Zipper anniversary: 10 bits of trivia to impress the pants off you

From the bathroom to the bedroom, the zipper — celebrating the 100th anniversary of one of the earliest working designs — has become one of the most commonly used inventions on Earth.

Billions of people rely on the zipper every day, and you'll find one (or more) on everything from jackets and pants, boots, backpacks, tents and luggage, to purses, pencil cases and a memorable Rolling Stones album cover.

But they weren't always so wildly popular.

The concept of a zipper got its start when an American, Elias Howe, earned a patent in 1851 for his Automatic Continuous Clothing Closure. His idea was ahead of its time, but Howe was so busy with his other inventions (including the sewing machine, which would later make zippers much easier to install) that he never got around to commercializing the radical new type of sliding fastener.

While the materials have changed over the years, the basic concept of the zipper is closest to Gideon Sundback's patents, arguably making him the father of the zipper.

It wasn't until decades later, in 1893, that Whitcomb Judson came up with something he called the Clasp Locker, and later the Judson C-Curity Fastener. Unfortunately, his invention had large teeth that could be tricky to close, and it also tended to come open by itself. As a result it wasn't very popular with the public, even though it was showcased at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

The idea might have languished in obscurity and left us all living in a button-down world. But Whitcomb also co-founded the Universal Fastener Co., and that's where things really started coming together for the zipper.

In 1906 the company hired a Swedish electrical engineer named Otto Frederick Gideon Sundback, who had immigrated to the United States. He took Whitcomb's design back to the drawing board and came up with the system of tiny interlocking teeth now known as the zipper.

Although it lacked a catchy name at the time, Sundback's early "Hookless Fastener" design was patented on April 29, 1913. He continued to develop it, and eventually patented a much improved version called the Separable Fastener in 1917. (He did some of the development work in St. Catharines, Ont., but there's some question surrounding how much.)

The Lightning Fastener Co. in St. Catharines, of which Sundback was president, started manufacturing the new fastener, but it took another couple of decades to really grab the world's attention.

There is a debate about whether the credit for inventing the zipper should ultimately go to Elias Howe, Whitcomb Judson or Gideon Sundback. While the materials have changed over the years, the basic concept of the zipper is closest to Sundback's Hookless Fastener design and it's also the one that had the most commercial success.

What can't be argued is that in the years since, this speedier way to manage one's wardrobe has headed off uncountable restroom-related accidents, saved many a couple from being caught in compromising situations and spared humanity from the scourge of draughty drawers.

In honour of the early patent's 100th anniversary, we've pulled together some miscellaneous trivia about the zipper.

Zip 'er up

The name "zipper" wasn't coined until a decade after Sundback's patent was issued. (iStock)

"Hookless Fastener" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it stuck for a while and the name "zipper" wasn't coined until a decade after Sundback's patent was issued. The B.F. Goodrich Company adopted the Hookless Fastener for a line of galoshes in 1923, and an employee trying them out apparently said something along the lines of "Zip 'er up!" when he heard the distinctive sound of the sliding fastener.

The company registered Zipper as a trademark in 1925.

B.F. Goodrich tried to protect the trademark as the word became popular. Its control of the name was challenged by Lightning Fastener Co. in the Supreme Court of Canada in 1931, in a case that was dismissed with costs.

B.F. Goodrich's trademark rights were ultimately limited specifically to the name "Zipper Boots."

Moral corruption

The zipper was originally used in footwear and bags for holding tobacco.

It was a hard sell in the early days for consumer clothing, with critics labeling the zipper a morally corrupt invention that made it too easy to remove one's pants.

That didn't worry the army, apparently. The first big customer was the U.S. military, which used zippers in gear and uniforms issued to World War One troops.

Thanks, Prince of Wales

The children's clothing and adult fashion industries didn't start using zippers in great numbers until the 1930s.

Zippers really took off in 1937 when they caught the attention of a number of French fashion designers. (iStock)

The Prince of Wales gave things a nudge when he adopted the zip fly into his wardrobe in 1934.

Around the same time, designer Elsa Schiaparelli started designing zippers into her sportswear and avant-garde gowns.

Zippers really took off in 1937, when they caught the attention of a number of French fashion designers.

In 1954, Levi's introduced a special zippered version of its overalls called the 501Z, replacing the button-fly. The company eventually brought in zippers across its line of jeans, but not until the 1970s.

Millions of zips

In the first year or production, Sundback's company was producing roughly 100 metres of zippers a day, enough for about 700 pairs of pants.

A large modern plant can produce zippers for more than seven million pairs of pants a day.

YKK

The letters YKK stamped on the pull tab of many zippers is the abbreviated name of a Japanese company, Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha, founded in 1934 by Tadao Yoshida. It translates as "Yoshida Company Ltd."

It now has factories around the world and makes more than 1.5 billion zippers a year. YKK Co. has also branched out into other types of fasteners, as well as architectural building products.

YKK's "Cycle of Goodness" philosophy states "No one prospers unless he renders benefit to others." Thanks in large part to the benefits others see in zippers, today the company operates in 71 countries and has about 39,000 employees.

Qiaotou

The zipper market is dominated by YKK, KCC Zipper, and Tex Corp., as well as a large group of smaller Chinese manufacturers.

The majority of the world's zipper supply is made in China's Qiaotou region. It's estimated that factories in Qiaotou produced more than 200 million metres of zippers in 2011.

One giant zip for mankind

Once the airtight zipper was perfected in the 1950s, it found its way to the depths of the ocean on diving gear, into orbit and eventually to the moon.

NASA helped develop airtight zippers for fighter-pilot pressure suits and later adapted them for space suits, including the ones used for the Apollo 11 moon landing (Neil Armstrong's zippers were made by YKK).

XYZ, PDQ

Justin Bieber poses with his fly down backstage at the 2011 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. (Jae C. Hong/AP)

Esquire magazine raved in 1937 that the zipper would help men avoid "the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray."

Unfortunately, it forgot that what goes up, must come down.

Celebrities caught with an open fly in public include:

• Movie stars such as Brad Pitt at the premiere of The Case of Benjamin Button in Paris on Jan. 22, 2009; Twilight's Robert Pattinson at red carpet events on Aug. 15 and again Oct. 31, 2012; and Robert Downey Jr. at the South Korean premiere of Iron Man 3 on April 4 this year.
• U.S. president George Bush on a visit to Chile in May 2004. And British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who when informed that he should check his zip, apparently replied, "It is of no account; after all, the old bird does not fly far from his nest."
• Model Kate Moss on a number of occasions in recent years. She told Grazia magazine, "I've got a problem with zips. Sometimes I just forget to do them up!"
• Canadian singer Justin Bieber at the 2011 Grammy Awards backstage photo shoot, and a few weeks later on stage at a March concert in Liverpool, England.

Records

According to Fort Lauderdale's Sun Sentinel newspaper, a local Sheraton hotel had a zipper more than 1.8 kilometres long built in 1988 as a promotional gimmick. The zipper was draped from a hot air balloon and then taken and wrapped around the hotel to promote its nightclub, called Zippers.

Guinness World Records doesn't have any current zipper-related entries, but according to Recordsetter.com, radio host Andre Hoeden raised and lowered the zipper on his pants 204 times in 30 seconds.

YouTube has videos of people attempting similar feats, with varying degrees of success (search for "zipper world record").

When zippers attack

Anyone trying to duplicate Hoeden's record should take heed: According to a study published in March in the British Journal of Urology International, zippers are the most common cause of serious genital injury. (For those keeping score, bicycles are number two.)

At least 17,616 people in the U.S. suffered zipper-related genital injuries between 2002 and 2010 that were bad enough to land them in hospital, according to the study.

The majority of the injuries – roughly five a day across the U.S. — involved men mangling their manhood because they were in too much of a rush as they zipped up. (Boys apparently have more to fear from falling toilet seats than zippers, according to hospital injury statistics.)

So while Gideon Sundback gave the world a useful, time-saving invention, be careful out there as you celebrate a century of zipping.

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Apple's iTunes celebrates 10th anniversary

The music world hasn't been the same since Apple's launch a decade ago of iTunes, its online music store for iPods and Mac computers.

As music moved into the digital age, the industry came to a difficult crossroads with the emergence of file-sharing programs such as Napster.

Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple, predicted the birth of iTunes would revolutionize electronic music and dominate the industry. The program that was introduced 10 years ago Sunday changed music consumption by unbundling albums and creating an à la carte system.

Within a few years of its launch, the outlet became the No. 1 music retailer in the world.

In its decade of existence, iTunes has grown to include all types of media, ranging from podcasts and television shows to movies and apps. In February 2013, it reached a significant landmark of 25 billion song downloads worldwide.

Apple created an interactive timeline to celebrate its milestone birthday that is available to download to iTunes users.

CBC's Christine Birak speaks with Canadian broadcaster and music writer Alan Cross on the history of iTunes and the impact it's had on the industry.

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Bumper crop of blue-green algae predicted for Lake Erie

Scientists warn conditions are perfect for a bumper crop of algae to grow on Lake Erie.

They say heavy April showers are washing fertilizer off farm fields into the water.

The chemicals feed algal blooms that starve the lake of oxygen. Algae feed on phosphorus.

Blue-green algae stinks, contains toxins and chokes off life in the lake.

