks to vaccines it was declared eradicated in Canada that year and by 2000 the United States was measles free.

25 plus years on we seem to have forgotten what an achievement that was and have started to take steps in the opposite direction. There have been 95 cases in Canada so far this year and we are well on track to exceed the 147 total cases last year.

The main reason for the uptick is also the most obvious one. Vaccination rates have been falling according to an open access paper from last year in the Canadian Journal of Public Health. In a CBC article on Wednesday, Dr. Theresa Tam was quoted as saying, "The fact that … the numbers are growing this year demonstrates how this virus can spread if people were not vaccinated". That same story went on to note that in the U.S. about 1 in 5 unvaccinated people who contract measles ends up in hospital because of the complications that can arise. I found it interesting that despite all our medical advancements, there is no specific treatment for measles according to the World Health Organization. Instead, we seek to relieve the symptoms with plenty of fluids, rest, and fever medications and do not bring antibiotics into play until secondary infections such as pneumonia develop. As I write this, a child in Texas has died. The unvaccinated child was one of 124 cases in Texas which Associated Press is reporting as the largest outbreak in 30 years. Robert F Kennedy Jr., the new head of U.S. Department of the Health and Human Services has dismissed the outbreak as “not unusual”.

A Global News article pointed out a contributing factor to the recent spread of measles. As we learned during the COVID epidemic, we live in a mobile world where travelling is easy. (at least if you don’t mind long lineups and flight delays!) The virus exists all over the world and can linger in the air for a couple of hours leading to an increased likelihood of coming in contact with the virus which one infectious disease specialist said, “has a knack for finding unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people and under-vaccinated communities.” In 2023 the number of measles cases around the world was up 20% to 10.3 million cases with 107,500 of those being fatal. It is not hard to imagine your chances of coming into contact with the virus if you, a member of your family, or a close friend have travelled recently.

Beating back measles is not really that difficult. Just ask people in Brazil. After a severe outbreak in 2018, the country stepped up its vaccination efforts, virus surveillance measures, and rapid response protocols and by 2022 was back into the measles free category according to the Pan American Health Organization. All it takes is a couple of shots in the arm, a dose of common sense, and a dash of science.

In Canada more than 6,000 people are living with sickle cell disease and in the United Kingdom there are 17,500 plus patients. The disease is caused by an inherited mutation in hemoglobin which carries oxygen throughout our bodies. The genetic mutation causes an abnormality resulting in the red blood cells becoming rigid and sickle-shaped. This restricts blood flow because the cells cannot bend and move freely, leading to pain and other complications including heart, kidney, and liver problems, and an increased risk of fever and infections.

There are approved gene therapies available in Canada to treat the disease, but costs can run up to $3 million Cdn per treatment and requires a high dose chemotherapy. A media release from Johns Hopkins Medicine says a new bone marrow transplant procedure has been developed which could prove to be effective, less costly, and requires lower chemotherapy doses. It has undergone 10 years of clinical trials at more than 20 centres in the United States. Of the 42 people with severe sickle cell disease who were part of the trial, 95% were alive two years after the transplant, and 88% are considered cured.

Richard Jones a professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins says the new transplant results are “every bit as good as or better than what you see with gene therapy”. He also estimated the cost of a transplant at about $467,747 (almost 675,000 Cdn).

This was a Phase 2 clinical trial so the next step will likely be a Phase 3 involving many more patients before it goes forward for U.S. FDA approval.

There is a shakeup ahead for James Bond and we are not talking about how the Ian Fleming character likes his martinis.

When did you last see a new James Bond movie?
It was 2021 when Daniel Craig played the role in No Time To Die. A review in Time Magazine noted that it appeared Mr. Bond had come to an untimely end, and that Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson who controlled the Bond franchise, could now step back and rethink the character and its legacy.

That re-think could be more than we expected, and it will not be coming from the Broccoli family which has controlled the franchise since 1962. United Artists had sole distribution rights to the films until 1981 when UA disappeared into MGM Entertainment. MGM’s fortunes suffered some ups and downs until shortly after the 2021 Bond movie when Amazon bought out MGM for $6.5 billion. No need to translate that to Canadian dollars, we’ll just say it is a lot. That deal gave Amazon some lucrative properties, but when it came to the Bond franchise it only had distribution rights – not creative control. That missing piece led to an impasse between Barbara Broccoli and Amazon which was pushing to make the most of its acquisition. Ms. Broccoli said Amazon was not a great fit for 007 and reportedly told friends that the people at Amazon were ‘F***ing idiots’.

As of this week, those ‘idiots’ have creative control.

Ms. Broccoli and Mr. Wilson said they are stepping down to focus on other projects but will remain as co-owners of the franchise. According to a BBC report, the pair referred to their “trusted partner, Amazon MGM Studios” as ready to lead James Bond into the future.

A change of heart?

Or maybe because Broccoli is 64 and Wilson is 83 and with no new leading man, scripts, or film in the works they feel like James Bond did in the 2006 Casino Royale movie when he said, “Does it look like I give a damn?”

Hats off to the Broccoli family for entertaining us over many years!

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I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

It is chilly here in Alberta with some extreme cold warnings. Meanwhile Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada are getting snow, freezing rain, and ice pellets. Let’s turn our back on winter for a moment and look ahead to warmer times and daffodils.

The United Kingdom’s Royal Horticultural Society is mapping the UK’s daffodils and wants to locate three varieties that are at risk or thought to be extinct: “Mrs. R.O. Backhouse”, “Mrs. William Copeland”, and “Sussex Bonfire”.

In the UK and here in Canada, daffodils are fairly simple to grow and hardy, which has helped them become a bit of a favourite here in Alberta. They are generally the first to bloom in most gardens so are also considered a harbinger of spring. Daffodils are in the genus Narcissus and its name comes from an alteration of another flower, the asphodel though no one seems to sure why or how the ‘D’ came to be added.

The endangered R.O. Backhouse variety they are trying to locate and map in the UK is named after Sarah Backhouse who bred and propagated the first true pink daffodil. Overall daffodils are prolific in the UK thanks to the efforts of botanists in the late 1800’s and later when the country turned its attention to food production during the Second World War. Millions of daffodil bulbs were dumped to make room for crops and vegetable gardens and those bulbs sprung up and thrived where they were dumped. Daffodils came to North America after the settlement of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and soon made their way to Canada.

So don’t look outside at the cold and snow. Just kick back and think about spring blooms of a neat little flower found right across Canada where they have earned their place as the flower of hope.

In March of last year the first genetically edited pig kidney was transplanted into a living recipient. He died a couple of months later of an “unexpected cardiac event” and at the time there was no sign of his body rejecting the kidney.

There have been four more xenotransplants since then, but only one patient is still alive. Massachusetts General Hospital has now announced a sixth has taken place and the patient has left the hospital, free from dialysis and living with his new organ.

There are about 100,000 people in the US and 2,500 in Canada on kidney transplant waitlists and every year many die while waiting for a donation match. Many more are on dialysis which increases long term patient risk and health care costs. The idea of using non-human organs is an intriguing solution and earlier this month the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave approval for two companies to conduct clinical trials. The previous transplants took place under the FDA's compassionate use program and the clinical trial will allow more detailed studies to be done. One of the conditions of the trials is a pause between patients to make sure there are no unexpected problems. Initially six transplants will be conducted with the goal of enrolling 50 people.

The kidney used in the latest transplant came from eGenesis, a company co-founded by geneticist George Church using CRISPR technology. There were 69 genomic edits on the donor pig which removed potentially harmful porcine genes, added human genes to improve compatibility, and inactivated viruses to control the risk of infection in the recipient.

Cross species transplants could transform how we handle organ transplants and manage organ donation shortages. It does however have ethical implications and Vox does a good job of outlining the questions raised by the practice.

While the science is being refined and better understood, for many patients it is the only answer.

I see a new TV franchise on the horizon: CSI: Dark Web.

This week TechCrunch reported on the seizure of a dark web site and its content run by the 8base gang. It took agencies from Europe, Japan, the U.S., and the U.K. to crack the case. The gang is known for indiscriminate targeting of small to medium sized businesses across sectors but have gone after healthcare companies and the United Nations Development Programme. The U.S. Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center says that 8Base is a data-extortion cybercrime operation as opposed to many of the ransomware threats we read about more often. Data extortion involves stealing sensitive information and threatening to release it unless they are paid. Those data releases are usually posted across the dark web.

According to VMware Security the group has been active since March of 2022. The business model for 8Base (yes, cybercrime has its own business models!) also involved ransomware-as-a-service where developers sell off-the-shelf ransom or malware code to other hackers. Cyperscoop says that has yielded $16 million worth of Bitcoin from over 1,000 individuals. 8Base has taken the high road in the past claiming it only targeted organizations which “neglected the privacy and importance of the data of their employees and customers”.

The whole operation to take down the organization was a true whodunnit involving tracking networks, unravelling infrastructure, and tracing financial transactions. Codeaintel says it is an important bust but as cybercrime is always evolving, other groups with better or more efficient operations will take their place.

Tuesday was Safer Internet Day so I hope you took the time to brush up on your cybersecurity knowledge!

A medium size oil tanker is a big beast. It can carry up to 300,000 barrels of oil and though their size means they can access most ports around the world, their deadweight is still 25,000 to 50,000 tons and they are 205 metres in (675 feet) long. Not an easy thing to hide or skulk around in, but the black market for oil is thriving according to Bloomberg this week as tankers continue to move the product.

With sanctions in place by the European Union and the United States, Russia needs to find customers for the 10 million barrels of oil it produces every day. The U.S. president has also said he wants to reduce Iran’s crude oil exports to zero and has imposed sanctions to put pressure on shipments to China. In a U.S. Department of the Treasury media release last week specific individuals, tankers, and companies were targeted.

But tankers continue to find and move supplies as the black market grows to a billion dollars a day says the Economic Times.

The Harvard International Review says one means of shipping black market oil is to move it through partner countries to hide the shipment’s origin and then mixing it with a non-sanctioned supply. The Washington Post found that after multiple changes in ownership the U.S. military ended up buying the dodgy mix from a Greek refinery. Another method is for the raw crude to be shipped to willing countries such as India or China where it is legitimately refined and then sold on which breaches the purpose of the sanctions, but not the specific wording.

I have written previously about ‘shadow fleets’ of ships which move illegal or sanctioned goods (mostly oil) and the practice has been growing for several years now. Windward, a maritime risk management company, estimates there were 1,300 dark fleet and an additional thousand gray fleet vessels operating around the world in 2024.

Apart from the political implications of a growing black market in oil, Vox has called many of these vessels “rustbuckets” which could pose an ecological threat as they dodge sanctions, inspections, and regulations. The Atlantic Council (a U.S. nonprofit think tank independent of government) says that the increase in shadow fleet size poses a threat to global maritime order and to the environment.

By the time you read this, Valentine’s Day will be over. I hope you didn’t give someone a diamond as a token of your feelings because it seems the diamond market is in trouble and with it the value of that little bauble you may have purchased.

Bloomberg says this week that an extended slumping market for diamonds has left De Beers “floundering for answers”, and in this video from December also reported that the company was slashing wholesale prices. De Beers is owned by Anglo American which holds 85% and the Government of Botswana which has the remaining 15%, but Anglo American wants to re-structure and sell off De Beers. The company’s chief executive said in early February they want to be free of De Beers by the end of this year.

