1 Week, 7 Stories #81
Just tape your mouth shut and everything will be okay.
Every edition features 7 stories from the past week. I’ll draw on my background in media, journalism, agriculture, biotech, and renewable energy to come up with an interesting selection and to offer some context.
The Paper-Thin Evidence for Mouth Taping.
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 138th 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.
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Bes sure to check my series of short stories based on Chris de Burgh’s 1975 album Spanish Train and Other Stories.
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