"There's a 99 per cent chance, there's a strong chance, that [we will] have very bad algae this year," said Raj Bejankiwar, a scientist with the International Joint Commission.

The warning comes two years after Lake Erie experienced the worst algal blooms on record.

Blooms are traditionally confined to the summer months, mainly August. However, last year, warmer temperatures in March allowed algae to grow earlier in the year, but the bloom wasn't as big as the one witnessed in 2011.

This year, April rain could cause as a bloom just as big as the one from two years ago. Heavy spring rain was to partially blame for that one, too.

Phosphorous gets from the fields to the lakes in one of three ways:

• blown there by the wind.
• soaks through the soil, enters the ground water and flows into rivers and lakes.
• rain washes it off the top of the soil and directly into rivers and lakes.

Bejankiwar is the lead on the Lake Erie Ecosystem Priority, a branch of the IJC that is studying algae levels in Lake Erie. He said it's normal to have some algae in the lake, but not massive blooms.

Bejankiwar said extra nutrients that feed algae also come from sewage treatment plants, recreational properties and golf courses. He said most of the phosphorus comes from farm run-off.

It's not much phosphorus per farm or per hectare, but it adds up, says one professor.

"If we're talking about the amount a farmer would lose, we're talking less than a few grams per hectare," said Ivan O'Halloran, a professor at Ridgetown College.

O'Halloran said that 1 kg of phosphorous run-off can have a "significant impact" on algae levels.

'No fertilizer police'

He said one way farmers try to decrease the amount of phosphorous that ends up in the lakes is to make sure they only put what they need into the soil. Soil tests can be done to see how much fertilizer is necessary.

However, the are no "fertilizer police," and best management practices are not laws; they are suggestions, O'Halloran said. It all makes it hard to regulate the distribution of fertilizer.

Henry Denotter, a Kingsville farmer, plants ground cover in the fall to keep the fertilizer from washing into the ditch. After the wheat is harvested, Denotter plants beets and clover in his wheat field to keep the soil in place. Even then, some phosphorus always escapes, he said.

"We do whatever we can to try and retain it, but we have to stay in business, too," Denotter said.

Denotter said it's impossible to keep all the fertilizer in the soil and dire predictions from scientists won't change that.

He thinks scientists should recognize there is only so much farmers can do.

Denotter already uses GPS to determine where he needs to fertilize; uses soil tests to determine how much fertilizer he needs; and uses what he calls a "no-till" system, where he doesn't turn up the earth.

Denotter said it's in farmers' best interest to do what they can to keep the phosphorous in the soil because it costs about $700 per tonne.

Last fall, the Essex Region Conservation Authority and Windsor-Essex County Environment Committee launched an educational campaign about blue-green algae. It's called Overload: Lake Erie Blue Green Algae.

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Bacteria engineered to pump out diesel from sugar

Diesel fuel has been produced from sugar instead of petroleum by specially engineered bacteria.

"We put in glucose and out of the other end came a range of alkanes … that mimic exactly the retail diesel that you buy at the pump," said John Love, a biosciences researcher at the University of Exeter, in an interview that airs on Quirks & Quarks Saturday.

Alkanes, such as octane, are the main type of chemical compound in fossil fuels such as gasoline and diesel.

Ethanol, biodiesel and other "biofuels" derived from living organisms such as corn have been touted as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since they absorb carbon dioxide as they grow. That potentially compensates for the carbon dioxide they release when they are burned and theoretically makes them "carbon neutral."

However, because conventional modern engines are optimized to burn alkanes, they won't function if the fuel contains more than about 20 per cent biofuel, Love said.

'Because it doesn't exist, we decided we would take the synthetic biology approach and build it from scratch.'—John Love, University of Exeter

He and his colleagues at the University of Exeter and at the U.K. technology research centre funded by the oil company Shell decided to tackle this problem by seeing if they could make biofuels that more closely mimic fossil fuels.

The ideal case would be if they could find an organism that could naturally produce alkanes in large amounts.

"Because it doesn't exist, we decided we would take the synthetic biology approach and build it from scratch," Love said. E. coli bacteria, which feed on glucose, were a good starting point.

Excess sugar becomes fat

"Much like we do, if they have an excess of sugar, they will start to make fat," Love said.

By stringing together two biochemical processes, that fat can be converted into alkanes.

The researchers pored through gene databases and scientific papers, and managed to find what they needed — two organisms, one with each of the biochemical processes in its metabolic repertoire.

They pulled the appropriate genes from a bioluminescent bacterium call Photorhabdus luminescens and a cyanobacterium or blue-green algae called Nostoc punctiforme. Then they popped those genes into E. coli.

To their surprise, the genetically engineered E. coli didn't seem to have any trouble with their new genes — they just started pumping out diesel, which floated to the top of the watery solution they lived in and was separated out, Love said.

The researchers published their results this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The next step is to optimize the process to produce more diesel by turning up or down some of the genes. They also hope to add extra genes that will allow the bacteria to use certain kinds of agricultural waste or other waste materials instead of glucose.

However, Love said, the process is a long way from being efficient enough for a gas station near you.

"It's only when it becomes cost efficient that you will actually see a realization of this process to the pump."

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Hear the voice of Alexander Graham Bell

The voice of Alexander Graham Bell, best known as the inventor of the telephone, can be heard now for the first time in nearly a century.

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1847 and died in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 1922. (Smithsonian Institution Archives)

The recording made by Bell on April 15, 1885, was released to the public in digital format this week by the Smithsonian Institution.

Bell, who was born in Scotland in 1847, lived and worked in both Canada and the U.S., and died in Cape Breton, N.S., in 1922. Many of the early recordings from his Washington, D.C., lab ended up in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The audio released this week was originally recorded on a cardboard disc coated with wax. The grooves on the wax, similar to those on a vinyl record, were recovered using high-resolution digital imaging. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory created a map of the disc, then processed the image to remove any marks or damage that could cause skips or scratches during playback. A computer then calculated the sounds that would have been played back by a stylus moving through the grooves.

Listen to the recording as it was played back on CBC's As It Happens.

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2nd largest pipeline spill in Alberta history leads to charges

The company that owns a pipeline that leaked 28,000 barrels of crude oil near a First Nations community in northwest Alberta — the largest spill in the province in 35 years — is now facing environmental charges.

Plains Midstream Canada ULC is facing three counts under the province's Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act

The April 2011 spill of almost 4.5 million litres of oil contaminated more than three hectares of beaver ponds and muskeg in a densely forested area.

Lubicon Cree residents of Little Buffalo, 30 kilometres from the spill site northeast of Peace River, claimed fumes from the leaking crude made them sick with nausea, burning eyes and headaches.

The community closed its school and ordered children to stay at home.

But the Environment and Sustainable Resource Development board, which monitored the air quality during the cleanup, did not believe the symptoms were related to the spill.

The Energy Resources Conservation Board later reprimanded the company saying it had inadequate leak detection and failed to test its emergency response plan.

Alberta's premier at the time, Ed Stelmach, also criticized the oil company's poor communication with the First Nation, as well as with the province itself, following the spill.

"From what I gather, they could be doing a better job," he said.

"And we're going to hold their feet to the fire to make sure they're there and they will have to pay all the costs related to the cleanup," he said just days after the leak was discovered.

Timing of charges is suspicious, says representative for Lubicon First Nation

But Garrett Tomlinson, the communications co-ordinator for the Lubicon First Nation, said he has seen little action in the two years since the accident.

That is, until a Greenpeace report detailing the environmental impact of the spill was delivered to the Department of Energy on Thursday, he said.

The report, which is scheduled for public release on April 28, calls the actions of both Plains Midstream and the ERCB into question, concluding that "the government and oil industry have consistently worked to limit reputational damage to companies rather than protect the environment."

The document also highlights many of the same environmental issues that had been previously reported by the Lubicon First Nation, said Tomlinson, adding that many of the issues had also been noted in an ERCB report released earlier this spring. "The ERCB report came out almost a month ago, if i'm not mistaken, and there were no charges were filed after that," Tomlinson said. "And they would be the authorities on the subject."

"[The Greenpeace report] seems to be really the only factor that led to the filing of charges, " said Tomlinson on Friday.

Province responds to growing controversy

But Nikki Booth, a spokeswoman for the ESRD, said the charges were laid as a result of the department's two-year investigation into the spill, which the province has only now wrapped up.

She said charges laid today are "in no way related to the Greenpeace report."

"Our folks know that there is a two year statute of limitations and we take as much time as necessary when we're doing an investigation like this so we can do our due diligence, ensure that we're accurate and have all the correct information."

Alberta Minister of Energy Ken Hughes has also weighed in on the Greenpeace report.

"I reject Greenpeace's contention that ERCB is biased toward industry," he said Friday.

"The expectation from the government of Alberta has been and continues to be that the province's regulator works on behalf of all Albertans to ensure responsible energy development and a clean and healthy environment."

'Alberta government isn't taking First Nations concerns seriously'

Tomlinson, however, is not convinced.

"It wasn't until Greenpeace came forward with their report that said the exact same thing that the ERCB [report] said, that said the exact same thing we've been saying all along — and threatened to release that report... only then did the province respond."

"I think it's just a testament to the fact that the Alberta government isn't taking First Nations concerns seriously," he said.