There seems to be a couple of reasons behind the industry slump, with lab-grown diamonds being the chief cause. Creating a diamond in the lab is difficult because of the need for extreme pressure and temperature. They were first produced in the 1950s, but new technology and increased efficiency have made the production from a tiny piece of real diamond ‘seed’ to start the process to the final product, much more affordable. This process can be customized and controlled, and this has reduced the cost not just for the lab diamonds, but the value of real diamonds takes a subsequent hit as well. The Guardian reports that the price for natural diamonds has fallen to the lowest this century while the market for lab grown diamonds could reach US$37.32 billion by 2028.

Another factor in the lab vs mined diamond market is the industrial and commercial market for the gem. Diamonds are used in cutting and drilling tools, play a role in some electronics because they conduct heat well, are part of high-end audio equipment, and for the rich and famous, diamond dust is used in beauty products. Lab developed diamonds can be customized for size and shape making them considerably less expensive than the work and costs to mine and cut the real thing for users outside the jewelry market.

If you are planning on buying a diamond for an upcoming 60^th or 75^th anniversary consider waiting as long as you can because when it comes to value, diamonds may not be forever.

Amazing what you can find when out on a training mission.

During a surveying training exercise last June, members of the 673rd Civil Engineer Squadron found an old food cache in a remote, wooded part of the base near Anchorage, Alaska says Stars and Stripes magazine. It took some time for radiocarbon dating to determine exactly how old, but Smithsonian Magazine says it has now been confirmed as being a 1,000 year old find. The discovery is of even more interest because most of the area was razed by the U.S. military when the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson was being constructed in the 1940s.

Cache pits such as this one were used to preserve fish, meat, and berries. They were just a little more than a metre deep (3.5 feet) and lined with birch bark and grass. The site sits on a traditional trail used by the Dena’ina and Ahtna people and the cache would have provided needed supplies as people moved along the trail across the seasons.

A tribal historic preservation officer in the area said “I feel like every site that we learn about, every site that we can further investigate, is a piece of our history that was potentially lost. So this is kind of regaining some of the history that we were separated from.”

A wrap this week with a story from the media freedom front.

Associated Press reporters were barred from an official White House event this week because the news agency was not referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. If you recall on January 20^th in #47’s stack of executive orders was one called “Restoring Names that Honor America’s Greatness” which directed that the Gulf of Mexico would become the Gulf of America.

The AP Stylebook is used by journalists and writers around the world, and I have a copy on the shelf behind me and receive digital updates. After the President’s order, AP pointed out in one of those updates that the Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years and the presidential order only has authority in the United States. It went on to say:

“The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.”

The president’s reason for the change was that “we do most of the work there and it's ours” and couldn’t resist the additional dig that Mexico had to stop allowing millions of people to “pour into our country”.

That order came onto effect this week which led the White House to bar Associated Press, a not-for-profit agency which has been around since 1846. It has won 59 Pulitzer Prizes and shared an Academy Award with PBS for ‘20 Days in Mariupol’, and has journalists in all 50 U.S. states and across the world in nearly 100 countries. Chances are many of the news stories you read either are AP stories or “use files from AP”.

The U.S. president can change names within his own country, but not beyond. AP acknowledged this and said:

“The Associated Press will use the official name change to Mount McKinley. The area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.”

Google is falling into line with the president, and it appears that Apple and Microsoft will be falling into line as well for U.S. users and may or may not change it for non-American users. I checked Google Earth and right now it reads “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”. Encyclopaedia Britannica is set to take a similar approach to AP.

While there is a United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names which offers recommendations on standardizing names it has no binding authority. Similarly, even with an executive order, even the U.S. president does not have binding authority on the media’s use of names or on how other countries refer to the Gulf of Mexico.

Though barring specific reporters or outlets is unusual, it has happened before. Not surprisingly the most recent was during the current president’s first term.

In his January 20^th, 2025, inaugural address the president said:

“After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.

Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents, something I know something about. We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again. Under my leadership, we will restore fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.

Never again! It will not happen again! Stop all government censorship!”

AP may beg to differ on the progress made to date.

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Next week you will be receiving the next short story from my re-imagining of Chris de Burgh’s album Spanish Train And Other Stories. The first went over well so please check it out.

I’m still available for contract, freelance, and ghost-writing work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

Be sure to read to the end of this edition to learn more about changes coming to 1 Week, 7 Stories.

A headline in the Montreal Gazette got my attention to start off this week’s edition so I’ll dive straight in.

“Montreal’s unhoused try out for Team Canada ahead of Homeless World Cup tournament”

The story goes on to profile four men attending a training session in the hope they can become part of Canada’s entry in a special kind of football (soccer over here) tournament in Oslo this summer. A tournament with a tag line of “A world without homelessness. That’s our goal.”

The format is different than your usual World Cup event featuring a14 minute game, with 4-a-side squads and rolling substitutes. It is organized by the Homeless World Cup Foundation and the first event was held in Austria in 2003. Its sponsors and supporters include FIFA, the Professional Footballers Association and in individual countries, groups like the Canadian Street Soccer Association (CSSA) which organized the training session in Montreal. As far as volunteer run groups go, the nonprofit CSSA is small (it only started up last year) and has chapters in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, but it is aiming high.

The Homeless World Cup got a boost when a Netflix movie starring Bill Nighy came out in 2024. The Beautiful Game is built around a fictional story inspired by the English entry into the event. A Forbes story points out that participation is perhaps more important than emerging as the tournament winner and highlights some of the players who returned to their home countries after the event and made some dramatic changes to their lives.

I have made a note and will follow up on Canada’s entry as we come closer to the event which runs from August 23^rd to the 30^th this year.

The significance of January 25^th was probably lost on the Government of Alberta when it released its Alberta COVID-19 Pandemic Data Review Task Force : final report the day before that notable date. (The report btw was re-issued on January 28^th with a new url.)

January 25, 2020 was Canada’s first confirmed case of COVID-19. It marked the beginning of the pandemic that brought about more than 1.5 million deaths that year, lockdowns, and the scramble for a vaccine. It spawned a controversy over how it was handled that resulted in political and social conflicts. It was the first significant global pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu and how it was handled has been the subject of numerous studies and research.

The Chair and Review Lead chosen by Premier Smith was Dr. Gary Davidson who has a COVID history. In 2021 Alberta Health Services said he made several false claims about the number of COVID patients and hospital capacity, and that he was doing a disservice to frontline workers. Dr. Blaine Achen was one of the authors of the report and during the pandemic he faced disciplinary action for refusing to be vaccinated against COVID.

The guidelines for the task force were fair enough and you can read them in the introduction to the full report.

One of the recommendations in the report is “halting the use of COVID-19 vaccines without full disclosure of their potential risks”. In my experience, the potential risks of the COVID vaccine are explained before you get the shot and have been well publicized in the media. Media which Dr. Davidson has said he doesn’t read. Potential risks have also been outlined in multiple papers on the vaccine, its development, and its effectiveness. This week a group of clinicians, scientists, public health experts ,and doctors sent an open letter to the Premier and Members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta asking that the report be dismissed and cited the extensive primary research that has been done on the COVID vaccine and its risks and benefits.

There is a lot to be digested in the report which some health experts have characterized as an “attempt to rewrite history”. Much of it runs counter to wide and diverse research and when you read it, keep in mind that the authors did not go into the lab to conduct new research. They just re-interpreted existing information. The Alberta Medical Association characterizes the report as “anti-science and anti-evidence” and last week the Canadian Medical Association said that this continued misinformation and an already over-stretched health care system equals real harm. Neither of which are addressed in the report about a pandemic which featured both.

The Government of Alberta is not obligated to adopt any of the recommendations so how much becomes incorporated into policy will be up to politicians and policy makers. The premier said this week she does not “have an agenda” on what becomes policy.

Reaching into the health file one more time, a note to check on the latest news related to antimicrobial resistance or AMR.

The ability of a bacteria, virus, fungi, or parasite is a public health issue by both human and economic measures and the number of these harmful “superbugs” is on the rise. In Canada there are about 5,400 deaths per year from infections which have become resistant to treatment. The U.S. estimates are around 35,000 deaths per year. Globally AMR could add $1 trillion dollars in additional health care costs by 2050 and in Canada it is estimated that the problem is currently adding about $500 million to our annual health care costs.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce takes the problem seriously and also sees it as a medical innovation and research opportunity that has a good rate of return on the investment. The organization supported the U.S. Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions to End Upsurging Resistance (PASTEUR) Act. However under the new administration the PASTEUR Act has stalled and a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria scheduled for this week has been cancelled. The cancellation may well be a signal for the future of AMR research and the leading role the U.S. has taken until now. A Vox story this week outlines other meetings and grants that have been cancelled or put on hold and the suspension of public reports by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. has also withdrawn from the World Health Organization. The British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy cited AMR as a key element of WHO’s work when it added its voice to the many calls for the U.S. to reconsider its decision.

One of the lessons driven home during the pandemic is that infection hops borders with ease and crosses social and cultural barriers without missing a beat. To deal with infectious superbugs requires all countries to be involved and to place science over politics.

People who live in the High River, Alberta area are “furious” over the approval of a project that will use manure from a nearby feedlot and waste produce from Calgary to produce biogas.

Rimrock Renewables will take manure from a 35,000 head feedlot owned by Rimrock Feeders and turn it into biogas using biodigesters which capture the methane produced by the manure. About 1.5 million cattle call Alberta home so the idea of putting that manure to use is probably overdue, but for residents in the area, it is more about the manure producing a great big stink. The feedlot was already the source of odour complaints and apart from the production of biogas, the project is seen as a way to mitigate the smell from the feedlot. A 2024 paper in the journal Heliyon says that once the process is complete, biogas has no odour.

The European Biogas Association views biogas as a key part of creating a sustainable agricultural economy. It estimates that by 2040 19% of all biogas production will come from animal manure with the rest derived from other agricultural residues. How ‘green’ that final product is depends on how it is produced. The association has established guidelines to mitigate production odour and potential harm to water sources. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has taken a similar stand and this month posted its own guidelines around livestock biogas projects and said biodigesters are another tool to mitigate odour.

The Rimrock Cattle Company is no stranger to manure management. Doug and Helga Price own the company which manages a total of 75,000 head of feedlot cattle.

As I dug into the Rimrock Renewables / Rimrock Feeders story I tried the old ‘follow the money’ strategy and found that the residents are up against more than just a family-owned business next door. The Rimrock Renewables website was taken down on June 20^th last year when Bill C-59 came into effect requiring companies to post evidence of environmental claims so not all details are still available. Rimrock Renewables was a majority owned subsidiary of Tidewater Renewables which calls itself a “multi-faceted, energy transition company” with operations in Canada and the U.S. On January 10^th of this year it announced it had closed the sale of Rimrock Renewables to Biocirc Canada, while keeping its investment in Rimrock Cattle Company. Biocirc Canada is an affiliate of the Biocirc Group based in Denmark which operates a number of biogas plants. Its ownership includes the DLG Group which is a cooperative of 25,000 Danish Farmers.

The High River area residents opposing the new biogas plant have a tough job ahead of them if they hope to eventually reverse the project’s approval as it appears there is global reach on the other side the table. If there is any upside to the new ownership it is that it has deep experience in building and managing biogas plant in regions where there are tough environmental laws in place.

