Halifax's Hope Blooms goes solar
Crystal Garrett visits Hope Blooms in Halifax to check out their new solar tracking system.
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CTV News
15 hours ago
- CTV News
SuperNOVA summer camp: High school students get hands-on experience solving climate problems
High school students in Dalhousie University's SuperNOVA Ocean Climate Innovation Program put their remotely operated vehicles to the test in the Halifax Harbour. Jarman Ley, the program coordinator of SuperNOVA, said 25 students took part in the program focused on ocean technologies, engineering, and artificial intelligence. 'We started this program to get high school students excited and interested in the climate and how the ocean relates to that,' said Ley. 'They all developed programs for their own sensors and then drove them into the harbour to see the difference between historical harbour data and current harbour data.' SuperNOVA Students participating in Dalhousie University's SuperNOVA Ocean Climate Innovation Program put their remotely operated vehicles into the Halifax Harbour Friday, July 25, 2025. (Paul DeWitt/CTV Atlantic) The students are testing for oxygen, solidity, and the acidity of the water, said Ley. 'They are specifically doing dissolved oxygen to see if fish have enough oxygen to breathe. They are doing the solidity because as climate changes or temperature changes you can have saltier waters, which is inhospitable to plants. They are doing the acidity of the water, the oxygen reduction potential, which is essentially how the ocean cleans itself.' Ley said the program teaches skills the students can take into their university careers. 'It's been a really interesting way to take all of the knowledge that we've learned and wrap it into one project that we can test and see the results of,' said student Finnegan Jafmann. SuperNOVA Students participating in Dalhousie University's SuperNOVA Ocean Climate Innovation Program put their remotely operated vehicles into the Halifax Harbour Friday, July 25, 2025. (Paul DeWitt/CTV Atlantic) 'A lot of the people here are probably going to use this as really good experience because we got to go to a lot of places. We got to tour multiple parts of the Dal building and the engineering section, and we got to talk to a lot of people about their projects,' said student Emily Whidden. 'For me, it was a lot of interesting information, but for the people who are planning to go into these fields or even come to Dal, it was probably a really good foot in the door.' From 2023 to date, Dalhousie University said SuperNOVA has reached more than 27,500 youth through this not-for-profit initiative. 'Young people are the lifeblood of the future. So, we really believe if we start to encourage them now, that they'll be that much more advanced when they get to university and potentially study it and develop the next generation of innovation,' said Ley. According to Dalhousie University, SuperNOVA summer camps introduce participants to STEM concepts, careers and mentors through 'fun experiments and innovative hands-on activities.' For more Nova Scotia news, visit our dedicated provincial page
CBC
21 hours ago
- CBC
Destined to be a boy mom? New study suggests baby's sex isn't always random
Ashley Clouthier says she hoped her first child would be a boy, so when he was, she was ecstatic. Clouthier, 39, of Almonte, Ont., grew up with an older brother, and wanted the same experience for the large family she was planning with her husband. And when their next child was also a boy, well, even better. Best buds close in age, she thought, and two big brothers for their brood of future children. But then their third child was a boy. And their fourth. Today, Clouthier's boys are ages 13, 12, 10 and four — and she says she's not planning to have any more children. But if she did? "I'm sure it would be a boy," she said with a laugh. There just might be some truth to that, according to a new study that suggests a child's sex at birth might not be entirely random. The study, published July 18 in the journal Science Advances, examined the maternal and genetic factors that influence the sex of offspring after several of the co-authors observed examples of friends, colleagues and family members who had produced either all boys or all girls, which, they say, raised questions about chance. Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health examined a dataset of 58,007 U.S. women with two or more singleton live births and found that "each family may have a unique probability of male or female births," they wrote in the study. "The data suggested that there may be families that are more likely than not to have only girls, [and] families that are more likely than not to have only boys," Dr. Jorge Chavarro, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology and one of the authors of the study, told CBC News. 