"We do have some concerns that it took two years to have these charges filed — despite the fact that we raised these concerns shortly after the spill and have continued to raise them to Alberta officials."

Regardless of the motivation behind today's charges, Tomlinson hopes the ESRD's action will change how the province and its pipeline companies deal with First Nations input.

"We really hope that the government takes the proper initiative to make sure we get a little more communication so we can keep our people safe."

Tomlinson said members of Lubicon First Nation will be watching the situation very closely to make sure implementation measures are going forward safely.

"It's only a matter of time until we are dealing with damage like this again."

Company to review charges

Plains Midstream is charged with releasing a substance that damages the environment, failing to take reasonable measures to repair, remedy or confine the impact of the substance in an appropriate amount of time, and failing to clean up the substance to prevent further environmental impact.

The maximum penalty for each violation is $500,000, but the court may consider a creative sentence that allows companies to fund environmental projects or research instead of paying a fine, said spokesperson Nikki Booth.

The company declined comment saying it will review the charges with its lawyers and the Crown before responding.

No court dates have been set in the case.

The 60-centimetre Rainbow pipeline runs 775 kilometres from Zama, Alta., to Edmonton and is capable of moving 220,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

The company also made headlines in 2012 for an oil spill near Sundre, Alta.

About half a million litres of light sour crude spilled into the Red Deer River with some of it washing into the Gleniffer reservoir, which provides thousands of Albertans with drinking water.

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The hacked tweet that sank Wall Street

It took less than 140 characters to wipe out almost $140 billion from the stock market this week, as a fake report from The Associated Press of a bombing of the White House had investors running for the exits.

A little after 1:07 in the afternoon on Tuesday, investors and followers of the Associated Press's Twitter feed saw the words "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured" flash across their screens.

What had been a positive day of gains on Wall Street was wiped out, as the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average lost roughly 140 points — more than one per cent — within 90 seconds.

Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over. The erroneous report was rapidly dispelled, the Dow went back to where it was, and everything returned to normal. Everything except shaky confidence in the market, which seems to be battered every few months with a new technology-based crisis that sends indexes reeling faster than humans can form a rational response.

'To me, it's indicative of a very dangerous market'—Julian Bridgen

"Before you could blink, it was over," said Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading and an outspoken critic of trading algorithms that are responsible for as much as two-thirds of stock trades on major North American markets today. "With people, you wouldn't have this type of reaction."

Known as "high-frequency traders," the trading systems are essentially vast networks of computers that collectively make trillions of calculations per second. Some are programmed to monitor macroeconomic events in the real world and respond accordingly. Others respond to imperceptible technical movements and place massive buy or sell positions instantaneously. When money can be made by reacting before others can, microseconds matter.

When HF traders respond to each other's large buys or sells, it starts an echo chamber, and that's when sudden sell-offs known as "flash crashes" can occur.

Frequent glitches

In May 2010, a similar event caused 600 points to vaporize off the Dow in 15 minutes, apparently in reaction to a single large trade that other computers then reacted to. Then last year, Knight Capital was blamed when an error in its trading software moved the value of some of America's largest companies sharply up and down in response to bogus trade orders before humans could intervene.

In August 2012, a phony report from a Russian official's Twitter account reporting that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been killed caused oil prices to spike, before moving lower again once the report was disproved.

"There was no waiting to see if any of this was real or not," trader Jonathan Corpina told CBC News' The Current in a recent interview. "The computers kicked into place way too quickly."

Confusion remains as to what exactly happened in markets on Tuesday. Some say the computers picked up on almost imperceptible pauses in human trading, as traders read and digested the bogus tweet. In Wall Street's insanely fast trading world, humans holding back for even a second could have signaled to computers that buyers were drying up and that prices could fall, and so the computers should sell fast.

Others, like Saluzzi, think computers may have sold on the tweet itself. That's possible because computer trading programs are increasingly written to read, and react to, news from social media outlets like Twitter.

Irene Aldridge, a consultant to hedge funds on algorithmic programs, said many of the trading systems just count the number of positive and negative words, without any filter. She wants regulators to do more but believes that glitches and plunges may be inevitable.

As much as humans are prone to overreaction, human traders are sometimes better equipped to avoid panic trades. "We just stopped trading," Corpina says, recalling he actually talked to a client in Washington, D.C., who looked out the window to report nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

"We stepped back and took a breath — which we're able to do as human beings, not computers — until we were able to process what was going on."

Fraud possible

A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army eventually came forward and took credit for the hack. The pro-government group out of Syria has previously hacked the accounts of the BBC, CBS News and FIFA president Sepp Blatter with similar moves in recent months.

In Tuesday's case, it's not believed that the SEA had financial gain at heart, although regulators are looking into that possibility. But with $136 billion worth of stocks moving lower within seconds, clearly the potential for financial abuse is present. It's likely a lot easier to hack a Twitter account than it is to engage in other much more expensive and complicated forms of financial terrorism.

"If they were really smart they might have done this and then shorted some stocks," said professor Ron Diebert, who heads up University of Toronto's digital incubator, the Citizen Lab. "But I doubt that was the intention."

Regardless, the incident underscores some troubling weaknesses in an already wobbly financial market. Julian Brigden of investing consultancy Macro Intelligence 2 Partners said the drop suggested an "unstable" trading environment, one that's dominated by investors too quick to buy or sell without any real investment analysis. "To me, it's indicative of a very dangerous market," he said.

"The exchanges love speed," added Bart Chilton, a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulator that has been reviewing high-speed programs. "I'm not so sure that fast is always better."

With files from The Associated Press

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Picking your nose and eating it may be good for you

Despite everything you may have heard from your mom, picking your nose and eating what you find may have some health benefits, according to a biochemistry professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

"By consuming those pathogens caught within the mucus, could that be a way to teach your immune system about what it's surrounded with?" is the hypothesis Scott Napper posed to his students.

'I've got two beautiful daughters and they spend an amazing amount of time with their fingers up their nose.'—Scott Napper, biochemistry professor

Napper noted that snot has a sugary taste and that may be a signal to the body to consume it and derive information for the immune system.

"I've got two beautiful daughters and they spend an amazing amount of time with their fingers up their nose," he said. "And without fail, it goes right into their mouth afterwards. Could they just be fulfilling what we're truly meant to do?"

Napper said his hypothesis also fits into other theories that examine the link between improved hygiene and an increase in allergies and auto-immune disorders.

"From an evolutionary perspective, we evolved under very dirty conditions and maybe this desire to keep our environment and our behaviours sterile isn't actually working to our advantage," he said.

Napper added he likes to talk about nose picking and science to teach students how seemingly simple questions can lead to valuable scientific discoveries.

Devising an experiment

He noted his poser about boogers would need to be tested.

"All you would need is a group of volunteers. You would put some sort of molecule in all their noses, and for half of the group they would go about their normal business and for the other half of the group, they would pick their nose and eat it," he said. "Then you could look for immune responses against that molecule and if they're higher in the booger-eaters, then that would validate the idea."

Napper added, with a chuckle, that he has already been approached by people keen to participate in a study.

"I'm actually a little concerned they're going to start mailing in samples of who knows what," he said.

Napper said the greatest value of the snot-eating question is that, when he brings it up with his first-year science students they are instantly engaged in the class.

"Get the student to think, rather than just sitting there taking down notes," Napper said. "[Science] should be about the exchange of ideas."

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Monkeys succumb to peer pressure, study suggests

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You don't have to be a teenager to want to fit in at the school lunchroom. Some wild animals seem to follow similar monkey-see, monkey-do behavior to follow the crowd and find the best eats, new research finds.

South African monkeys switched foods purely because of peer pressure, suggest the results of a study in Thursday's journal Science.

"We're not as unique as we would like to think," said lead author Erica van de Waal, of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. "We can find many of the roots of our behaviors in animals."

For her study, 109 vervet monkeys living in groups in the wild were given a choice of food tinted pink or blue by the researchers. One color for each group was tainted with aloe to give it a harmless yucky flavor. After a few meals, the food was no longer tainted, but the monkeys still wouldn't eat the color they figured was bad.

But that changed when some of them tried to fit in with a new group of monkeys. Blue-food eaters instantly switch when they moved to an area full of pink-food eaters, even though they shunned pink food before. Pink eaters also changed when they moved to a blue-food area.

The social pressure may be like "teenagers with a desperate need to be just like the other guys," said co-author Andrew Whiten, also of St. Andrews. Or it could be that the monkeys are learning to adapt to local custom — think restaurant reviews or the old saying "when in Rome, do as the Romans do," he said.

Not original goal of study

The researchers were surprised by the finding: They were only aiming to find out if mothers taught their young the same color food preference they learned, Whiten said. The next generation automatically ate the same as their mother, showing how food choice is learned.

Just by sheer luck, some blue-eating monkeys went to the pink-eating tribes and some pink-eating males went to blue tribes. And that's when the researchers saw peer pressure in action

Of the 10 migrating males, nine instantly ate what everyone else ate. The only hold out was an alpha male, who stuck to his previous diet.

Van de Waal said it could be the eat-what-locals-eat idea, but she favors the social conformity, peer pressure concept. She figures the other males were trying to get in good with females, while the dominant male acted as "if he's already in charge, why does he need to do like the others."