In 2017 Eileen Gunn published a short story about an array of bots, controlled from Earth, which were mining the asteroid Bennu. That was just after the real OSIRIS-Rex mission blasted off in 2016 on a voyage to the real Bennu to collect samples from the 500 metre (1640 feet) chunk of rock. It arrived at Bennu in 2020, collected a sample, and dropped off its cargo here on Earth in 2023. Not quite the speedy timelines of science fiction, but mission accomplished.

This week a paper in Nature Astronomy by an international team of researchers says that the sample contained all five nucleobases necessary to the formation of DNA and RNA. The stuff that you and I are made of. That is very different than samples from asteroid Ryugu which lacked four of the five building blocks.

Don’t get too excited quite yet because what was found were the necessary building blocks, but no signs of life. It does however help support the theory that life here on Earth may have been kick started with water and organic matter scattered about the planet in the early days of our solar systems as asteroids crashed into the planet.

As this story from the BBC points out, Earth was not the only place being peppered with space rocks 4 billion years ago so the same kinds of material were being delivered elsewhere.

Maybe we aren’t alone after all.

Imagine a scene 76 million years ago near what is now the region of Brooks, Alberta. You are fortunate to be an observer and not close to the action as a young pterosaur with a wingspan of 2 metres (6.5 feet) flies nearby. Suddenly what appears to be a distant relative of the crocodile rises out of the water and bites at the flying reptile.

That could have been the story around the discovery of a fossilised neck bone of a pterosaur in Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park. The neckbone showed signs of being bitten by a crocodile-like creature and which were confirmed by 3D X-ray scans. It was found in 2023, but as you may have learned through this newsletter, it does not really become ‘official’ until the findings appear in a peer-reviewed journal. In this case, a paper in the Journal of Paleontology. The fossil was found during a University of Reading field course. A media release from the University quotes Dr. Caleb Brown from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology who says “Pterosaur bones are very delicate - so finding fossils where another animal has clearly taken a bite is exceptionally uncommon”.

While my scenario was meant to get your attention how the bite really got there is not clear. Did the crocodile rise up to bite the pterosaur flying overhead or stopping for a drink of water, or was the bite after the crocodile happened upon a dead pterosaur?

We’ll probably never know what happened here, but direct evidence of predator-prey interactions are rare so it is a noteworthy find.

While time was up for dinosaurs 66 million years ago or so, our modern Doomsday Clock is getting closer to midnight.

The Doomsday Clock is a creation of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which was a pamphlet produced by a group of scientists in 1945 after the United States tested its first nuclear device. The image of a clock with its hands approaching midnight started out as the cover for the bulletin when it made the transition to a full magazine in 1947. The hands on that first edition were set at 7 minutes to midnight. The next time it moved was in 1949 when it was moved to 3 minutes to midnight after the Soviet Union tested its own nuclear weapon. The clock has been moved 25 times – the earliest time was 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 after the Soviet Union collapsed, and in 1953 it hit 2 minutes to midnight when the U.S. and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear bombs.

This week the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set it at 89 seconds to midnight – the closest we have come to having the potential to follow dinosaurs into extinction.

The group cites the conflict in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, emerging and re-emerging diseases, disruptive technologies, climate change, and an ever-widening range of dis- and misinformation as factors in setting a new time on the clock.

What happens when the clock strikes midnight?

Well, dinosaurs roamed around the world for 165 million years and then disappeared completely. At best we have only been around for 300,000 years as Homo sapiens and maybe 60,000 as fully human. No good reason to assume we can hang on past the midnight hour.

A reminder that starting next week, February 8^th, you’ll see a change to the newsletter. That edition will feature the first of my short stories based on the 1975 Chris de Burgh album, Spanish Train and Other Stories. I will be alternating between the regular format and a new short story. Short story fiction is really not LinkedIn material so those readers will get a teaser and a link to the Substack story. Substack subscribers will automatically receive the full story.

As always, read, comment, subscribe, and share the newsletter – especially the short stories. I have not written fiction in decades and will need your help in getting it out there to be read.

I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

After skipping an edition there is space news to catch up on, so let’s head out on a space walk.

You can only stand being stuck inside for so long before you need to venture out and get some exercise. Or in the case of NASA astronaut Suni Williams, do some chores. Ms. Williams and Butch Wilmore have been houseguests on the International Space Station since June of last year after their Boeing Starliner capsule was deemed unsafe to take them back to good old planet earth. This was her first space walk since arriving on this trip to the ISS, but she has completed seven other walks in previous visits. Williams and Wilmore are now scheduled to return home in late March or early April — ten months after what was supposed to be a one-week mission.

The good news in our next story is that the booster used in this week’s SpaceX mission made a controlled return to earth and was snagged by the giant mechanical arms, nicknamed “chopsticks”. The bad news is that the rest of the rocket is in little pieces after a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”. In more down-to-earth terms it blew to pieces. It is now an ex-rocket ship. The 123-metre-tall (403 feet) rocket is what Elon Musk is touting as the launch vehicle that will take people to Mars. One can only imagine the euphemism the company will use if a crew ends up scattered about the sky after a failed training mission.

On the success side of the ledger, the New Glenn rocket built by Blue Origin, managed to make it into orbit on January 16^th. The mission of the Jeff Bezos (of Amazon fame and fortune) owned company was still not a complete success. The booster was supposed to land safely on a specially designed floating platform but “man, we got close”, said a company spokesman. According to Space.com, each New Glenn rocket booster will be reused 25 times to carry 45 metric tons (50 tons) for public, private, and government customers. They just need to stick the landings.

Dementia cases are on the rise. According to a study in Nature Medicine, the number of cases in the United States will double by 2060. The study was lead by researchers at NYU Langone Health and in a media release attributes much of the increase to the overall aging of the population, but adds that unhealthy diets and lifestyle and underestimating previous numbers were also a factor.

The Alzheimer Society says that by 2030, 1 million people will likely be living with dementia in Canada. Their estimates include roughly 771,339 Canadians already with dementia as of January 1^st of this year and in the 2040s, there will be 20,000 people diagnosed with dementia every month. Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta will experience the biggest increases.

In a report from last year, Ontario Health said that in 2020 (statistics lag in this one) the economic toll of dealing with dementia in Canada was $40.1 billion when you factor in indirect costs on family and care partners through lost productivity. Hope you are sitting down for the projected costs for 2050: a 275% growth to $110 billon.

Ongoing research to delay the onset of dementia is vital, because the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis estimates that even a 1 year delay reduces the economic costs by 10% and a 5 year delay will save 42%.

Research is discovering biomarkers and behavioural and social indicators that can detect early signs of dementia and The Guardian this week outlined new drugs and even a vaccine which are showing promise for treatment. If we can spot it sooner and reduce wait times for diagnosis, dementia patients in the future can be better taken care of by a health care system already stretched to the limit.

Of course, Alberta had taxpayers like me in mind when they lifted the ban on new coal exploration on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains this month. Apparently the health impacts of those living in the vicinity of coal mining activity or the sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide produced by burning coal are minor in comparison to the lawsuits which could be filed against the province if the industry doesn’t get its way. Never mind that the Government of Alberta has 10 cases going to court at taxpayers expense in its ongoing fight with the federal government over gripes ranging from guns to energy.

In a January 16^th letter to the Alberta Energy Regulator, the Province’s Minister of Energy and Minerals said,

“I am directing the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) to lift the suspensions of all approvals that were suspended under Ministerial Orders 054/2021, 093/2021 and 002/2022 and extend the expiry dates of approvals suspended under those orders to account for the period of suspension”.

It was done “quietly” said the Toronto Star, via Ministerial Order with no media release and is meant to “reduce regulatory confusion”. As you can see in the image of Danielle Smith as she spoke from Washington, DC to reporters, she was concerned about the seriously liability the province could be facing, and the decision was taken to make sure that “taxpayers are protected”. The government also said in a statement to CTV that the order to AER amounted to” housekeeping”.

The eastern slopes area covered by the decision amounts to 188,000 hectares according to the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.

Heck of a housekeeping job.

No, not going to let the inauguration of #47 slip by entirely. In his inauguration speech he said the border wall (not finished in his term as #45) would be completed and in a follow-up speech expanded on his plans and mused that the governor of Texas would be saying, “Sir, the wall is going up too fast!”. Whether it will come to pass or whether it will affect immigration I’ll leave to you to dissect over coffee, but one concern generally not discussed is how the existing segment of wall and possible expansion affects wildlife. The 3,200km (2,000 miles) U.S / Mexico border is home to more than just people or immigration activity, it is prime habitat for large animals such as bears, pronghorns, jaguars, and wetland species living along the Rio Grande.

A story this week in The Guardian says the 720 kms (450 miles) that were completed broke up wildlife corridors, fragmented ecosystems, and has harmed biodiversity. One ecologist quoted in the article referred to the damage done as an “absolute travesty and a disaster for border wildlife”. Animals are not very handy with ladders or tools so instead of being an insurmountable human barrier, animals larger than a jackrabbit are the ones out of luck. Hilltops have been dynamited and other areas graded which exacerbates the damage to ecosystems located on federal land. Jaguars have been hunted close to extinction in the U.S, but their comeback will come to a shuddering halt if the new administration continues to build, baby, build.

In June of 2023, Parliament passed the Online News Act (ONA) which was drafted to ensure compensation for news organizations whenever their content was re-used on other platforms. Google is the example used most often because it makes billions of dollars in ad revenue by scooping up news and news links and serving it up every time users type in a search term. Globally, Google’s ad revenue is almost $238 billion U.S. dollars. Google and Facebook (Meta) control 80+ percent of the digital ad revenue in Canada and when the ONA came into force, they had very different responses. Meta chose to block news links in Canada and Google opted to enter into the compensation option offered by the Act. It agreed to pump $100 million CDN annually into the non-profit Canadian Journalism Collective to distribute to Canadian news businesses. The first distribution of those funds will be complete by the end of this month.

CBC is set to receive about $7 million from the fund and says it will be adding staff in 22 communities with a focus on Western Canada. In a blog post, Brodie Fenlon, general manager and editor in chief of CBC News outlined those jobs. One and two person bureaus in underserved locations such as the Peace Region in B.C., a new position in Yellowknife to cover communities Old Crow and Sachs Harbour, expanding the Fort McMurray bureau, and a travelling journalist based in northern New Brunswick are a few examples of what we will see and hear.

Canadian print and digital media will receive 63% of the total fund, CBC 7%, and other broadcasters the remaining 30%. Not everyone is happy with the distribution. There was an open call for proposals and the Collective has promised the funding round will be completed by the end of January. However, considering the amount at stake and that the organization is a collection of journalists and media organizations it has an inadequate website with precious little information available.

Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, back at the frontlines of Internet search.

A survey released by the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) this week contained some troubling numbers on how we decide the best ways to take care of ourselves. For a start most of us are either highly susceptible (43%) or moderately susceptible (35%) to health misinformation. The result is more than a third of Canadians says they “avoided effective health treatments due to false information”.

In a Globe & Mail story (should be a free link, if not please let me know) the president of the CMA attributes the growing problem to an increasing lack of access to doctors or health professionals and a crisis of misinformation. While there still seems to be a high level of trust in doctors, if a significant number of people cannot get an appointment quickly, the Internet becomes the option of choice. If that information proves to be of no value or results in an adverse reaction, anxiety goes up as well. The survey also found a generational gap as more younger people turn to social media for answers.

