Latest news with #Sherbrooke
CBC
a day ago
- General
- CBC
Man charged with 2nd-degree murder in death of woman in Sherbrooke, Que.
A 28-year-old man has been charged with second-degree murder in connection with the death of Mylène Masson-Bessette in Sherbrooke, Que. Joey Bilodeau, the accused and Masson-Bessette's partner, was arrested at a residence on Morkill Street Friday evening in the eastern part of the city, about 130 kilometres east of Montreal. Sherbrooke police were sent to the home around 8:30 p.m. on Friday to conduct a wellness check after relatives of Masson-Bessette, 33, said they had not heard from her. Officers found her dead at the scene, according to police.
CTV News
3 days ago
- General
- CTV News
Sherbrooke man arrested after girlfriend found dead
The Sherbrooke Police Service (SPS) launched a homicide investigation after the body of a 33-year-old woman was found in a residence in the eastern part of the city. The victim's relatives who worried for her and alerted the police, who arrived at the residence on Morkill Street around 8:30 p.m. on Friday evening. 'Upon arrival, our officers found the 33-year-old resident dead. Her new partner, aged 28, was arrested at the scene,' said SPS spokesperson Martin Carrier. He did disclose the nature of the injuries so as not to jeopardize the ongoing investigation. 'Initial findings lead us to believe that this is a homicide. A crime scene has been established. SPS investigators and forensic experts are on site and are expected to remain there for part of the day (Saturday),' said Carrier. Witnesses were interviewed on Saturday. The suspect was also questioned by investigators in the morning. The 28-year-old man is expected to appear in court by videoconference in the coming hours. The SPS investigation is ongoing. This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French May 31, 2025.
Globe and Mail
6 days ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Quebec startup shows progress toward practical quantum computing
Julien Camirand Lemyre wants to correct the errors in his way. To be clear, this is not a quest for personal improvement. It's a technical challenge and, for the nascent quantum computing industry, an extremely important one. Mr. Lemyre is a PhD physicist and chief executive officer of Nord Quantique, a startup based in Sherbrooke, Que. Since 2020, he has set his company's sights on overcoming a key obstacle that stands in the path of commercial quantum computing: the technology's propensity for making mistakes. On Thursday, Nord Quantique announced it had taken an important step on its path toward surmounting that barrier. The company has successfully used one of its own quantum devices to encode a form of error detection for the first time. Bigger players, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon, are working on the same problem as they seek to advance their own quantum systems. What's different about Nord Quantique is that the hardware doing the checking is the same hardware doing the calculating. The experimental result suggests that larger, commercially relevant quantum computers can be constructed from similar components. If so, those computers might occupy only a modest amount of space – something like a standard data centre rather than a football-field size complex that some fear will be required to get other types of quantum systems to run reliably. 'We think there are better ways to quantum error correction,' Mr. Lemyre said. 'This ties in with our philosophy of really working on something that we think is worth scaling up.' The company's announcement, together with an accompanying scientific paper, is the latest step in what has become a industry-wide push to tackle error correction, also called fault tolerance. Fault tolerant quantum computers have yet become a practical reality, but they are an attractive business proposition because they are expected to one day perform various kinds of calculations that are out of reach of conventional digital systems. Potential applications range from data security, to drug discovery to forecasting, among other areas. Yet the same properties that make quantum computers powerful also make it easy for them to fail. Ordinary computers use bits – the electronic components that represent the 1s and 0s of a digital operation. In a quantum system, the bits are replaced with qubits, which are more versatile and