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Joe Oliver slams scientist's oilsands claims as 'nonsense'

Joe Oliver speaks at Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. Natural Resources/ Candian Press

A leading climate change activist and former NASA scientist is "crying wolf" with his "exaggerated" comments about the effects of oilsands development on the environment, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver charged Wednesday.

Oliver, in Washington, D.C., to shore up support for the Keystone XL pipeline, took aim at scientist James Hansen, who has been a vocal opponent of developing the oilsands.

"It does not advance the debate when people make exaggerated comments that are not rooted in the facts. And he should know that," Oliver said to reporters, following a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In an op-ed piece for the New York Times last year, Hansen claimed that "if Canada proceeds [with oilsands development], and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate."

Oliver countered that when a source of energy represents 1/1000th of global emissions, "to say it's the end of the planet if that's developed is nonsense."

He added that "crying wolf all the time" does not advance the serious debate.

In his speech, Oliver listed the benefits he said will come from the Keystone XL pipeline project, which would carry oil from Western Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. He said the pipeline will create thousands of jobs and ensure the U.S. with a reliable supply of oil.

"Ultimately this comes down to a choice. The U.S. can choose Canada — a friend, neighbour and ally — as its source of oil imports," Oliver said. "Or it can choose to continue to import oil from less friendly, less stable countries with weaker — or perhaps no — environmental standards."

Oliver added that oilsands development will continue, whether the Keystone pipeline is approved or not.

But his pitch comes just days after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency publicly rebuked the State Department over its positive environmental assessment of the proposed pipeline.

In a letter sent Monday that was widely seen as a setback for the pipeline, the EPA raised serious concerns about the project's carbon footprint and criticized the State Department's draft analysis.

The letter also urged Washington to work together with Canada to step up its efforts on climate change.

With files from The Canadian Press and The Associated Press

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Feds must 'step up' to help experimental lakes program

Ontario's pledge to help save the Experimental Lakes Area in northwestern Ontario is welcome news to scientists.

But the founder of the Coalition to Save the ELA, Diane Orihel, says it's only the first step as the province enters talks with the federal government, Manitoba, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Winnipeg to figure out a long-range plan.

And Ottawa has yet to step up, Orihel noted.

"Let's not over-react," she said. "This is a very, very big announcement. But the pressure needs to continue because these are, at this point, pledges and promises and we have to make sure this happens."

The ELA in northwestern Ontario has been shut down since Ottawa pulled its funding last month.

Thunder Bay-Superior North MP Bruce Hyer congratulated Ontario and Manitoba for giving the Experimental Lakes a second lease on life.

"It was extremely gratifying to see the Ontario and Manitoba provincial governments step up to the plate to take on responsibilities abandoned by the federal Harper Conservatives," said Hyer in a press release.

"I fully expect the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans to work and negotiate in good faith to see that a hand-over of the facility takes place with minimal disruption. Given the announcement, there is no reason why scientists cannot now be allowed to return to the facility to continue their research over the vital summer field season."

But Orihel said it's also unclear whether scientists will be able to work at the northwestern Ontario site over the summer.

"It's wonderful that Ontario has stepped up to the plate. But what this really does is it puts pressure on the federal government to step up to the plate to do their part," she said.

ELA is a public research program that gathers scientific evidence for the development of effective public policy, management strategies, and stewardship activities to ensure the health of Canada's freshwaters and fisheries.

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Huge 6-legged robot unveiled by creator

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A two-tonne, six-legged robot that you can pilot using two joysticks is finally operational after four years of unpaid work and an investment of thousands of pounds by an electronics engineer in Hampshire, England.

The robot, known as Mantis, looks somewhat like six excavator arms attached to the cab of an Apache helicopter and can walk at a top speed of 1.5 kilometres an hour, said its creator Matt Denton in an interview with CBC's As It Happens this week.

The robot can also be remote controlled.

"But obviously, it's more fun being on board," Denton said.

Over the course of the interview, Denton revealed why he decided to invest so much of his sweat, time and money into a robot that has no obvious practical use.

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1-way Mars trip starts accepting astronaut applications

Want to spend the rest of your life on Mars? You can apply to do so now.

Mars One, a non-profit organization that plans to send humans on a one-way trip to establish a permanent settlement on Mars in 2023, began accepting online applications Monday.

"We are very excited about launching the selection program," said Bas Landorp, co-founder and CEO of the Netherlands-based group, in a statement announcing the start of the selection process. "This is an international mission and it is very important for the project that anyone anywhere can ask themselves: Do I want this? Am I ready for this? If the answer is yes then we want to hear from you."

The program is looking for applicants 18 and older "who are both mature and interesting," but there is no requirement for any particular academic or professional background, as astronauts will spend seven years learning all the skills they need, said a Mars One news release.

Norbert Kraft, Mars One's chief medical officer, said because the mission involves a permanent settlement, the organization is more concerned with "how well each astronaut lives and works with others and their ability to deal with a lifetime of challenges" than whether they have traditional astronaut qualities such as bravery or experience piloting a supersonic jet.

The first round of applications will be open until Aug. 31, 2013. In order to apply, prospective astronauts must:

• Pay a registration fee that depends on the per capita GDP of their home country. For Canada, the fee is $33 US.
• Provide some general information about themselves.
• Write a letter about why they are applying.
• Submit a one-minute video answering some standard questions and explaining why he or she should be among the first humans to set foot on Mars.

As of Tuesday at noon, dozens of videos were already viewable online, including at least one from Canada.

Mars One "experts" will decide which applications will pass on to Round 2, when candidates will have to pass a health evaluation and an interview.

Rounds 3 and 4 will be reality-type shows broadcast on TV and the internet.

In Round 3, 20 to 40 candidates from each country will participate in "challenges" to demonstrate their suitability for the mission and the audience will choose a winner. Mars One will decide who else proceeds to the next round.

In Round 4, candidates will be split into international groups and will begin their training in a mock Mars outpost. Depending on their performance, some will be removed from the program individually or in groups until six groups of four remain.

Mars One estimates that it will cost $6 billion US to put the first four people on Mars. It plans to raise the money through broadcasting rights and sponsorships.

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Video game treatment for lazy eye restores 3D vision

A Canadian-led study has found that playing video games with both eyes can dramatically improve vision in adults with lazy eye — a condition thought to be all but untreatable in adults.

Lazy eye, known to doctors as amblyopia, is a problem in which a person sees better in one eye than the other and the brain effectively turns off the weaker eye. It affects up to three per cent of the population. People with lazy eye can't see in 3D and can't judge distances as effectively as people with normal vision because those tasks require the use of both eyes at the same time.

In children, vision in the weaker eye can sometimes be improved by covering the stronger eye with a patch and forcing the brain to use the weaker eye.

But up until now, no treatment, including that one, has been effective in adults.

The new treatment developed by an international research team headed by Robert Hess, director of the opthalmalogy research department at McGill University and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, significantly improves the vision in the weaker eye of someone with lazy eye in just a few weeks.

'Surprisingly quick' results

"It's relatively quick, surprisingly quick," said Hess. "More importantly, in a majority of cases, they get back their stereoscopic or their 3D vision."

This experiment involved Tetris, but Hess thinks other visually intensive games and activities that engage both eyes would also work. (Pierre Dubois/McGill University Health Centre)

That may mean being able to watch 3D movies for the first time.

For a long time, scientists thought lazy eye in adults wasn't treatable because adult brains are too set in their ways and can't learn to use the lazy eye.

But recent scientific evidence has suggested that isn't the problem, Hess said. Instead, experiments show that what is probably happening is that the stronger eye suppresses the communication between the weaker eye and the brain. The greater the contrast in the image seen by the stronger eye, the more it suppresses the signal from the weaker eye.

The new treatment involves setting up the video game of Tetris so it can only be played effectively using both eyes. The game involves rotating puzzle pieces as they fall so that they interlock with other puzzle pieces sitting at the bottom of the screen. The researchers split the image between the eyepieces of a pair of head-mounted video goggles so that one eye could only see the falling pieces and the other eye could only see the pieces sitting at the bottom of the screen. They also adjusted the contrast in each eye so that at first, there was very little contrast in the image seen by the stronger eye.

After playing Tetris that way for an hour a day for two weeks, nine adults with lazy eye showed a big improvement in the vision of the weaker eye and in their 3D depth perception, the researchers reported in a paper published this week in the journal Current Biology.

A comparison group of nine adults who played the game using their weaker eye while their stronger eye was patched showed some improvement in their weaker eye. But the vision in the weaker eye and their 3D vision both improved much more dramatically when they too started started playing the game with the image split across both eyes.

Other games could work

"What we have to do is to get the two eyes working together so one eye doesn't suppress the other eye," Hess said. He added that there's nothing special about the Tetris game, and any other visually intensive game or activity that forces the use of both eyes should also be effective.

The adult treatment appears to work much more quickly than patching, which typically requires the child to wear a patch for three to six hours a day for six months to a year before improvements are seen in the weaker eye, Hess said. He added that children whose eyes were patched generally never learn to use their eyes together, and the weaker eye tends to regress over time.

The researchers are scheduled to test the video game treatment in children in a clinical trial across North America later this year.

"What our real interest is in is seeing if can replace the patching that's used in children with something a little more fun and enjoyable that might potentially be more effective."