The Lancet didn’t mince words in an editorial last week about misinformation and disinformation. It said the problem is more than a nuisance and is a societal threat that can seriously undermine public health. The CMA survey data would seem it support that idea. The Lancet also took a poke at Facebook and its decision to end fact-checking. Meta said instead of fact checking it would rely on the “community” to correct errors, but as many surveys have shown, we have a tough time separating misinformation, disinformation, and downright bafflegab.

As one of the health experts ABC News interviewed said in this story about health misinformation, “ … we do see people trying to leverage health [misinformation], in particular, toward a political end…”.

Dr. Google it seems, is not the answer.

The final story for this edition is a story about stories, and a tweak to 1 Week, 7 Stories.

Back in my University days when I wanted to change the world with music, writing, and a dash of rock n’ roll all held together with a dollop of idealism, Chris de Burgh released his album, Spanish Train and Other Stories. It was his second album and was a relative success. Some critics and fans consider it his best and I was among that group. I bought it on vinyl when it came out and believed that the “stories” part of the album title was key to its success. The songs told a story if you just closed your eyes and listened.

When I suddenly found myself “retired” last year, I thought it was time to do what I considered doing back in that less than academic phase of my time n university. Turn each one of the songs into a story.

Songs and stories are quite different beasts. One relies on music, musicians, and imagery. The other needs imagery but it does not have a voice, let alone a rock band backing it up. Music can evoke emotions across language and cultural barriers. Putting a tale down on paper or electronic ink requires a different approach to get the job done.

Turning the 11 songs on the album into 11 different stories was a challenge. I wanted to make sure each story stood on its own even if you were not familiar with the album or Chris de Burgh. I took it on as a creative exercise and one that I hoped would bring back my creative edge.

Over the next few months, 1 Week, 7 Stories will alternate between its usual format and a new one of those short stories. You’ll have to subscribe to the stories (free) on Substack if you want to receive them automatically, but the alternating LinkedIn newsletter will include a teaser and a link to the most recent story.

The first short story from Media Margins will drop on February 8^th. Hope you enjoy and share.

Read, comment, subscribe, and share this newsletter.

I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

(On a scheduling note, there will not be a newsletter next week. The next edition will be January 25^th)

Canada’s first babies born in 2025 entered the year minutes after midnight on News Year’s Eve and ushered in a new generation. Welcome Generation Beta kids.

First off, the assigning of a generational name and date is not a scientific or sharply defined practice, and there is certainly no policy associated with the generational shorthand. That doesn’t make it a useless point for discussion because as the Pew Research Centre points out it is one way to frame the challenges and opportunities for the young and the old. The downside being that we can oversimplify those discussions with stereotypes that lose sight of change.

The first generation given a handle of its own was the Silent Generation born between 1928 and 1945 and since then we have been through the Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials or Generation Y, Gen Z, Generation Alpha, and now Generation Beta which will include new additions up until about 2039.

While we have no “generation naming authority” there have been some influential analysts, writers, and demographers. A book called Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe first opened that generational door in 1991. That same year, Canadian Douglas Coupland wrote a novel which popularized Generation X. In 2021, thirty years after the book was published, The Guardian caught up with Coupland who admitted he never liked being called a baby boomer and his novel was a way to invent his way out of it. Australia-based Mark McCrindle and McCrindle research coined the term Generation Alpha and says that the new generation will make up 16% of the global population by 2035.

As we wrestle with all the opportunities and challenges that artificial intelligence is throwing at us every day, keep in mind that the first Beta baby born in New South Wales and all those that follow her will go beyond being digital natives – they will never have known a world without AI.

Which leads to another AI story which these newborns will never read and therefore may never have learn a much-needed lesson.

Apple’s AI-generated news alerts said that Luke Littler had won the PDC World Darts Championship before it had even taken place and that tennis star Rafa Nadal had come out as gay. The two false stories were based on BBC stories and sent to the BBC News app.

This is not the first bug in the Apple works and even though the BBC raised the issue in December, Apple did not respond until this week and said it is working to clarify that the summaries were AI-generated. Somewhat hypocritical of Apple to push the British introduction of its new AI-powered featured in early December and by January using the same technology seemingly as an excuse for the mistakes. As Computerworld notes, Apple appears to be saying that these summaries are done by AI and therefore could contain machine-generated errors. Hardly a selling point for a product that Vox described as “magically mediocre” when they tested it in September.

Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of The Guardian said the product should be pulled from use because it is “clearly not ready”. BBC complained earlier that Apple’s AI summary said BBC had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. Another little oops from Apple. Perhaps Isaac Asimov’s novel, I,Robot had a point when it suggested that robot were more human than mankind!

Judging by what TechCrunch said about the problem, Meta and Apple are as focused on labelling AI generated content as they are on ensuring that it works.

Those Beta kids who will start reading AI generated content in 6 years or so will never know what hit them.

‘Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions, back to school, and for getting sick. Just about everywhere. Top among what’s ailing us this January is the flu and RSV (Respiratory syncytial virus). It is winter and many people assume that as we get cold, we catch a cold. Not so. Both the flu and RSV are caused by viruses. When it gets cold, we spend more time inside in close contact with other people and over the holidays we tend to up our close contact time. It may appear that cold is the problem, but there is no direct link.

In Alberta the holiday sick-giving season pushed some hospitals to over capacity for children and Winnipeg is experiencing a surge in emergency room visits for respiratory virus related problems. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says New Hampshire is one of 11 states classified as having a “very high” level of respiratory illnesses. The state has had two flu-related deaths this winter. In Europe, flu cases are up sharply with France and Spain getting the worst of it.

While we are by no means headed into pandemic territory there are enough hotspots to remind us that the decline in vaccination rates does have consequences. For instance, as 2024 was closing out Medical News in Brief said that cases of measles around the world rose by 20% over the previous year and pointed to a drop in vaccine coverage as the culprit.

Not too late to get the jab!

As COIVD-19 was on the rise, wastewater surveillance for the virus became more common and proved to be an effective tool. By analyzing wastewater samples for specific pathogens researchers and public health officials can track the prevalence of potentially harmful disease before patients have begun to show clinical symptoms.

Now, Alberta researchers are on the hunt for the latest disease needing some early detection measure in place.

H5N1 often referred to as avian influenza.

H5N1 takes its toll on wild and domestic birds but has now been found in U.S. dairy cattle and has spread to a small number of people. From the perspective of the pan-Alberta wastewater network monitoring waste from Alberta livestock makes a lot of sense to stay a ahead of the spread. As one of the team leads said in this CBC story, when it comes to H5N1 “we've been worried about an impending pandemic threat for some time. It could happen any day, and being prepared is really important". By monitoring the wastewater on farms and feedlots, early detection of H5N1 can help us identify potential hotspots

The Public Health Agency of Canada is working with a variety of government levels and department and academic institutions to establish a pan-Canadian program to deal with potential public health threats whether it is communicable diseases, potential antimicrobial resistant organisms, or even illicit drug use.

It may not be the most pleasant job to collect wastewater samples, but as the old saying goes, “someone has to do it”.

We love our highways. Highways to get us out for a quick getaway, highways that are tricky to navigate in bad weather, and highways like Toronto’s 401 or the I-5 in Los Angeles to make drivers wish they had stayed at home.

Millions of years ago, Jurassic dinosaurs had their own kind of highway and likely encountered their own kind of road rage. One of those reptilian highways has been discovered in a quarry in the United Kingdom. We may not have much physical evidence of the actual dinosaurs that made the tracks but an article from the UK’s Natural History Museum says that the fossilized tracks give clues to behaviour. A BBC story from last week calls it the “biggest ever” dinosaur trackway found in the UK.

Canada has its own share of dino highways and byways. The UK find featured about 200 ancient tracks, but in 2022 an international team of paleontologists documented more than 100 footprints on the banks of the Red Willow river near Grande Prairie, Alberta. British Columbia has its own “dinosaur autobahn” which dates back 100 million years.

Dinosaur tracks are generally found where there was plenty of mud and silt present to leave deep impressions. Unlike the typical impression you might leave as you walk through mud; dinosaur tracks are found because they had quickly filled in sand and small pebbles. Over time these become compressed and leave a cast of the original print. It could also be the case that the muddy area where the prints were left dried out in under increasingly hot and dry conditions. These unique conditions that overcome time and human development are why large tracked areas such as the recent one in the UK or the one in Alberta are uncommon and get special attention.

Ambitions of fighting climate change through special funding, expensive initiatives, tax incentives (negative and positive), and corporate action are experiencing rough times.

The Net-Zero Banking Alliance is the latest example of how shaky climate action structures can be. The United Nations-led initiative was launched in 2021 and is made up of banks from 44 countries. Using their collective investment capital and influence, the commitment was net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from the member’s lending and investing portfolios.

While the group says that remains the goal, many company’s are jumping off the bandwagon. Major institutions such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase have left the group. Not surprisingly, they have all left since the “drill, baby, drill” Donald Trump was elected. Now Canada’s RBC and BMO are ready to leave the group according to some media reports.

With control of the US Executive, Senate, and House, Republicans are applying pressure on the sector to walk back their plans.

Depending on what you read and who is the pundit of the day, either this latest development could be a good PR move to stay in the good graces of the incoming administration, or the original group commitment was weak or hypocritical.

Another case of wait and see what happens to the best of intentions.

While we are enjoying a Chinook and unseasonable warm weather in Calgary this week, it is not quite nice enough for a picnic. By the time summer rolls around, however, you might want to keep this story in mind. Ants can hold a grudge. Evolutionary biologists from the University of Freiburg found that ants learn from experience. They remember aggression and odours. When they don’t like what they remember they will “open their mandibles and bite” or kill their competitors by spraying acid. The authors of the paper in the open access journal Current Biology point out that some form of recognition is important for the cell level to the societal level. Habits or automatic response are part of that behaviour, but social insects such as the ants in the study also rely on “associative learning” to protect themselves.

Ants have long been known as social creatures and this new research illustrates how well developed their societies really are.

The acid spray by the way, is formic acid and it isn’t pleasant stuff according to MIT.

Read, comment, subscribe, and share this newsletter.

I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

Playing some catchup from the end of the off the year and to ease into 2025, starting off with the cute and cuddly and perhaps endangered koala bear.

Koalas are in trouble because of the spread of chlamydia, stress from droughts and wildfires, and an increasing number of traumatic injuries from cars and dogs according to this story from the New York Times. On the eastern seaboard of Australia the animal we tend to think of as synonymous with the land down under is officially listed as endangered which the Australian Koala Foundation says is almost meaningless because the koala habitat is not protected. The foundation is one of several wildlife groups which says that chlamydia is definitely a problem, but that habitat pressure is becoming a much greater issue.

Chlamydia is common in the animal world and in the case of the koala spreads through sexual contact and from mothers to their babies. It is a bacterial infection which can lead to urinary tract infections, blindness, and infertility. Antibiotics are an effective treatment, but that wreaks havoc on the gut making it difficult for the koala to digest its main food source – eucalyptus leaves.

There is research on vaccines to protect against chlamydia and a couple of them have had good success but as a BBC story pointed out this week, it may not be in time to stop more koala populations becoming endangered.

I grew up during a time when smoking still had a cool factor (I evaded the temptation so wasn’t really cool) and though it has lost that old suave appeal, it is neither gone nor forgotten. Considering that smoking goes back thousands of years, we have made pretty good progress in trying to convince people to kick the habit.