more finicky. Thanks to the slippery rules of quantum physics a qubit needn't be a one or a zero, but can be a bit of both. But this ambiguous state of being, so essential for quantum computation, is easily disrupted by outside influences such as vibration or heat. Microsoft creates chip it says shows quantum computers are 'years, not decades' away The standard way of dealing with this is to dedicate other qubits to keep tabs on the first one. But this gets complicated and costly. For every qubit required to perform a calculation, more than 1,000 may be required for error correction. Imagine a Hollywood celebrity with an entourage that would fill an entire hotel and you can see how the problem multiplies as more celebrities join the party. Nord Quantique uses a different kind of qubit than many other systems, involving microwaves in a supercooled cavity. The microwaves consist of individual particles, or photons, that have different ways of bouncing around in the cavity called modes. What Nord Quantique has shown in its latest work is that these modes can be used for a type of error detecting code called Tesseract without the need for additional hardware. Mr. Lemyre said there are ways in which the approach can be further improved, such as by adding more photons to the cavity. And the system would draw only a fraction of the energy needed by other approaches. Yvonne Gao, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore who is familiar with the company's work, said that the work represents good progress along one possible path toward a fault tolerant quantum computer. She said Nord Quantique has helped the field by adding to the diversity of approaches to error correction, while carving out its own niche. 'It's a very smart choice not going head on with the other people working on other flavours' of the problem, she said. While some larger companies have made huge investments in quantum computing, it is unclear which approach is most likely to succeed. That means smaller startups with novel technologies to explore may ultimately be the ones who find the way forward. Three Canadian companies vying for U.S. quantum computing funding as race to develop technology heats up Daniel Gottesman, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland who played a part in developing the codes that Nord Quantique and others are using for error correction, said that it was surprising that no clear winner has yet emerged among the various approaches being tried. One reason for this, he said, is that the difficulty in building and controlling such systems is challenging enough that even the best-resourced companies cannot zoom ahead, but instead must work methodically at improving error rates and increasing the number of qubits in their devices. 'That takes time and gives other people time to do that work as well,' he said. Nord Quantique is not the only Canadian company in the error correction game. Last February, Photonic Inc. of Coquitlam, B.C., publicized its approach to the problem, which builds on an alternative strategy for tying qubits together known as QLDPC (quantum low-density parity check) codes. This class of codes is well suited to Photonic's quantum computing hardware, in which qubits are based on the spins of carbon atoms that reside within silicon chips. Because the chips can be interconnected with light guided by fibre optics, the qubits do not need to be physically adjacent to one another to be linked. This means the task of error correction can be spread out, creating opportunities to harness groups of qubits in more efficient ways. Housed in a non-descript industrial unit east of Vancouver, Photonic has grown its head count to 150 since coming out of stealth mode 18 months ago. The company is now preparing to expand into a larger building next door to facilitate its hardware development. Together with Nord Quantique and Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc. of Toronto, Photonic is one of the Canadian companies to be selected by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to compete for support in developing quantum computing technologies. Stephanie Simmons, who founded Photonic in 2016 and leads its technology development, said that despite the challenge, the reason for the increasing sense of excitement in the field is clear. 'Every time you commercialize a branch of physics it changes everything,' she said.