The study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

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BlackBerry's keyboard Q10 to roll out May 1

BlackBerry has announced that its new Q10 smartphone — the one with a physical keypad — will make its global debut in Canada on May 1.

In a blog posting on the company's website, BlackBerry said all three of Canada's big wireless carriers — Bell Mobility, Rogers Wireless and Telus — will have the handset in their stores and kiosks in eight days, with prices starting at $199 with a three-year contract.

Telus and Bell have said they will sell the phone without a contract for $700. Rogers will sell the phone for $649.99 without a contract, and will be the only Canadian carrier that offers the BlackBerry Q10 in a white version, as well as the more common black model.

The launch date is in line with analysts' expectations.

BlackBerry said the Q10 would also be available through Virgin Mobile Canada, Fido, Koodo Mobile, Sasktel, and at The Source, Best Buy and Future Shop. It said further details on those rollouts were still to come.

Availability dates for the Q10 in the U.S. and other countries are still to be announced. That's similar to the staggered rollout for BlackBerry's Z10 model, which launched first in Canada and several other countries on Jan. 30. The Z10 wasn't available in the U.S. until March 22.

In March, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said the Q10 wouldn't be available in the U.S. for two or three months.

The decision to stagger the release of the touchscreen and keypad versions prompted some criticism from analysts.

The new Q10 model, which has both a keypad and a touchscreen, is considered especially crucial for BlackBerry's turnaround hopes as many BlackBerry users prefer a physical keypad over the touchscreen found on the iPhone and many Android devices.

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Oilsands monitoring portal launched by Ottawa, Alberta

Environmental monitoring data from Alberta's oilsands region is now accessible online at a web portal launched Monday by the federal and Alberta governments.

"Today, as the world celebrates Earth Day and showcases commitments to protecting the environment, Canada is contributing and doing our part, by delivering on our collective promise to ensure that scientific data from the monitoring activity is transparent and accessible," federal Environment Minister Peter Kent said in announcing the launch of the Canada-Alberta Environmental Monitoring Information Portal.

"With this portal, our respective governments are actively encouraging informed discussions and analysis on the impacts of oilsands development."

Alberta Environment Minister Diana McQueen added in her own statement: "By openly reporting on our data and our progress, we are ensuring the rest of the world recognizes our commitment to responsible and sustainable resource development."

A federal-provincial joint environmental monitoring plan for the oilsands region launched in February 2012. (Jeff McIntosh/Canadian Press)

The site describes the water, air, land and biodiversity monitoring taking place as part of a "world class" federal-provincial joint environmental monitoring plan for the oilsands region launched in February 2012. The plan is part of an effort to convince the world that Canada's oilsands are being developed responsibly and are not the dirty, environmental villain they are sometimes portrayed to be.

'Information isn't action.'—Megan Leslie, NDP Environment Critic

It is also an attempt to address criticism that the government isn't open about environmental impacts of the oilsands.

The industry-funded plan was expected to cost $50 million a year in its first three years and was to be managed jointly by the two levels of government. The phasing in of the plan started in 2012 and is expected to be completed in 2015.

The new portal includes a map of the monitoring sites, and data that has been gathered so far is available for download.

'Not a cause for concern'

A section describing the latest results states that preliminary tests show "low levels of oilsands development-related contaminants are present in both air and water" but the levels "are not a cause for concern." The website acknowledges that metal concentrations in some water samples exceed guidelines in spring and summer, but said that was due in part to "natural characteristics" of the Athabasca River.

With respect to air, sites close to oilsands development had double the levels of polyaromatic hydrocarbons, a class of chemicals that can be carcinogenic. Concentrations of nitrous oxide and sulphur dioxide, which can cause smog and acid rain, were comparable to those near a coal-burning power plant or a large city such as Toronto.

"As new data is collected, analyzed and validated, it will be posted and be publicly accessible," said a news release from Environment Canada.

The agency added that there will be more data as the plan gets closer to full implementation, slated for 2015.

Additional, complementary data is also available on another website, the Alberta's Oil Sands Information Portal.

NDP Environment Critic Megan Leslie questioned how useful the data will be, since it can't be compared with data from before the oilsands development.

"Government didn't do a baseline study, so even once we get this information, what will it mean, frankly?" she asked.

"For Earth Day, I would much rather have seen an announcement saying what they're going to do with that information, how they're actually going to try and protect our environment by using that information... Information isn't action."

Cautious praise from scientists

University of Alberta ecologist David Schindler, who has conducted research showing evidence that the oilsands are polluting nearby waterways, told The Canadian Press that the new data portal has good potential. However, he said the monitoring work needs independent oversight.

John Smol, a biology professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., who served on a federal oilsands panel appointed in 2010 to look into the state of oilsands environmental research and monitoring, said he thinks the launch of the portal is "great."

"But let's wait and see," he said in a statement. "I am interested in the quality and the type of data made available. It's too early to tell how effective this website will be. The devil is in the details."

One of Smol's panel's recommendations was to make the monitoring data transparent and available.

The oilsands' poor environmental reputation has led to international criticism and even boycotts. The federal government has said it would work hard to combat misinformation about the oilsands' environmental impact.

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Samsung Galaxy S4: Where the smartphone excels, what needs work

Making a hit phone isn't too different from making a hit movie or video game — as long as you don't mess up the basics and do add in a few new improvements each time out, you should continue to find success. And so it goes for the Galaxy S4, the fourth iteration of Samsung's highly successful smartphone series.

By delivering the same popular features from previous models with a few additional bonuses, the S4 is the equivalent of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire or Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare: It's a successful franchise on cruise control.

I've had a few days to play with Samsung's new flagship smartphone, which is being released through just about every Canadian carrier on April 27. Here's how it compares to previous models and other devices on the market.

The looks

Esthetically, the S4 looks and feels similar to the S3. It's slightly bigger than its predecessor, but also a tad lighter at 130 grams, and feels good in the hand.

With a five-inch screen, it's bigger than the comparatively diminutive iPhone 5, but also a good deal smaller than the gigantic Samsung Note 2.

The super AMOLED screen is sharper than the S3's thanks to a bump-up in resolution. The S4 now boasts full high-definition 1,920-by-1,080 pixels, or 441 pixels per inch. In real terms, everything on the screen — movies, photos and text — looks very crisp.

If there's a complaint to be made about the feel, it's that the phone is "plasticky." Competing phones such as the iPhone 5 and HTC One feel more high-end because of their use of lightweight metal casings.

The guts

Samsung had initially teased people with the possibility of an octa-core processor — that's eight to the non-Latin — but the S4 model being released in Canada will only have four cores (or quad, for the Latin inclined). Octa-cores are reportedly being reserved for Asian and African markets that lack fourth-generation LTE wireless coverage.

The Samsung S4 can shoot using the back-facing 13-megapixel camera, and simultaneously add a small inset of you into the photo or video with the front-facing two-megapixel camera. (Peter Nowak/CBC)

Four is plenty of processing power for much of what the average person wants to do. A good showcase for that power is the new picture-in-picture feature, which uses both of the phone's cameras to create a single image or video. You can shoot using the back-facing 13-megapixel camera, but also simultaneously add a small inset of yourself into the photo or video with the front-facing two-megapixel camera.

It's a little gimmicky and difficult to use — it is, after all, tough enough to line up and frame just one photo, never mind two at the same time on different sides of the handset — but I'm impressed with the fact that the phone has the horsepower to pull it off without a hitch.

The main camera itself is pretty good and packs in a number of nifty software features, like the ability to create animated GIFs or record up to nine seconds of sound to accompany a still photo.

However, the S4's camera does prove that megapixels are not the only factor to be considered when it comes to taking high-quality photos. When compared against the two phones with the best cameras on the market — the iPhone 5 and the Lumia 920, both of which have only eight megapixels – the S4 still isn't quite as good. Its photos are not quite as sharp or detailed as those snapped by its rivals.

A comparison of photos taken by the iPhone 5 (left), Lumia 920 (centre) and Galaxy S4. (Peter Nowak/CBC)

Otherwise, the S4 has pretty much all the other hardware that's expected of a high-end Android smartphone these days. It has LTE connectivity, near-field communications (NFC) for one-touch media sharing and — hopefully some day — mobile financial transactions, and expandable memory. The various models come in 16, 32 or 64 gigabytes, with a microSD slot for accommodating up to 64 GB more.

Battery-wise, the S4 is about par for the course with most smartphones, meaning that with notifications, various connections and push email turned on, it'll be tough to make it through the day on a single charge. The phone itself has a relatively large battery, but power users are likely going to need some sort of external charging source. Either that, or they'll have to remember to carry a charging cable around.

The controls

If you've used an Android smartphone — or any smartphone, really — the controls and layout of Samsung's newest phone are undoubtedly familiar. The S4 runs Android Jellybean 4.2.2, which really isn't all that different from other recent versions —same grid of apps, same horizontal swiping to get to additional screens.

Samsung has added an "easy mode" home screen, which greatly simplifies the whole interface into just a few big icons. Veteran smartphone users wouldn't be caught dead using it, but it's a nice feature for people who are upgrading to a smart device for the first time.

Samsung pushed the S3's gesture and motion controls as one of its major selling points, and those are back in spades here. The list of possible controls is pretty long. You can set your phone to answer calls when you wave your hand in front of it, take screen captures when you swipe your palm across the screen, pause videos if you look away, and so on.