New research commissioned by the United Kingdom Department for Health and Social Care was released just in time for smokers to add kicking the habit to their list of resolutions for 2025. The research says that ending a 10-cigarette a day habit will have paid off by January 8^th by adding one day more to their life expectancy. The research updated previous research (from 2000) that underestimated how much of a smoker’s life is lost from the habit. The new numbers say that every cigarette shortens your life by 20 minutes. One researcher from University College London said that means the average smoker will lose about a decade of their life. Some of the conclusions were drawn from the British Doctors Study which began in 1951 and has surveyed doctors and smokers with regular check-ins and questionnaires.

About six million adults or 12% of the population in the United Kingdom are smokers and the same percentage holds true here according to Statistics Canada numbers. Also in keeping with the UK numbers, more men than women smoke and older Canadian are more likely to smoke.

Quit smoking, live long and prosper in 2025.

Jimmy Carter died earlier this week, and I won’t try to re-hash much of what you have already heard, except to point out his stand on environmental issues during his term in office from 1977 to 1981.

On June 20, 1979, President Carter officially unveiled solar panels on the roof of the White House.

It was during an energy crisis in the U.S. following a cut in oil production by Iran from 5.8 million barrels a day to a mere 445,000 a day which drove up prices, pushed down supply, and resulted in panic buying.

Not everyone embraces cutting back on fossil fuel use today, but in 1979 the suggestion was almost unheard of, yet Carter said the world needs to waste less energy and use renewable energy to replace fossil fuel supplies. He went so far as to set a goal of 20% of all the energy the country used would be renewable by the end of the 20^th century. In 2024 the US number sits barely above that and globally falls just under it. Canda lags behind at about 17%.

Even from day 1 of his presidency he had an eye on solar with a solar-heated reviewing stand for his inauguration. The all-metal stand (he didn’t want wood that would end up in a landfill) was recycled as a bandstand in Atlanta Georgia but has since ‘disappeared’. The White House solar panels fared somewhat better. President Ronald Reagan had them removed and they were used on a roof at Unity College. One has been preserved as an historical marker on the campus.

The incoming administration is not likely to have such a green eye on the future, but a Reuters story suggests that while there may be a slowdown in renewables it will not be a full stop. Renewables may even hold their own, because while Trump is from the school of “drill, baby, drill”, his pick for “energy czar” Doug Burgum, is an all-of-the-above choice who supports renewables and carbon capture.

Elon Musk is back in the news to end 2024 and not because of his role as the seemingly U.S. Co-President. He is launching into 2025 as his newfound political power is boosting his Starlink service and wearing down the opposition according to Bloomberg. Starlink uses a constellation of low (550km) Earth orbit satellites to deliver the internet to underserved countries, remote communities, or as the home page of Starlink illustrates, to your yacht.

Starlink cannot operate in some countries because it would be in the way of government telecommunications, has been criticized for opening its service to terrorist organizations, has military and security implications, and in the case of countries such as South Africa, the company does not want follow rules for local or national investment and equity.

Astronomers also have a string of concerns. First there is the sheer number of satellites. There are more than 6,000 Starlink satellites in orbit today and plans for tens of thousands more according to AAAS Science. It will not be long before a wide-viewing telescope will not be able to look at a piece of sky without a Starlink satellite in the picture. Add in other private companies using Musk’s SpaceX launch capabilities and researchers say that by the end of the decade there could be 100,000 satellites whirling around the planet.

Each of those satellites emits radio waves which interfere with radio astronomy and an open access letter in Astronomy & Astrophysics says the “unintended electromagnetic radiation” from the latest Starlink satellites is worse.

There is no question that Starlink is a valuable and innovative piece of communications kit, but Space.com recently questioned whether it is a grand innovation or a menace. Already the article says, Starlink is considered the greatest risk for orbital collisions. Sooner or later all those satellites are going to come down and burn up in the atmosphere. A Canadian researcher said in a 2021 open access paper that the burn-up emissions will add a significant amount ozone depleting alumina into the atmosphere. As this is new territory it is difficult to say what the long-term effects will be.

Which brings us back to Musk and his out-sized influence on the planet. The Canadian paper suggests that much of the satellite activity violates parts of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and there have been numerous calls for more co-operation between countries and regulatory bodies.

As the Bloomberg story points out however, Starlink and Musk will not let regulatory rules or politics get in the way. His bromance with incoming President Trump is already adding to his wealth and influence and hurdles are melting away.

Look up in the night sky for a few nights and you will likely see a Starlink satellite train looking down on you. Even a decent smartphone will snap a picture to remind you of what lies ahead in 2025.

One of the stories I covered early in my CBC career was about knives. After a knife attack in Calgary, I happened to be walking through a mall and passed a knife shop selling some pretty nasty looking sharp edge knives, small swords, and cleaves alongside the usual kitchen-variety tools. The on-the-street and law enforcement interviews we did agreed that getting hold of a dangerous weapon was far too easy.

There have been some changes in the law since then, but in 2023 homicides from stabbing were number 2 in Canada, close behind shootings. Of the 778 homicides that year, 234 were stabbings.

This week new laws governing the sale of long-blade weapons such as machetes came into effect in Manitoba. For a start, retailers have to store them in a manner that makes it difficult for shoppers to access without assistance. They can only be sold to adults and photo ID is required. Back when I did my story ‘smash and grab’ was easy and anyone could buy a cleaver or machete along with a new butter or steak knife. The Long-Bladed Weapon Control Act also requires the seller to record the purchaser’s address and other relevant information. The act also notes (unfortunately) that the rules do not apply to online retailers sending knives to Manitoba addresses.

One of the reasons Manitoba may have had for taking on this new law could be a rash of knife crimes that involve machetes in particular. The Winnipeg Free Press said that in 2023 there were 1,637 violent crimes involving knives - 28% more than the 5-year average.

The C2C Journal has a good rundown of the problem in Manitoba and the difficulty in implementing and enforcing knife laws in most jurisdictions.

Two self guided vehicles met with a bit of a crunch on December 27^th. It had to happen eventually and it certainly won’t be the last time. (and certainly fodder for late night talk and comedy sketches!)

The bigger vehicle was a Waymo taxi and it hit a Serve Robotics vehicle as it was crossing the street in Los Angeles. Serve Robotics launched its autonomous sidewalk delivery fleet in January 2022, and is one of many similar services around the world. The company is cagey about its actual numbers but has announced a contract with partners to deploy 2,000 more robots in U.S. markets. Waymo has close to a thousand robocabs puttering around San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin. Head-to-head contact was inevitable.

What is also inevitable are people having close encounters with self-driving vehicles. The first recorded pedestrian fatality from a vehicle goes back to London in 1896. Canada’s first ever pedestrian fatality was in 1905, the first in the U.S. was in 1899, and finally in March of 2018 an Uber self-driving test vehicle killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. The vehicle was in autonomous mode, but there was a backup driver. He was charged with felony negligent homicide pleaded guilty and accepted a plea agreement.

Generally, the driverless vehicles are proving to be safe, but it will be some time before a final verdict because there are so few on the roads in a very limited number of cities. An equally important question to be addressed will be the question of liability in accidents involving robo-whatevers. Right now, it appears that the manufacturer, software company, operator, and other drivers or pedestrians will find themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit. No fault insurance may find a few more advocates!

I’ll close this edition with a great big, “I didn’t know that”. The bald eagle is now the official bird of the United States. What I didn’t realise was that until Christmas Eve, the U.S. had no official bird at all.

S.4610 – A bill to amend title 36, United States Code, to designate the bald eagle as national bird changed that.

The bird is on the official Great Seal of the U.S, it first appeared on a coin in 1776, and can’t be missed on one-dollar bills. It got a bad rap from Benjamin Franklin who said, “He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly” and then went on to say he preferred the turkey “For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America”.

Maybe because it lacked official status the big bird has had a tough go of it for many years. The American Eagle Foundation says it has gone from a high of 100,000 nesting Bald Eagles in 1782 to a low of 417 known nesting pairs in 1963. That wild ride has stabilized at about 316,700 individuals, which includes 71,467 occupied nests according to the U.S, Fish & Wildlife Service.

House and Senate politicians from both parties in Minnesota (home to the largest nesting population of bald eagles) started the big push and once it made it through Congress, it was ready to be signed.

No one could be happier than this man from Minnesota who has a collection of 40,000 bald eagle related objects and tipped off Congress that the bald eagle lacked official status. A great way for him and for the eagle to end 2024 and kick off 2025.

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I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

This edition however is going to be a bit different. It is after all a holiday week and coming up to the end of the year when we are awash in lists of top stories, news, events, and discoveries, so I am offering my list of lists worth adding to your reading list.

We’ll start with news from space courtesy of CTV and Canadian astrophysicist Robert Thacker with a “look up and a look back”. Two stories in particular hit home for the average person – the aurora borealis and the chance to see a total solar eclipse in parts of Canada. Some regions had numerous chances to catch the northerns lights over the year, but in early October the nighttime light show hit a peak thanks to a geomagnetic storm. The solar eclipse was a special treat for people in the Maritimes who won’t get another chance until 2079. It was also a great year for orbital space launches which hit 255 - more than twice the number of launches at the height of the sixties space race. One of those launches was the Boeing Starliner which I have covered a few times in this newsletter. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams made a successful trip to the International Space Station the first week of June but problems with their vehicle meant they could not use it for the return trip. What was supposed to be a one-week trip has been dragging on, and the latest date for their return is now March or April.

Some guests just won’t leave!

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is better known as AAAS, and it has been publishing a science magazine since 1880. The organization struggled to stay viable in its early years, but after merging with Science magazine and getting some help from Alexander Graham Bell it managed to stick and has emerged with some leading peer-reviewed journals including Science Advances, Science Robotics, and Science Translational Medicine.

Last week it posted its “favorite online news stories of 2024”. The list offers some insight into the stories, then sends you off to read the full article. One comes with a warning not to read it before your Christmas dinner, or it may put you off when you see your dog licking its chops in anticipation of a special treat (read it to find out!).

Also on its list are Brazilian sharpnose sharks testing positive for cocaine, cave art from kids, virtual reality for flies, and the Ig Nobel awards, better known as the ‘Iggies’. Nature magazine calls them “the wayward son of the more righteous Nobels, supposed to reward research that makes people laugh, then think. For 2024, the winners included an experiment to put live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight path, real plants that imitate the shape of nearby artificial plants, and a study which conducted 350,757 tests which concluded that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started.

Science does indeed have a sense of humour.

Another magazine that has a solid history and has (so far) survived the media upheaval is Maclean’s. Originally called The Busy Man’s Magazine in 1905, its owner and publisher John Bayne Maclean renamed it after himself in 1911 and it still turns out some solid journalism.

It has 2 lists worth checking out.

First is the 10 best long reads of 2024.I have not read them all, but one from November does stick out. Schools vs Screens came in at No. 2 and examines the practice of banning smartphones in classroom. The success of the idea seems to depend a lot on which province, which school, and even which teacher is instituting and enforcing the ban. What remains to be studied over the longer terms is whether it makes any difference to academic results. Other stories making the list include the trend to alcohol-free bars and mocktails, the promise and peril of our rising population, and the Jackpot Generation as boomers both pass on, and pass on their wealth, to their millennial kids.