CBC
23-05-2025
- Politics
- CBC
Why this Quebec city walked back its decision to ban religious events in municipal spaces
Overnight, religious groups in Sherbrooke, Que., went from having access to only a single municipal venue for large gatherings — to all of them. At a recent city council meeting, members struck down a 2012 policy forbidding the renting of indoor spaces owned by the city for religious purposes in the name of secularism. Those venues were limited to multi-purpose rooms, conference halls, auditoriums, gymnasiums and arenas. The news comes as a relief to the region's Muslim community, whose June holiday celebration plans became overshadowed by a large question mark when the convention centre they've relied on for years — the Centre de Foires de Sherbrooke — came under city management. Despite there being an exemption in the policy applying to the city's arena — which, at the time the policy was written, was rented by a Jehovah's Witness group for an annual convention — councillors voted against granting a similar exemption to the Centre de Foires de Sherbrooke at their April 22 meeting. The vote was narrow: eight to six. The outrage that ensued from the community was loud. At the following municipal council meeting on May 6, multiple community members spoke out during question period. Among them was Hafid Agourram, the president of the Association Culturelle Islamique de l'Estrie (ACIE). "We clarified to them this decision was foolish, it's no good and we testified that the only place we had to celebrate twice a year is the Centre de Foires," he said. The community, which is 9,000 strong in Sherbrooke alone, has outgrown the seating capacity of the city's two mosques. Earlier this year, one of those mosques hosted the end of Ramadan celebrations due to a scheduling issue with the Centre de Foires. Over 2,000 people showed up, said Agourram, and prayers had to be conducted in five different rotations. "It was a mess," he said. "Security problems, kids are going into the streets, cars, neighbours … not acceptable. But we had no choice." Amine Menadi, another member of the community, likened their celebrations to Christmas, saying the religious components are minimal. "Even if people pray, we pray really fast. It's really the party that we want. Don't stop them," he said. Inside the municipal debate There was a general feeling of discomfort among several city councillors as they faced the question of whether or not to create an exemption for the convention centre at their April 22 meeting. The question came with a caveat: whatever decision they made would be re-assessed once a working committee currently studying how to apply secularism at the municipal level releases its recommendations later this year. A lawyer was supposed to be present to answer any questions but was unable to come. "I find it unfortunate that we have to decide this today. It would have been interesting to wait to obtain the report, but it doesn't work with the timeline," said city councillor Christelle Lefèvre. She ended up voting for the exemption. Among the opposing voters, there was a consensus that the rules were the rules and needed to be followed as such. It's not because an exemption had been granted once that they were going to do it again, said Danielle Berthold. Sherbrooke Mayor Évelyne Beaudin, for her part, said the exemption granted to the arena always made her uncomfortable. She said the Centre de Foires received $15,000 from the religious events it hosts, so either the city would allow them to go forth or would essentially pay $15,000 for it to sit empty. After hearing from the community when the council reconvened on May 20, it struck down the policy altogether. There was only one dissident, councillor Hélène Dauphinais. "I would have preferred that we wait for the report from the provincial government because it's much easier to open doors than to close them," she said. Council president Laure Letarte-Lavoie said she found the first-hand accounts from community members touching. "These kinds of measures by the city, sometimes it's really administrative and we don't think about all that, but to not be able to hold gatherings in these venues in their own city, they experienced it as discrimination and rejection," she said. Councillor Fernanda Luz said that culture and religion are often intertwined. "When we include everybody, it's also a way to demonstrate our neutrality, there's no favouritism," she said. "We can either exclude everybody [or] include everybody."
Calgary Herald
14-05-2025
- Science
- Calgary Herald
Canada's boutique military: 'Should we not be able to defend ourselves?'
'On top of the turret of this thing is a rotating radar dish (that can detect incoming drones),' he said. 'It's a lot like a naval gun on a land vehicle, and they're very effective at shooting down drones.' The Ukrainians have modified their Neptune anti-ship missile — its original version sank the Russian Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva in April 2022 — and fired it recently against Russian oil refineries. 'It has a range of 1,000 kilometres,' Hansen said. 'It is flying to co-ordinates that cannot be jammed. It has to be shot down. And good luck with that, because it flies at about 900 miles an hour.' Drone technology and weapons to counter them are something 'we can't afford not to learn,' Boivin said. The brigade now in Latvia has some weapons aimed at countering the threat from incoming drones by jamming their sensors or shooting them down, said the commander. 'We've got some that are still to be delivered in order to give us the capabilities to address threats from unmanned aerial systems.' Last summer, Canada awarded three 'Diamond in the rough' cash prizes to companies making equipment to detect and defeat such threats. Vancouver's AIM Defence took home the million-dollar first prize. Sherbrooke, Que.'s DARIT Technologies, and Toronto's Prandtl Dynamics tied for second place in the contest — dubbed a Sandbox event at Alberta's CFB Suffield — that featured 15 outfits from five countries demonstrating and testing their counter-drone technologies.