These settings are entirely subjective — each user is bound to find some they like and others that are useless. I actually quite liked the ability to take a screen grab with a simple swipe, but I couldn't imagine wanting to wave the phone around to answer a call.

The S4 also dabbles in eye tracking. With this feature turned on, you can read up and down a web page simply by looking up and down it — the phone follows your gaze and scrolls along.

It requires you to be a little obvious — you sometimes have to actually move your head to get the screen to scroll — but it's a feature that can come in handy in situations where you've only got one hand free, such as when you're carrying a package or riding a bus and holding on to something for balance.

Otherwise, I can't say I've ever enjoyed typing on a Samsung device and the same is true here. I generally find the keys to be too close together or not big enough.

The S4 compounds the problem by being almost all screen, with a very small bezel around it. I found myself frequently hitting the back and menu buttons by accident as a result. It's a frustration that power typists won't like.

The frills

Every Android phone maker has had to add in their own proprietary bonuses in an effort to distinguish their devices. Some of the ones Samsung has come up with are better than others.

The Galaxy S4's home screen. (Peter Nowak/CBC)

I liked the WatchOn feature, which is an app that turns the phone into a remote control for your television and PVR. Not only does it work with competing brands — my television is an LG plasma — I was also amazed at how quickly and easily it made the connection. All you have to do is select your make and, in the case of the PVR, your TV service provider, and bam, it's ready to go.

I was also fond of Story Album, which is a nice way to look at your photos. The app lets you select pictures, then displays them in a sort of digital album where it randomly places them into frames and grids. You can, of course, look at the full photo by tapping on it.

I had high hopes for the S Health app, which uses the phone's built-in pedometer and weather sensors to track your fitness and comfort levels. But I didn't find the temperature readings to be very accurate, and the pedometer was way off. It somehow counted me as taking more than 100 steps while I was in bed sleeping. On the plus side, I should be losing weight in no time with that kind of tracking.

The S4 also has a Group Play app, where you can stream photos, music and documents and play games with a number of other people. I saw this in action at a demo and it was impressive, but in reality it'll be something of a rarity since you'll have to find a bunch of other S4 owners to really take advantage of it.

Similarly, I wasn't able to test Samsung's recently unveiled Knox feature, which effectively creates two profiles on the phone — one for personal use and another for work that can be controlled by your employer. It's similar to BlackBerry's Balance feature, in that employers can field their own apps and remotely wipe their own data, but it's still rare to see in action given its newness.

The verdict

Industry analysts have joked that the S4 could actually be called the S3S, a play on Apple's naming conventions where incrementally improved phones get the "S" suffix while the real big next steps get an actual new number.

'The S4 is very much an incremental step over the S3 – it's evolutionary, not revolutionary.'

The assessment isn't entirely off. The S4 is very much an incremental step over the S3 — it's evolutionary, not revolutionary.

That said, it's still a good phone that is likely to do well, just like another Harry Potter movie or Call of Duty game. It's a solid choice for people with older phones who are looking to upgrade.

Samsung's Galaxy S series has so far proven to be Apple's main competition, with other smartphone makers struggling to catch up to the two behemoths. The S4 will continue that rivalry, with the ball now firmly in Apple's court.

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Patrick Brown: China's gathering environmental storm

About The Author

Former CBC correspondent Patrick Brown has reported from world capitals and dusty backwaters for over 30 years, with a particular emphasis on Asia, having been based at different times in Bangkok, Delhi and, most recently, Beijing. He now splits his time between Canada and China as an independent documentary-maker. Follow Patrick Brown on Twitter: @jiluTV

China's new leaders are grappling with their first natural disaster — the earthquake that struck Lushan county, a remote mountainous area of Sichuan province, early Saturday morning, killing about 200 people and injuring many thousands.

In office for only five weeks, the new leadership seems determined to do a better job than the last one, and for good reason.

The relationship between the country's rulers and the natural world looms large in traditional Chinese thought. Dynasties have risen and fallen on their handling of things like irrigation and flood control, and natural disasters have been interpreted almost as nature's commentary on the quality of governance.

It was no surprise then that, within hours of Saturday's quake, Premier Li Keqiang arrived at the epicentre by helicopter to begin sympathizing with victims and supervising the rescue effort.

Li's predecessor, Wen Jiabao, was criticized for arriving late at some disasters, and often ridiculed as "China's best actor" for the theatrical tears he would shed when he did arrive.

In 2008, the image of the ruling Communist Party was gravely damaged by the much stronger earthquake that killed about 70,000 people in Sichuan.

It struck at two in the afternoon on a school day, and thousands of children lost their lives in buildings that had been shoddily built by unscrupulous construction firms in league with corrupt officials. Relief funds found their way into the same greedy pockets.

The only people to have been punished were not the culprits, but those brave enough to speak out and call for an accounting for the young lives lost.

One of them, the environmentalist writer Tan Zuoren, was sentenced to five years for "inciting subversion of state power."

Ironically, he's serving his time in Ya'an, at the heart of Saturday's earthquake. If his cell has a window he might have caught a glimpse of Premier Li's entourage inspecting the town.

The 'Mandate of Heaven'

Earthquakes, floods, droughts and other natural disasters have a special place in China's history because of the ancient concept that a dynasty's right to rule depended on the "Mandate of Heaven."

Today, as China's leaders are subject to public scrutiny as never before, that concept is still relevant, particularly when it comes to disaster relief and environmental degradation.

The explosion of Twitter-like micro-blogging has given ordinary Chinese a new and growing sense that they have a right to more accurate and timely information — and the right to pass judgment on officials who were previously beyond criticism.

The opportunity to rate the new leadership's handling of a natural disaster comes at a time when people are also wondering how the authorities will tackle some epic man-made environmental problems.

The past five weeks have seen a cascade of revelations about the scale of degradation resulting from 35 years of single-minded economic development.

Here are just a few of the issues that have dominated the Chinese internet in the five weeks since President Xi Jinping and Premier Li began their 10-year mandate in March:

• A flotilla of 16,000 dead pigs drifted down the river that provides drinking water for China's largest city, Shanghai. Officials say there was no threat to health, but a leading internet theory held that farmers were dumping diseased pigs that would otherwise have been sold for meat prior to new regulations.
• Disappearing rivers. A three-year national water census revealed that the number of rivers with a catchment area greater than 100 square kilometres has dropped by 28,000 since the 1990s.
• In announcing a plan to control the use of 58 industrial chemicals, the government acknowledged the existence of "cancer villages" near factories. Activists have estimated there may be hundreds of such clusters, caused by pollution. Deaths from cancer in China have risen by more than 80 per cent since the 1970s.
• Official newspapers published an international study estimating that outdoor air pollution caused 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010. People are left to speculate what the figure is today, now that levels of the most dangerous fine particles in Beijing are commonly more than 30 times the World Health Organization's recommended standard.

How dynasties fall

For modern historians, the collapse of the great Ming Dynasty in the 17th century is seen as resulting from many factors, including catastrophic changes in the world silver market.

Health workers lower dead pigs into a processing pit where the carcasses will be fermented into organic fertilizer near Zhuji in eastern China. Over a two-week period in mid-March, nearly 16,000 pig carcasses were found floating in the nearby river system, or dumped by farmers by the side of the road for reasons that have never been fully explained. (Associated Press)

Chinese who lived through those chaotic times also saw many causes, but the general view is that they felt that the Ming had lost the Mandate of Heaven, as demonstrated by the results of two major disasters: devastating short-term climate change known as the Little Ice Age, and the Shaanxi earthquake of 1556, which killed more than 800,000 people.

In modern times, many Chinese saw a connection between Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and the Tangshan earthquake, which killed a quarter of a million people six weeks earlier.

The Communist Party clings to the rhetoric of Mao's revolution as the foundation of its one-party rule. But for the past 35 years it has staked its legitimacy on the free market and a policy of breakneck development and relentless economic growth.

Recent weeks, however, have seen growing and unprecedented public concern about the price being paid in poisoned water, polluted soil, unbreathable air and contaminated food.

(In Hong Kong, retired customs agents have been called back to work to enforce a ban on the smuggling of baby milk, while retailers as far away as Britain and Australia have been asked to ration sales of baby milk powder because of bulk purchases for export to China. The reason: Chinese mothers still don't trust the Chinese product that was the subject of a deadly contamination scandal in 2008.)

President Xi Jinping has already suggested that he and the party will be judged on whether he keeps his promise to tackle pandemic corruption, a leading cause of public discontent.

Earthquake relief and reconstruction will be a huge test of that promise.

In the longer term, though, it may be that the gathering storm of discontent over the environment is an even greater threat to the party's Mandate of Heaven.

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Oilsands environmental data to be released for Earth Day

The federal Conservatives will be launching a long-awaited information portal which will give the public access to oilsands environmental data. (Jeff McIntosh/Canadian Press)

The federal Conservatives have decided to mark Earth Day this year, launching a long-promised portal for public access to sensitive environmental data from the oilsands.

Federal Environment Minister Peter Kent and his Alberta counterpart Diana McQueen will be at Carleton University in Ottawa on Monday to flick the switch and allow public scrutiny of new research measuring the quality and quantity of the land, air and water in the Athabasca region.