If you don’t want to invest the time for a long read while over-indulging in holiday festivities, the most popular Maclean’s interviews for the year can be consumed with your coffee or eggnog. I’m not a huge fan of the interview/transcript in print, but for many it does work well. Former federal health minister Jane Philpott’s interview is No. 8 and the interview covers a lot of ground from her views on Canadian health care to her time spent working in Niger and Ethiopia (she is a qualified MD). Her book, Health for All, was published earlier this year and rose up on the Canadian bestseller list.

Other interviews include the mayor of Jasper talking about what’s next for the town after the fire caused so much damage, and “The Canadian Doctor Who Helped Invent Ozempic”.

Not to be overlooked in top stories, are people, nature, and the climate and for those stories we’ll turn to the global nonprofit research organization, the World Resources Institute. The WRI was founded in 1982 with funding from the MacArthur Foundation which is a non-profit investment powerhouse in its own right. The WRI has a lofty ambition to improve how we use land, water, energy, food, and finance to “protect and restore nature, and to stabilize the climate”.

It leads into its look back at 2024 by pointing out we are just finishing offer the hottest year on record. Wildfires laid waste to huge areas of South America and Canada, floods swept Brazil and Kenya, and heat waves hit major cities.

Not only does the WRI list examine the challenges, it does offer some hope in work being done to use more sustainable agriculture in the Amazon, the increased use of clean energy, and technology which is bringing electricity to areas in the sub-Sahara.

While the world lost the equivalent of almost 10 football (soccer) fields of tropical forest per minute in 2023, Brazil and Columbia managed to slow forest loss significantly in 2024.

When it comes to climate change the WRI says we are on track to cut emissions 1% by 2030, but the number needs to be 42%. That left me speechless but the organization says it is not impossible to overcomes, even with the election of Donald Trump which is cast as “a blow to U.S climate and environmental action”.

The WRI lists covers a lot of global ground with enough links to keep you busy, informed, and maybe not quite as pessimistic as you might think.

Canadians love to talk about the weather and Environment and Climate Change Canada always keeps us in the know. There was the January deep freeze which brought temperatures down into the -40 C range (the point where -C and -F meet!) in some parts of the Prairies, flooding in southern Ontario, and of course the wildfire which scorched a third of the town of Jasper and more than 32,500 hectares of Jasper National Park.

Environment and Climate Change Canada said we are entering years where weather extremes are the new normal which prompted this response from the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment:

“Looking back on extreme weather events of the past year paints a stark picture of the escalating health crisis caused by climate change. Worsening wildfires, heat waves, floods, and other extreme events threaten the lives of people across Canada.”

One of the biggest cultural and societal changes of 2024 is the one confronting the media. Specifically, journalists and reporters whether they work in print, broadcast, or digital, to stay safe while producing solid, fact-checked stories for their audiences. The last year (and longer) has been a tough one.

Reporters Without Borders says that 2024 was an intense year for journalists, especially in conflicts zones where the number killed has reached a five-year high. Of the 104 killed last year, more than half were Palestinian media professionals. Globally 550 are being held in prisons somewhere, 55 are being held hostage, and 95 are missing. The International Federation of Journalists says the independent press is fragile and that the profession has become risky and dangerous.

“Protecting those who inform us is protecting the truth.”

Thibaut Bruttin, Director General of Reporters Without Borders

You will need to invest about 42 minutes of feet up and listening time to hear the West of Centre podcast to get the most from this final list. It was posted a week before Christmas, and given Canada’s political churn it may have a few out-of-date bits, but it is still worth the effort.

Joining host Kathleen Petty are Zain Velji from Northweather (a marketing and lobbying agency), Alex Boyd from the Toronto Star, and the CBC’s Jason Markusoff.

They cover a lot of ground starting in Alberta where they discuss what the provincial NDP’s new leader is doing and why he is not doing more, the different tactics being taken by Canadian federal and provincial leaders in response to Trump’s tariff musings, and of course they analyze the resignation of Chrystia Freeland and the sinking fortunes of federal liberals.

If you’d prefer a more global take on 2024 news I’d also recommend The Guardian’s year end podcast.

All the best for the New Year ahead and I’ll be back on the news beat in 2025.

Read, comment, subscribe, and share this newsletter.

I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

As we get closer to a holiday break and the end of the year, there always seems to be last minute shopping. We’ll start there with the Biden Administration’s to-do list as they get ready to close the doors on their tenure.

Thanks to an Interior Department decision on Monday, energy companies can do some post holiday shopping for drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge starting January 9^th. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service describes the area in the northeastern corner of Alaska as a critical home to migratory and resident wildlife. It is the largest designated wilderness within the National Wildlife Refuge System and lies about 2300 kms (1400 mi) from the Yukon Border.

While its name implies some form of protection for wildlife that is not entirely true. According to the Protect the Arctic website, the coastal plain was left unprotected due to “political pressure”. Protection was further eroded in 2017 with a provision buried in the Tax Act requiring the sale of oil and gas leases to generate revenue.

This is the second drilling lease sale since the Tax Act and the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation has opposed the sale because of its cultural significance and its importance as wildlife habitat for many species including the Porcupine caribou herd. The herd migrates every year from the Northwest Territories and Yukon to the Alaska refuge for calving. A 2400 km (1490 miles) journey. The Bureau of Land Management media release says important polar bear denning and Porcupine Caribou Herd calving areas will not be part of the leases being offered.

There is both hope and danger for the Refuge.

An active coalition of environmental groups have been lobbying with some success against the sale and drilling in the area. Those groups have been joined by national and international banks and insurers including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and American International Group (an insurance company) which have said they will not fund oil and gas development in the Arctic. Past sales have seen little interest from energy companies with few bidders bringing in less that 1% of the projected revenue.

The threat? The incoming Trump administration which opened up the first sale when it was in office. A December 2^nd story in The Guardian notes that not only are animals such as polar bears put in harm’s way, but Donald Trump has referred to the refuge as the United State’s “biggest oil farm”.

Lost in the news shuffle this week was the story of an oil spill in the Kerch Strait. The Kerch Peninsula is on the eastern edge of Crimea with the Sea of Azov on one side and the Black Sea on the other. It was occupied by Russia in 2014 as part of its annexation of Crimea. The strait is between 4 and 15 kms wide (2.4 – 9.3 miles) and separates the peninsula from Russia, making it an important navigation route.

Last weekend 2 Russian tankers were damaged during a heavy storm and drifted before running aground. This BBC story includes video footage released by Russia’s Southern Transport Prosecutor's Office which shows one tanker split open with only the bow visible above water. The 2 ships are believed to have spilled about 9,000 tons of low-grade fuel oil into the water. Then on Wednesday of this week another ship sent out a distress call in the same area saying it had a damaged cargo tank which also contained oil. A Deutsche Welle story says that not only is clean-up not high on Russia’s priority list, but more winter storms will make any clean-up efforts difficult.

While it is difficult to be conclusive given the secrecy and misinformation that surrounds Russian activities, a Reuters story says the incidents may be indicative of Russia’s “shadow fleet”. Because of sanctions, Russia has needed to find ways to move cargo, weapons, and oil in and out of the country. The shadow fleet generally consists of older ships operating under flags of convenience from non-sanctioned countries which transmit false location information, turn off their transponders, or conduct ship-to-ship transfers in areas where they can escape detection.

The recent accidents involving ships carrying oil have prompted a dozen Western countries to announce this week that they will “disrupt and deter” which includes boarding and sanctioning any ship if it cannot prove it is insured.

Political ramifications of these events have their own implications, but the environmental fallout associated with global conflicts is starting to mount up.

What a better way to beat the winter cold and inject a sense of an old-fashioned Christmas than a story about apples. Nice crisp apples to be eaten right away, turned into a pie, or become mulled cider. So when I saw this BBC story on a -18 C day (plus a wind chill), I had to share. Tucked away in the south of England is a special orchard that is home to 2,000 apple varieties. That sounds like a lot of different kinds of apples but it is just a drop in the bucket when you consider that there are at least 7,500 apple varieties around the world. (Here is an incredible database of apple varieties).

The United Kingdom’s National Fruit Collection in Kent is basically a living apple library of all apples (and other fruits) that are or have once been grown in the UK. There are similar living collections in other countries to help preserve and protect plant genetic resources. Canada does not have anything comparable, though we do have some protection through Plant Gene Resources Canada in Saskatoon SK, Canadian Potato Gene Resources in Fredericton NB, and the Canadian Clonal Genebank in Harrow ON.

Why these types of facilities are necessary has been in the works for thousands of years. Probably about 12,000 years once our neolithic ancestors started to seek out more reliable food sources beyond their hunter gatherer lifestyle. This meant selecting for desirable traits and replanting only the best seeds suitable for where these new farmers lived. Today however as we ship food around the world and grow it in the most efficient manner, the biodiversity that came with new farming communities scattered around the world is lost. Preserving varieties is important so we have somewhere to turn to in event of war, crop diseases, or climate disasters which radically reduce the crops we have come to depend on.

According to statistics from a Canadian study funded by the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada, someone ends up in a hospital or emergency department with a stroke every 5 minutes. More people are surviving a stroke, but an aging population means the overall numbers continue to rise. Ischemic strokes are the most common and the Canadian Stroke Best Practice Recommendations (CSBPR) for Acute Stroke Management lays out the guidelines for health professionals to deliver the best care.

A new study led by a University of Calgary researcher believes it has found a new tool to add to stroke management. An ischemic stroke stops the blood flow to the brain and the study will test whether a new drug will act as a neuroprotectant for brain cells to reduce neurological disability from the reduced blood flow. It would not replace drugs which dissolve the blood clots in the brain but would slow the loss of brain cells and buy time for other treatments to work.

A 2023 paper in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences said that neuroprotectants are promising but there was not enough data from “bench-to-bedside”.

The double-blind U of C trial will add to the data by studying up to 600 patients from as many as 15 hospitals. Half the patients will be given the standard treatment and the neuroprotectant, the other half will receive the standard of care and a placebo. Almost one million people in Canada are living with the effects of a stroke and it is a leading cause of adult disability. New treatment protocols may well reduce those numbers in the years ahead.

The incoming Trump administration already has journalists and media owners apprehensive about the future of their business. They have been nervous since election night, but recent events have raised the stakes. First there was the settlement of the lawsuit against ABC by the president elect. The $15 million (USD) accompanied by an apology meant that ABC and its parent company Disney would not be in litigation with a sitting president. Not a good look for Disney. The lawsuit was filed after a March TV segment in which journalist George Stephanopoulos said that Donald Trump had been “found liable for rape”. A jury in a civil case said Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carrol, but there was no finding of rape. This CNN story will take you through some of the reasons ABC agreed to settle.

With that under the Trump legal team’s belt, they said this week they are suing the Des Moines Register newspaper and its pollster. There may have been some merit in the case against ABC, but this new lawsuit could signal how the next 4 years will hit the media. An NBC NEWS story says the lawsuit accuses the paper, and pollster J Ann Selzer, of consumer fraud and election interference. The paper published its poll showing Trump was trailing by 3 points, mere days before election night in the US. It turned out to be dismally wrong, but love ‘em or hate ‘em polls are a legitimate fact of life year-round and especially at election time. Politicians, including Donald Trump conduct them, quote them, ignore them, or make decisions based on them. Whether they are right, wrong, or fall somewhere in between, a reputable pollster makes their best effort to get it right. Win or lose, these types of lawsuits and the cost of fighting them may start to sink some media initiatives.