'A weighted coin' Specifically, mothers with three or more children were more likely to have either all boys or all girls, which challenges the traditional view that the probability is "random and independent," or that you have a 50-50 chance of having a boy or a girl each pregnancy, the authors wrote. They calculated that, in families with three boys, the probability of having another boy was 61 per cent, and in families with three girls, the probability of having another girl was 58 per cent. "Akin to flipping a weighted coin with roughly a 60-40 probability," Chavarro explained. The study suggests that there are subtle biological or genetic influences at play, rather than pure chance, which is what we know to be true of most things in life, said Dr. Sebastian Hobson, the head of labour and delivery at Mount Sinai hospital in Toronto and a maternal fetal medicine specialist. Hobson, who is also the chair of obstetrics for the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada and who was not involved in the study, noted that the Harvard study is large and methodologically rigorous, but as with any study, the results should be interpreted with caution. The observed effects are small, he said, don't determine cause and effect, and the large population was predominantly white and U.S.-based, so can't be generalized globally. They also didn't gather any information about the biological fathers, he added. "Biology can nudge these probabilities slightly, but predicting a child's sex remains highly uncertain," Hobson said. "I think this is a great study, but it's not the be all and end all of sex determination." WATCH | Is gentle parenting too rough on parents? Why more parents are ditching the gentle approach 5 months ago 'Lose the birth lottery' Previous studies have found that parents are more likely to have a third child if their first two are the same sex, often in hopes the third child will be the opposite. And you only have to spend some time at school pickups, playgrounds and community pools to see that, well, it doesn't always work out that way. One recent study in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics refers to those who have three boys or three girls as parents who "lose the birth lottery." "If I got paid $1 for every time someone said, 'Are you going to try for a girl?' I'd be a millionaire," said Krystyna Recoskie, 48, also of Almonte, Ont., and a friend of Clouthier's. She has three boys, ages 15, 13 and 11. "For a while, it made me feel like I had failed. Like it was bad. How ridiculous is that?" she added. "I am blessed. I am complete." In the Harvard study, the researchers found that two-child families were actually more likely to be opposite sexes, or boy-girl, which they suggested implies that "couples are more inclined to stop reproducing when a balanced sex was reached." As for why some mothers were more likely to give birth to all-boys or all-girls, the authors suggested some women are at high risk of producing offspring of a specific sex due to factors affecting sperm survival. As well, procreation behaviour can be strongly influenced by the sex of previous children, they added. In addition, the authors found that older maternal age at first birth could be a risk factor for repeatedly giving birth to children of only one sex. This may be due to biological changes in the body, they said, like shorter follicular phase and lower vaginal pH. 'Four boys, poor you' Other studies have explored the idea of gender disappointment, or the feeling of sadness a parent may experience when their child's sex doesn't match with what they'd hoped for, and suggest it's more prevalent than we may think. "Gender disappointment in Western cultures is mostly related to the desire for 'gender balance' in the family — having a child of each gender to experience being a mother to sons as well as daughters," notes a 2023 study in the BJPsych Bulletin journal. Clouthier says she's never been disappointed about having four boys, and any negativity she experiences comes from other people. In a lot of ways, it's easier to have four kids all the same sex, she explained, between the hand-me-downs and gear they already have on hand. Birthday party themes can also overlap. And yes, it can get loud, and rough, and there are kid-sized holes in the drywall, but she notes her boys are also sweet, sensitive and cuddly. "I still get comments all time time, where people say, 'Four boys, poor you,'" Clouthier said. And I'll say, 'Yeah, lucky me!'"
Globe and Mail
2 days ago
- Globe and Mail
Canada is hosting the world's biggest dementia conference for the first time in a decade. What's changed since then?