It's a contrast to the defensive stance the Conservatives have taken on Earth Days past. Last year, hundreds of thousands of people rallied in Montreal and other cities against Ottawa's changes to environmental oversight and its withdrawal from the Kyoto accord to cut emissions.

And it's part of an increasingly urgent effort to court more public buy-in for Canada's resource development practices as the oil patch worries about how it will pipe its product to port.

"I think they are on a quest of social license, that's for sure," said Megan Leslie, the NDP's environment critic. "The reasons it's a 'quest' is their own fault."

Oilsands Monitoring

The oilsands monitoring system was started up more than a year ago, touted at the time as a crucial tool in Canada's efforts to persuade Canadians and the world that the oilsands were not the major source of pollution and global warming that critics were claiming.

Once public, the data, Kent has said, would show a skeptical world that Canada's oil should be welcomed and not scorned.

"It will provide the facts and the science to defend the product which some abroad are threatening to boycott," he said as he first announced the idea of a world-class data system in July 2011.

But then came the 2012 budget with its promises to streamline the environmental hurdles industry has to jump through to develop Canada's natural resources -- promises that drove many into the streets last Earth Day and then repeatedly over the summer.

By Christmas, the environmental movement had merged with First Nations who were also upset about the federal government's two omnibus bills that radically overhauled environmental assessments, fisheries protections and oversight of most of Canada's waterways.

Now, Alberta's plans for building at least one pipeline to send oilsands products to a tide-water port are on the line. The Northern Gateway proposal to build a pipeline to Canada's West Coast is now widely considered moribund because of public concerns about spills and tanker safety. The Keystone XL pipeline through the United States is now a flashpoint for environmentalists on both sides of the border, concerned about greenhouse gas emissions that would increase as production in the oilsands grows.

Importance of social licence

Ottawa insiders who spoke on condition of anonymity say Ottawa is determined not to follow the same course with two new proposals that would pipe bitumen from the West through Eastern Canada, either for shipping or refining in Quebec or Atlantic Canada.

"The Canadian governments have not paid enough attention to how this could have happened and put in place an inoculation policy," said David McLaughlin, the former head of the now-defunct National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy.

The federal Conservatives are learning the hard way what corporations involved in mining and energy have long known: that social license is crucial for successful business, he said. The trouble now is, Ottawa comes late to this realization and they need to win back some trust on the environment file, he added.

"I think they make it tougher for themselves, unnecessarily," McLaughlin said. "It has been tough, but it's not too late by any means to turn the page....It's never too late to turn this around."

The oilsands monitoring program is one key piece of an array of measures the Conservatives are planning to take in the coming months, in large part to show Canadians and the world that the oilsands are being developed responsibly.

Emissions restrictions

Also in the policy pipeline are plans to introduce emissions restrictions for the oil and gas industry, and plans to dramatically raise the liability companies need to carry in case of oil spills or pipeline accidents.

But all three of those policies have lurched towards the finish line.

With the oilsands monitoring plan, federal and provincial officials spent months bickering about who would do what, and how they would get industry to pay.

Now that they have figured it out, whether or not publication of the data aides the social license cause will depend on how relevant and complete scientists find the data.

Unsure outcome

Outspoken Alberta ecologist David Schindler, who was consulted on the development of the database, is on side. For Greenpeace, however, the jury is still out.

"We're a little skeptical, as the system won't be fully implemented until 2015 and yet the two levels of government continue to approve new projects in the absence of reliable data on cumulative impacts," said Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaign coordinator for Greenpeace Canada.

As for raising the liability limits, various proposals have gone before the House of Commons in the past, only to die quietly before they could be passed.

And the oil and gas emissions regulations have been years in the making. Federal and Alberta officials have been meeting intensely with industry players over the past six months in the hopes of finding rules that are strict enough to allow Canada to meet its international obligations but that won't unduly penalize industry.

The provinces are likely to have control over the design of the regulations in their own jurisdictions, but Ottawa is on the hook for making sure the international emissions targets are met.

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China ramps up earthquake disaster response efforts

The tent village that sprang up in two days in mountain-flanked Lushan to house survivors of the devastating earthquake in China on the weekend is no ordinary refugee camp, as the country's full range of disaster response is on display: Trucks with x-ray equipment, phone-charging stations, bank tellers-on-wheels — even a tent for insurance claims.

The efforts underway Monday in mountainous Sichuan province after a quake Saturday that killed at least 188 people showed that the government has continued to hone its disaster reaction — long considered a crucial leadership test in China — since a much more devastating earthquake in 2008, also in Sichuan, and another one in 2010 in the western region of Yushu.

"Lushan was so heavily hit and my family's house toppled. It has been such a disaster for us," said Yue Hejun, 28, as he waited to recharge his family's three mobile phones at a charging stall, volunteered by a communications company and coordinated by the government in a new addition to the arsenal of services after natural disasters. "If we can charge our phones, we are at least able to keep in touch with our family members outside and that helps to set our minds at ease."

At a mini-clinic with two green cots in the open air and a small tent for doctors to sleep, a doctor said the government has learned the importance of fast co-ordination since the Yushu quake, which killed more than 2,600 people. Much of the initial relief in that disaster came from Buddhist monks and other non-government volunteers, partly because of the remoteness of much of the affected areas.

"After 24 hours or 48 hours in Yushu, things were not so orderly or settled in," said the doctor, who like many government officials would give only her surname, Luo. "The government's quick, organized response is very important. It's no use to blindly come here and try to save people."

Aid getting to people more efficiently

Helicopters have been an obvious presence in the latest rescue efforts, used to reach outlying communities, unlike in 2008 when bad weather hampered their use in the critical first 36 hours. This time, better use of helicopters for reconnaissance — with remote sensing technology — and for the distribution of aid has allowed help to get out more quickly to where it is needed, said Teng Wuxiao, director of the Institute of Urban Public Security at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Still, complaints were common among the survivors of the latest quake, especially in the more hard-to-reach areas. While aid was being delivered, it was not getting out to all who need it. Yue said family members in his remote mountain village had received no help with shelter and were living under tarpaulins.

Huang Mingxian, 47, who was camped out with seven family members in a government-issued blue tent in a small public square, said the government's efforts were appreciated but that supplies were not always distributed fairly.

"This morning is the first time in three days that we have gotten instant noodles," Huang said, waving a pair of long chopsticks she was using to stir the noodles in a wok over a gas canister-powered mobile stove. "Other areas have electricity and water, what about us?"

Earlier Monday, about two dozen residents briefly gathered on a street corner near a camp area, shouting that they had not been given food in two days. A half-hour later, a large truck rolled up and dozens of evacuees ran up to it, jostling as the supplies were being handed out.

The death toll in Saturday's quake — measured at magnitude 7.0 by Chinese authorities and at magnitude 6.6 by monitors in the U.S. — may continue to tick upward, with about two dozen people still missing. More than 15,000 people have been sent to hospitals, with more than 300 of them seriously injured.Residents line up for packets of instant noodles in the county of Lushan in southwestern China's Sichuan province on Monday, following the earthquake Saturday that killed at least 188 people. (Ng Han Guan/Associated Press)

Central authorities' ability to respond to natural disasters has been seen as tests of legitimacy for centuries. Chinese emperors put state resources into controlling floods, and earthquakes and other disasters were believed to be signs that a dynasty was losing the "mandate of heaven."

The state-run tabloid Global Times boasted in an editorial of China's communal `'disaster-relief" culture, and its "more mature" response to the latest quake, comparing it favorably to those overseas. "In its ability to mobilize people and in other indicators, China's disaster relief comes ahead of the United States, Japan and other developed countries," the newspaper said.

The Foreign Ministry said that Beijing is turning away foreign offers of assistance, saying China is capable of handling it on its own.

In Lushan county's town, where many of the buildings are unsafe for use, the grounds of schools, hospitals, a gymnasium and other government buildings have been converted into evacuee camps. Quake survivors formed long lines in front of trucks and stalls to receive instant noodles, bottled water and other supplies.

Classes expected to continue later this week

Beyond the bare necessities, there are also stalls for survivors to make insurance claims, a large vehicle that converts into a bank and ATM-on-wheels, and tents sponsored by Chinese telecoms companies providing numerous electrical extension cords for residents to recharge their electrical gadgets.

High school seniors in the disaster area will be moved this week to the provincial capital, Chengdu, along with 30 teachers so that they can continue classes and take the all-important university entrance exam, the state Xinhua News Agency reported.People charge their mobile phones at a relief centre in the county seat of Lushan in southwestern China's Sichuan province on Monday. The tent village sprang up two days after Saturday's deadly quake. (Ng Han Guan/Associated Press)

As typically happens after disasters, Chinese with cars were packing them with supplies and heading to the disaster area. Anticipating traffic congestion that could hamper emergency teams, the government issued a notice Monday asking volunteers, tourists and others not trained as rescuers to stay out of the disaster area.

However, authorities were letting motorcyclists through.

Peng Song, 28, an outdoor equipment retailer who biked to Lushan from the provincial capital of Chengdu, had his motorcycle packed with tents and bottled water and was riding with 14 other bikers-turned-volunteers out to remote communities.

"Those in the disaster area need help. We just want to offer a hand to them, that's all," Peng said.