But wait, we have more.

Voice of America is a media network funded by the US government. It broadcasts around the world across TV, radio, and digital platforms in 48 languages. It first switched on its transmitters in 1942 and is considered to be arms length from the government. In 1976 President Gerald Ford signed the VOA charter to protect the independence and integrity of the broadcaster’s programming. That charter says:

(1) VOA will serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news. VOA news will be accurate, objective, and comprehensive.

(2) VOA will represent America, not any single segment of American society, and will therefore present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions.

That is further guaranteed by the 1994 International Broadcasting Act which prohibits interference by US government officials.

That may all be changing with the appointment of Kari Lake to lead VOA. She is a former broadcaster, a staunch Trump ally, and failed in her attempts to represent Arizona in the senate and to become its governor. According to media reports, she has referred to journalists as “monsters”. Here is how VOA initially covered the announcement, which staff heard about through a social media post for the president elect. VOA is one of several media outlets including Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Radio y Televisión Martí which are overseen by the United States Agency for Global Media. That organization will also soon be subject to a yet to be named Trump loyalist.

Add all this up, and as a Guardian story said this week, public broadcast journalists should brace for “political inquisitions”.

In late November Russia added a new weapon to the war in Ukraine when it deployed a hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile known as the "Oreshnik" (the hazel). This month Belarus said some of the new missiles would be based there is 2025. Belarus is already home to Russian nuclear weapons according to President Alexander Lukashenko.

Not to be outdone in the missile race, the United States completed a successful flight of its latest conventional hypersonic missile. (that link is a Stars & Stripes story, but you can also read the US DoD, media release) The new weapon is a joint effort by the Army and Navy and the test was completed on the day of the Army-Navy football game.

Not surprisingly this means Russia will respond by increasing mass production of its missile according to Politico this week.

A hypersonic missile is generally considered to be a missile that can reach at least five times the speed of sound, manoeuvre quickly at those speeds, and complete its mission without leaving the earth’s atmosphere. Russia and China have already deployed these missiles and a US Congressional Research briefing this month says the Pentagon has asked for an increase in funding for development of comparable systems. The UK and Australia are also collaborating on the development of hypersonic weapons technology.

According to LiveScience, a U.S. Navy stealth ship will be upgraded to carry an experimental hypersonic weapon. Hypersonic missiles are usually launched from an aircraft or boosted by a rocket so this could be an attempt by the U.S. to gain an edge in a race where it is currently lagging behind.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Read, comment, subscribe, and share this newsletter.

I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

As the holiday season approaches food and grocery shopping becomes top of mind. However the rising cost of food has been top of mind for a couple of years now, so lets reach into the shopping cart and take a peek.

First off, grocery prices and the rising cost of your weekly food bill is not a local, regional, or national problem. As The Guardian put it, wake up and smell the coffee – it is global.

In October, food commodity prices were at the highest since April of 2023. That is a global statistic from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Vegetable oil prices were up a whopping 24%, the dairy category 17%, meat 10%. It will vary locally or regionally, but the bottom line is we are not alone. Canada is not exactly known for producing palm oil so if you buy something with palm oil, guess what – it costs more. We can produce seasonal peaks of some produce but in the dead of a Canadian winter your tomatoes and strawberries come from away.

Canada’s Food Price Report for 2025 is out this month and it predicts prices will continue to climb between 3 and 5 percent. About an extra $801 over this year. The report is led by Dalhousie University and has a good track record for accuracy. A Dalhousie University media release points out that global weather patterns, geopolitical conflicts, energy costs, currency fluctuations, government policies, and regulations affect prices everywhere along the chain. Seafood arriving in landlocked Alberta, bananas in the middle of an ice storm in Quebec, and oranges from California or Spain making it in time for Christmas in the Maritimes are all part of a global growing, processing, and distribution landscape.

Politicians cannot promise to lower your food bill, or the cost of food for the 29% of Canadians living with food insecurity. It seems the best we can do right now is help those that need it the most and rely on policy makers to make a dent in our overall cost of living.

As for smelling the coffee when you wake up, we are facing record high coffee prices so enjoy it while you can afford it.

The number of ways we can cut harmful emissions seems to look better every year with new technology and some innovative thinking. Biofuels are seen as one way to replace fossil fuels in some situations, but the idea is not exactly brand new. Animal and vegetable oils for lamps date back to ancient civilizations and Rudolf Diesel’s first diesel engine was powered by a vegetable oil fuel.

The latest development in biofuels is another step to increasing its use and its fuel efficiency which has been one of the drawbacks. According to a news release from King’s College London, research on a new way to produce biofuel “from chip shop to pit stop”, is 1000-times more efficient than current methods. The research was published in the journal Green Chemistry and promises the production technique will produce a fuel that is the chemical equivalent of fossil fuels without additives or blending.

The International Energy Agency predicts that between 2023 and 2028 biofuel demand will grow by 38 billion litres to hit 200 billion by 2028. The agency says that efficiency requirements, higher costs, and technical limitations are holding back growth. If this new research can be applied at an industrial level, we can expect the supply and demand to increase even more.

The lingering problem is still a sustainable feedstock for all types of biofuels. Maybe along with our green, blue, and black carts for municipal pickup, we’ll have one for our leftover cooking oil!

There are more than enough hotspots around the world with the potential for simmering tensions to boil over. One you might want to keep an eye on is the Republic of Estonia. It sits on the Baltic Sea with a 294 km (183 mi) border with Russia and a 333 km (207 mi) Latvian border.

It is that Russian strip worth noting.

Much like the strained Ukraine – Russia tensions that led up to the current conflict, Estonia and Russia have not had a happy history with Russia occupying Estonia for much of the 20th century. On the heels of the country’s “Singing Revolution”, Estonia gained its independence in 1991. It joined NATO in 2004 which may account for it having not yet met the same fate of Ukraine. Estonia spends more that 3% of its GDP on defence and starting last week British, French, Latvian, American and Estonian troops have been conducting a joint exercise in Estonia called operation Pikne (meaning lightning). The UK, France, and Iceland have a permanent military presence because as the New York Times reported in January, a NATO – Russia conflict is no longer unthinkable and for Estonians, it is “only a question of when”.

The political tensions were on display at a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ministerial meeting last week. It started as Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov approached the podium and the foreign ministers from Ukraine, Poland, and Estonia walked out. Estonia’s ambassador to NATO said Russia does not want any negotiations to end its war with Ukraine.

Estonia is a major supporter of the Ukrainian war effort, and in an attempt to enforce EU sanctions against Russia instituted full road and rail border control on traffic coming from Russia in August. Within a month customs authorities said there were 600 violations. It has been increasing its border security with wire fencing and enhanced surveillance and radar monitoring. In May the government recommended against any travel from Estonia into Russia.

Diplomatic relations between the 2 countries have been a tit-for-tat since early 2023 when each expelled the other’s diplomats. Russia has since ordered the closure of the consulates of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania in St. Peterburg and all employees are labelled as persona non grata.

In February of this year Russia added then Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas to its wanted list “over the destruction of monuments to Soviet soldiers”. Also added were Lithuanian Culture Minister Simonas Kairys and Estonian State Secretary Taimar Peterkop.

Find a good map of the Estonia – Russia border and keep an eye on the news over the coming year.

We are running low on blood. Not me or you personally, but around the world there are not enough donors to meet the blood product demand for a growing and aging population. In Canada, only 80% of the available appointments needed to meet demand are filled, leaving a gap at critical times. Globally, 61% of countries have chronic blood shortages which has prompted years of research and development into synthetic blood products that mimic hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs).

One of the latest ideas comes from a team of students at the University of Calgary who are taking hemoglobin from earthworms to the next level. As weird as it might first sound, earthworms are high in erythrocruorins which are large oxygen-carrying proteins making them a perfect blood substitute candidate. The U of C students won several medals at November’s iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) Grand Jamboree in Paris for their work on synthesizing worm HBOC using a lab grown yeast system to reproduce the key properties. The team also won the Best Entrepreneurship Special Award and the Safety and Security Special Award. They were up against 400 teams from 50 countries presenting synthetic biology projects. Consider iGEM as a science fair on steroids using the latest high-level concepts in synthetic biology to address real-world problems beginning with experiments and ending with proof-of-concept and start-up companies.

The U of C team feels that with further research and testing they can lay the groundwork for large-scale sustainable production of HBOC to address the problem of blood shortages.

There was enough going on up beyond the earth this week to warrant another Space News section.

Blue Origin is a commercial company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in 2000, with its sights set on the wild blue yonder. It launched its first uncrewed mission in 2015 and has since completed 9 crewed launches. Reporting from TechCrunch says the company’s New Glenn launch vehicle (named after astronaut John Glenn) is set for a ‘hot fire’ test this month. If that test is successful the next step for the will be a liftoff from Cape Canaveral according to a Blue Origin media release this week. That launch is key to for the rocket to earn National Security Space Launch certification so it can enter into contracts with the US Space Force. The 98 metre (320 feet) tall rocket is designed to carry 45 metric tons (99,200 pounds) to low Earth orbit.

Also this week the Breaking Defense website reported that United Launch Alliance said it expects to receive certification for its Vulcan vehicle to carry Space Force payloads soon, though the CEO admits that ‘soon’ is a flexible target. United Launch Alliance is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security. According to the Breaking Defense story the company hopes for 20 to 30 Vulcan launches per year with about half for national security missions.

SpinLaunch is a company with a completely different approach to getting payloads into space. Looking like something you might see on the cover of an old Tom Swift book, SpinLaunch uses what amounts to a giant high tech, electric slingshot to hurl up to 200 kilograms (400 pounds) into space. Inside its vacuum chamber the payload is spun around at upwards of 8,000 kph (5,000 mph) before being shot into space. (Gizmodo said it spins the “living crap” out of a satellite) That creates a tremendous G-force on the payload and the company made space news this week with a successful test which demonstrated that a small satellite can hold up under that extreme acceleration. The unique launch system has yet to be tested with an orbital launch. Earlier this month SpinLaunch closed an $11.5 million funding round though some reports said it had hoped for much more.

And as an fyi, 52 years ago this week the crew from the Apollo17 mission were the last people to walk on the moon. Don’t expect anyone to repeat the feat until sometime in 2027.

Not quite so high in the sky, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said in a media release this week that business in the past year and into 2025 is looking better after a few dismal years. Depending on which sector you’re interested in, there were a couple of high notes. Travel and Tour World focused on global passenger traffic which increased 7.1 % from the previous year with the greatest percentage coming from international travel. The International Airport Review dived into air cargo demand which was up 9.8%. One of the low notes was in the growth of sustainable aviation fuel production which is behind projections.

Airlines themselves are expected to see considerably higher revenues in 2025 and may break the one trillion-dollar mark for the first time. Apart from higher passenger volume adding to the bottom-line, higher airfares, those irritating extra charges, lower fuel prices, and increased aircraft efficiency have helped the outlook.

Never one to miss the chance of a pun, there is some turbulence ahead on the profitability flight path. Boeing and Airbus are behind in their deliveries which cuts into those efficiency savings through increased costs for airlines to maintain and fly older aircraft. Global supply chain problems are adding to the problems. The world’s geopolitical conflicts are also getting in the way as some routes must be abandoned or changed because of the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine conflicts. Some pilots and unions expressed their concerns this week about Middle East routes in particular.

You can see the full report on the IATA website.