This week, researchers from around the globe are descending upon downtown Toronto to attend the Alzheimer's Association International Conference, the world's biggest and most influential meeting for dementia research. The gathering is a chance for the international dementia community to discuss the latest research in the field; it's also where significant breakthroughs are often unveiled. At a related event on Saturday, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) – Canada's health research funding agency – announced $44.8-million in new funding for dementia and aging-related research initiatives, including the creation of 16 teams that will study everything from Alzheimer's biomarkers to dementia in Indigenous populations. To set the stage for this year's conference, The Globe and Mail checked in with Jane Rylett, a professor at Western University and scientific director at the CIHR Institute of Aging, which hosted Saturday's event. The last time this global conference was held in Canada was in 2016, nearly a decade ago. How has the dementia research landscape changed since then? This is a really important inflection point. There is a new class of drugs, the antibody therapy, that came into the market within the last three or four years; they probably will be approved in Canada in the coming years. But while there's huge hope around it . . . right now, there's a lot of debate around if they're really beneficial. For certain people, they don't work at all; other people have negative side effects by creating inflammation in the brain. And the benefit-to-risk ratio is not great. So I think at this year's conference, it's going to be really important to hear about new findings with that. Something that's really gained momentum over the last few years is stepping back from the pharmacological approach to treatment and saying, 'What else can we do that will reduce the risk of developing dementia?' Health system urged to brace for major shift in dementia demographics The other thing that's changed is there's always been an 'amyloid hypothesis' of Alzheimer's disease, based on these toxic peptides that get made in the brain and clearly have a role in brain health and development of dementia. But during these nine years, there's been a much greater move towards understanding the role of those and recognizing that while they're still important, they're not the whole story. Now there's more openness to looking at other hypotheses about how brain health can be impacted during the life course and can lead to dementia. How should people feel about this present moment? Thinking back to 2012, the United States' health department set an ambitious goal to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer's disease by 2025. But here we are today and that goal is far from met. When people or groups make those kinds of statements, it doesn't necessarily mesh with the complication of the thing. And then what happens is people see [the missed deadline] and think, well, it didn't happen. That's always the danger of doing something like that. The brain is a complex thing, it really is. The problem with something like Alzheimer's disease is it's so multi-faceted and it's a spectrum. There's so many areas of the brain that are impacted and the clinical presentation can look similar for people but what's happening in their brain, and where the degeneration is initiated, can be quite different. There's no one pill that you're going to have that's going to be able to change the course or alleviate the symptoms. So was it realistic to say in 2012 that this could be cured by 2025? Probably not. But it stimulated a lot of activity. We understand much more about the underlying pathology and the pathogenesis of the disease. And stepping back was an important thing, saying what can we do that is not a pharmaceutical or a pill? What are the life, behavioural and other things that we can do? Canada has a chance to change the Alzheimer's experience - let's not squander it There's been a lot of focus on the funding cuts in the U.S. that are under way right now, including to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). How has that affected things? is it looming over the conference this year? Yes. A number of Canadian researchers also have been funded by NIH, either in their own right or as subcontracts on larger studies within the U.S., and for the most part, that has been ended, which is very problematic. So we have a number of very good Canadian researchers in all fields that have lost substantial funding, and we don't have the resources in Canada to replace that. One of the big question marks is the impact it's going to have on the number of Americans that are going to be able to attend the conference. And I don't know the answer to that yet. Let's talk about Canadian researchers. What role are they playing within the broader effort? Canadian researchers are leaders internationally in these fields of study. There's really significant work being done by Canadians in the biomarkers area, so the diagnostic area. We have a lot of expertise around how to develop and promote new methods for supporting caregivers and persons with dementia. Alzheimer's trial brings at-risk patients hope for the future, but new doubts in the present We've got outstanding Indigenous cognitive health researchers that are developing new culturally safe and appropriate diagnostic and caregiving methods. And we do have some very good work going on around pathogenesis, looking at changes in the brain during aging and how that may lead to loss of cognition. That's important because you really need to understand where those earliest changes come from. Those are the targets where you need to develop drugs and therapies. This interview has been edited and condensed.