Microplastics are not new to regular readers of this newsletter, but this edition has an update on mitigating the microplastic problem.

Chinese researchers have developed a sponge made of cotton and squid bone that absorbed about 99.9% of the microplastics from water samples. While it does not address the root cause of plastic pollution, The Guardian says it could change the course of the public health problem posed by microplastic. The researchers have published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal AAAS Science Advances.

There is little doubt that we need to control microplastics which are the small bits of plastic that come from the breakdown of consumer plastic products. They pollute our environment and end up in our bodies, including our brain which have been found to contain microplastics. In one study from 2022, researchers found microplastic in the blood of 77% of the people tested.

This new sponge is not the first one developed by Chinese researchers. Last year a different research team said they had made a sponge from starch and gelatin which Smithsonian Magazine said looked like a “large white marshmallow”. That sponge could be used in wastewater treatment plants to filter out microplastics before it makes it any further into the environment, or a smaller sponge to be used in your washing machine.

Both of these sponges are still in the experimental stage and could be scaled up for industrial use, but there are challenges. Starch and gelatin are important to the food industry and a scaling up of that sponge tech would result in competition for the resources. The one which relies on the bones from squid would also seem to face some resource limitations.

Simply boiling water can remove a significant amount of microplastics but that is not practical on an industrial scale. Also being studied to remove harmful nano and micro plastics are membrane filters, oxidation, and biodegradation.

Best bet however is to recycle your plastic and improve how we handle plastic to keep it out of our environment. Or simply use less of it.

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I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

We love wireless. Wireless charging, wireless phones, wireless Internet. You may not realise it, but wires are what makes all the wireless stuff go ‘round and that is where the first December edition of my newsletter starts.

Yes, there are satellites floating in orbit ready to deliver a host of communications services. As of last month, Elon Musk’s Starlink service alone has 6,764 satellites in orbit 550 kms (342 miles) above us which are messing up optical and radio astronomical observations while delivering an important service. Much closer to home however, we have more than 600 public undersea cable systems which are key in tying us all together. That number does not include purpose specific undersea lines for power transmission, research networks, and private systems. The TeleGeography website has an in-depth collection of data about the global underwater network including an interactive map of the image above.

Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) is planning on building a global subsea fibre-optic network covering 40,000 kms ( 25,000 miles) that will require an investment of at least $10 billion by the time it is completed according to a story in TechCrunch. It would run from the east coast of the US and end up on the US west coast after touching India, South Africa, and Australia. The “W” network as it has been nicknamed, would give Meta a dedicated infrastructure with full control of its data capacity and traffic. Currently it owns parts of 16 different networks meaning it is always competing for space.

Damage to cables is one of the most vulnerable parts of our global Internet. Accidents do happen but the latest threat is sabotage, which is suspected in two incidents in November which severed cables in the Baltic Sea. 99% of the world’s international data exchanges pass through underwater cables so the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) has created the International Advisory Body for Submarine Cable Resilience with representatives from 40 countries to help deal with threats to the global system.

Cables are damaged or broken around 100 times per year and it is a complex repair job so you can’t just call your local cable guy. The Verge has a fascinating look into what goes into keeping the network running. Give it a read!

It is getting warmer out there and we’re not talking about the mild Chinook weather we are experiencing in Calgary right now. This is climate change and its effects here at home.

The Canadian Permafrost Association defines permafrost as soil or rock that remains at a temperature of 0°C or lower for at least two consecutive years. 15% of the Northern Hemisphere is covered in permafrost and Canada has the second most permafrost on the planet (Russia is number one). The Arctic is warming at a rate three times more than the global average and as the permafrost thaws it releases the carbon that has been safely trapped for thousands of years.

A New York Times story this week says the thaw also threatens communities such as Tuktoyaktuk which is slowly finding itself closer to the Beaufort sea. Shoreline collapse is letting the sea move closer in and gravesites are collapsing in the cemetery. Gravel and large rocks are being dumped on shorelines to mitigate erosion but that is hardly a solution and does not address the root cause. A Carleton University research story says there are 3.6 million people globally living in areas vulnerable to permafrost changes.

Arctic roads, building practices and standards, biodiversity, and traditional ways of life are centred around the nature of the climate and permafrost. Winter roads assume a permafrost base, pipelines were built on what was stable permafrost ground, and the frozen ground traps water near the surface to maintain plant growth. The Guardian said last month that the “land is tearing itself apart” as landslides and slumping ground become more common and even the very monitoring stations needed to understand the problem are being swallowed up.

Permafrost is “the glue holding northern landscapes together”, and the only way to maintain those landscapes is keep that glue intact.

On November 18^th Alberta Forestry and Parks published an updated Provincial Parks General Directive. It didn’t come with fanfare or a media release and there is little reason to have expected a routine directive to be handled in any other way. Except in this case, it was bound to cause some controversy, and it is best to keep such directives under the radar. Eventually conservationists caught wind of it and The Narwhal made some noise about what had been done very quietly.

Signed by Todd Loewen, Minister of Forestry and Parks, the directive now allows the hunting of cougars in Cypress Hills Provincial Park. When the hunting season in the park opened on December 1, hunters are welcome to bring their dogs to assist in killing their trophy. Providing they meet all the guidelines of course.

Since getting the Forestry and Parks top job Loewen has been criticized for a conflict of interest because his family owns and manages Red Willow Outfitters. He has said there is “nothing unusual here”. When he first became Minister, Red Willow Outfitter listed him as part of the team offering to “Make Your Dream Hunt a Reality”, but his name (and actually all names) has been removed from the website.

His department had already raised the hunting quota for the 2023-2024 season to 72 female cougars from the previous season’s 42. The Alberta Wildlife Association said at the time the decision seemed to be based not on science, but on the “beliefs of certain stakeholders”. The latest directive once again has the Alberta Wilderness Association concerned that there is no scientific justification for the change, but without government transparency, it is hard to draw any conclusions. Here is the Minister explaining the decision in a CBC Radio interview.

This is just the latest eyebrow raising decision from the department. In November the limits on wolverines, lynx, and rivers otters were lifted. Minister Loewen said it was to get more data on how many of the animals there are. As Albertapoitica.ca observed, that only tells you how many there were, and is hardly in keeping with 21^st century science.

If you are interested in how many wolverines we have in Alberta, I’m sure there is an outfitter near you more than happy to help you nab as many as you wish.

When we get lazy or have a tough time understanding a concept we often turn to jargon or phrases that provide a broad stroke to a complex picture.

The latest sleight of hand is “AI hallucinations”.

TechCrunch has a story this week about Amazon Web Service’s new tool to combat these hallucinations which all AI models suffer from. The story says that hallucinations cause an AI model to behave unreliably. TechTarget says it is when a system generates false information or misleading results. Ah, we are getting closer. LiveScience pushes the idea further along by saying these problems can lead to “catastrophic mistakes”.

Let’s be honest and say we use the word “hallucination”, because that is a lot easier than admitting out loud that artificial intelligence is well, artificial, that it sometimes lacks intelligence, and at times simply does not work. If my car breaks down on a busy street I don’t say it needs a rest and will be better after it takes a nap – I know something is wrong so I have it towed away and fixed.

In January of this year a column in The Guardian called hallucination out for what they are. “Botshit” the writer said, bears little relationship to reality. It is easy for people and governments to make important decisions built on incorrect information that costs nothing to generate but which can lead to potentially costly outcomes. Naomi Klein said that AI advocates use the term to help build an AI mythology, and it is really the tech CEOs having the hallucinations.

AI is finding a role in diagnosing complex diseases, targeting military weapons, and analyzing data to solve complex problems. The experts argue that AI can find answers in huge datasets that would take months for people to sift through. What happens when that AI model hallucinates and identifies a hospital as a military installation? Or if a medical specialist does not have the months needed to fact check an AI diagnosis?

The answers are not just an hallucination.

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Time to open the debate.

Real or artificial Christmas trees. (I have not had either for years!)

Ready?

Here we go.

The BBC started it for me this week with a story on the “overlooked benefits” of having a real tree in your house for Christmas. Some of those benefits include the biodiversity that comes with Christmas tree farms, a direct connection with a forest species that many urbanites would otherwise never encounter, and a sustainable economic driver for growers and sellers.

Until artificial trees appeared on the scene there wasn’t much choice of course. Last year an artificial Christmas tree purchased in 1920 was sold at an auction in Britain for £3,411 (about $6,000 Cdn today). It was a pretty simple tree with a wooden base and 25 branches. By 1958 those garish aluminum trees made in Chicago started to take over. Today an artificial tree can be quite elaborate and come already decorated. They also last a long time with proper care largely because of the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) which goes into the production. Those PVC’s and the other “plasticizers” and stabilizers release harmful gases into your home and they are generally not recyclable. Nevertheless, we rack up $60 million in artificial tree sales in Canada.

Most of those artificial trees are imported, but we do have our own real Christmas tree sector which provides a homegrown (literally!) economic benefit. According to the Canadian Christmas Trees Association we have more than 20,558 hectares (50,800 acres) dedicated to Christmas tree production. While an established farm can make money, with rising land prices buying a piece of land to start a new lot is economically impossible in some areas, and the economics for exporters next year would take a hit if US tariffs were to become a reality. Adding to the problem says a CBC story this week, is that some of our Christmas tree species will be at risk due to climate change.

If we start with the premise that our current Christmas tree farms are managed carefully and sustainably, buying a real tree is not a bad choice says the Nature Conservancy. They are renewable, compostable, the trees store carbon, and they provide local jobs from the grower to the seller.

Whatever your choice – enjoy.

It is only fitting that a media site dedicated to wine is called Decanter, but this week it had some bad news to go along with the regular wine reviews.

“Global wine production falls to lowest level since 1961”

Frost, heavy rain, drought. You name it, winemakers have had to deal with it. The troubles hit wine production in both hemispheres with France missing the worst of it and overtaking Italy to become the world’s largest producer. The United States also had a good year. It is mixed so far in Canada with Nuvo magazine saying overall we have a “True north, strong and bubbly” for 2024 while Nova Scotia producers are looking for extra government support. BC also felt the pinch this year when -24C (-11 F) temperatures caused significant crop losses before the growing season had even begun. Grapes that survived however had more concentrated fruit and wine which should have more intense flavours.

You may not notice the 2024 losses right away so in the meantime here some top picks from Food & Wine magazine and the winners of the 2024 All Canadian Wine Championships to stock up on.

In 2021, Wisdom the albatross hatched a single chick at a wildlife refuge on the Midway Atoll in the North Pacific. It was big news because she was at least 70 years old making her the oldest known wild bird. The old girl has not finished yet. She is still the oldest, has a new partner, and has laid another egg, which has a 70-80% chance of it hatching. She was first identified and tagged in 1956, so biologists are confident of her record holding title. Laysan albatrosses usually live only 12-40 years and mate for life but Wisdom seems to outlive her partners and the current one is at least her third.

An albatross has a good life span for a bird but some macaws and parrots often live to the ripe old age of 50 or 60. The kākāpō is also a parrot but is a nocturnal, flightless species. It is native to New Zealand but there are only 244 of the critically endangered birds left. It is considered to be the longest-lived bird species with an estimated life span of 90 years.

Remember Gus the Emperor Penguin from the last newsletter? With any kind of luck he is back home by now and will live into his twenties.

Read, comment, subscribe, and share this newsletter.

I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.