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E-health records saved medical system $1.3B in 6 years

A study done for Canada Health Infoway, the federally funded organization set up to monitor and improve the use of information technology across Canada's health care system, has found that increased use of electronic medical health records has saved $1.3 billion over the last six years.

The study by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) examined the switch to electronic medical records (EMR) by family doctors from across Canada between 2006 and 2012 and found:

• $800 million in administrative efficiencies (less time by staff pulling and filing charts or processing finding lab test results, less time by doctors reading and maintaining paper files).
• $584 million in health system benefits (reduced duplicate diagnostic testing, reduced adverse drug events).
• Improved chronic disease management and illness prevention (higher mammogram screening rates, higher pneumonia and flu vaccination rates).
• Improved communication amongst care providers and with patients.

The study's methodology included a review of current research, national survey and cost data and interviews.

"In some cases, it's the sum of a lot of little things, " said Jennifer Zelmer, senior vice-president with Canada Health Infoway.

"When you're using electronic medical records, staff in a medical practice tend to spend less time … pulling charts, and they're able to use that time for clinical services," she added. "

And when you add that up those kinds of efficiencies, both in terms of chart pulls and in terms of tracking down test results, actually the value of that is quite significant."

The study's findings don't surprise Stephen McLaren, a family physician in Markham, Ontario. He says many patients already understand the efficiency of an electronic record, especially if their paper record or test results were ever misplaced.

"Their visit with their provider is a very inefficient, unproductive visit and very often means you have to come back," Dr. McLaren said.

McLaren says there's also better treatment of chronic illness because electronic medical records allow a doctor to easily spot trends in a patient's tests, over time.

"In the paper world, you have to flip through pages and pages and pages, hoping to catch onto a trend if there was one there to see."

Despite the growing use of electronic medical records, only 56 per cent of patients have one. McLaren says their use continues to grow, as more and more patients ask for them.

Meanwhile, he says the next big step in this area is to link up health care institutions — hospitals, labs, nursing homes, and doctors offices — so that a patient's information can be shared more easily, while still protecting the privacy of the data.

Canada Health Infoway had set a target for half of Canadians to have electronic health records by the end of 2010. The federal government delayed $500 million in funding for the agency by one year, seeking more information about how the contribution would be spent.

A 2009 report from the federal auditor general found contracting and reporting problems in early efforts to move more Canadian health records online.

The emerging benefits of electronic medical record use in community-based care (PDF)
The emerging benefits of electronic medical record use in community-based care (Text)

With files from CBC's Susan Lunn

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Stressed moms give babies a boost, squirrel study suggests

Having a stressed-out mom may give baby squirrels a competitive edge, a new study suggests.

Red squirrels who were stressed out during pregnancy had babies that out-competed their peers by growing significantly faster without any extra food, reported the study, published online in Science Express.

"What that suggests is that they're first able to predict what sort of environment their offspring will encounter… and they're preparing them for what their offspring are going to face," said Ben Dantzer, lead author of the study he worked on while he was a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University under the supervision of Guelph University biologist Andrew McAdam.

'The hardest part of the study was spending hundreds of hours grinding up fecal samples.'—Ben Dantzer, researcher

Further investigation uncovered a link between faster growth among the baby squirrels and higher levels of stress hormones in their mothers during the pregnancies.

That link may explain how environmental conditions cue the animals to respond and adapt.

Canadian researchers, including Stan Boutin at the University of Alberta, Murray Humphreys at McGill University in Montreal and McAdam at the University of Guelph, had been studying red squirrels near Kluane Lake, Yukon, for 22 years to find out how they are affected by changes in resources such as food over time.

They had noticed that in the years when food such as white spruce seeds were more widely available, there was a much higher population density of squirrels — crowded conditions that the territorial squirrels find stressful. Among the babies born in those years, only the fastest growing ones survived.

That left researchers wondering whether it was the higher population density that prompted the baby squirrels to grow faster. The tricky part was being able to show that any changes in growth rates weren't caused by greater availability of food.

Squirrels tricked with recordings

To tackle that problem, Dantzer played recordings of calls that squirrels use to defend their territories, tricking the squirrels into thinking their forest was more crowded than it actually was. For these squirrels, the growth rates of their offspring were compared to the growth rates of those whose mothers didn't hear the extra audio recordings.

Researcher Ben Dantzer, shown here removing a baby squirrel from its nest, tricked squirrels into thinking they were living in crowded conditions by playing recordings of squirrels defending their territory. (Ben Dantzer)To confirm whether the recordings stressed the squirrels out, Dantzer, with the help of University of Toronto researcher Rudy Boonstra, collected squirrel feces and analyzed them for the stress hormone cortisol.

"I would say the hardest part of the study was spending hundreds of hours grinding up fecal samples," recalled Dantzer, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge.

As expected, squirrels who thought they were living in crowded conditions had higher levels of cortisol in their feces.

The researchers also fed peanut butter laced with cortisol to some pregnant squirrels to boost their levels of the hormone, and found that their babies grew 41 per cent faster than the babies of squirrels that were fed plain peanut butter.

That bolstered the evidence that it was the increased cortisol levels that had caused the offspring of the stressed mother squirrels to grow faster.

Dantzer said the results came as something of a surprise because researchers had previously thought baby animals always grow as fast as they can according to the amount of food available. The data suggest that baby animals usually aren't growing as fast as they possibly can, but only do that when they really have to.

He added that researchers aren't sure why that is the case, but the results suggest that the faster growth rate may have a cost to either the mother or the babies. For example, there is some evidence that reproducing more often can cause some physiological stress to mother squirrels, and that offspring born in years when the squirrel density is high don't live as long.

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Amateur online sleuthing: Does it do more harm than good?

After the FBI circulated photos of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings on Thursday afternoon, a thread on the social media site Reddit suggested that one of the wanted men could be a missing student from Brown University in Rhode Island.

Online speculation that followed sent Sunil Tripathi's name trending worldwide on Twitter. News crews descended on his family home in surburban Philadelphia. Hours later, however, NBC News was reporting that "Tripathi was not involved with the bombings at all."

In fact, the two suspects in the FBI photos are believed to be brothers originally from a Russian region near Chechnya. One was arrested Friday night after a massive police manhunt, while the other was killed earlier after gunfire was exchanged with police.

But the brothers didn't seem to figure prominently in any of the widespread amateur sleuthing online that emerged after the bombings. Suspects whose images were front and centre in the public's online speculation ranged from a suspicious man in a blue robe seen in the area around the time of the bombings, to another person who ran away from the scene very quickly after the first explosion on Monday.

The haste with which such images and speculation flooded social media sites such as Reddit and 4chan after the bombings is hardly surprising. In the face of such deadly horror at such an iconic public event, everyone wanted a perpetrator behind bars instantly.

Plus, maybe one of those photos would be the crucial clue that could crack the case wide open.

But the online sleuthing fuelled by the ubiquity of cellphones and their ability to capture every face and activity in their vicinity also highlights a question about the role such activities can play in solving crime. In short, do they do more harm than good?

Photos such as this one of people at the Boston Marathon Monday have been viewed more than 2.9 million times on online site 4chan since the page displaying it was created three days ago. The photo has been blurred to protect the man's identity. (4chan ThinkTank - Imgur)

"There are vigilante-type concerns here, obviously," says Peter Rosenthal, a lawyer and adjunct professor of law at the University of Toronto.

"It's one thing if people gather photographs or videos and turn them in to the proper authorities for analysis. That's obviously a positive thing to do, it seems to me.

"But on the other hand, to be all over the internet identifying people as suspects could be very dangerous for those persons who get identified."

Rosenthal recognizes the trickiness of the situation, with everyone wanting an arrest in the Boston bombings. But he also sees a significant need for caution in such instances.

"That's the kind of situation that leads to wrongful convictions even in court," not to mention a wrongful identification that "can end up with somebody getting beaten or killed. It could be dangerous."

Leave it to the professionals

Rosenthal suggests leaving any examination of potential evidence to the professionals. But that is by no means the only view on this contentious subject.

Sidneyeve Matrix, a media professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., recognizes the inherent danger in the possible identification of people who aren't suspects. But she argues that the kind of crowsourced investigative work occurring around the Boston bombings, does "great good."

Massive online participation can solve problems quickly, she says.

"Having a thousand sets of eyeballs or a million sets of eyeballs … is handy because the wisdom of the masses can come together to solve problems a lot quicker sometimes. It's a speed issue, really."

Misinformation and false leads are risks in every avenue of investigation, she says.

"I think we can probably identify misinformation and then take it off the table a lot quicker when we have lot more people involved, including professionals and amateurs, working together."

A middle ground

In this case, the actions of Reddit and other online sites have drawn considerable media discussion and criticism.

"Our crowd-mobbed vigilante future," was the headline on a piece in Salon. The Atlantic waded in with "Hey Reddit, Enough Boston Bombing Vigilantism."

For its part, Reddit has added some words of explanation to its FindBostonBombers thread, saying that it does not condone vigilante justice.

"FindBostonBombers seeks a middle ground," Reddit editors say in notes down the side of a web page displaying a discussion. "A middle ground populated with debate tempered with cautious restraint. We ask that all viewers and subscribers pursue our goal dispassionately and impartially as possible.

"We do not support any form of vigilante justice. We are not law enforcement. If you have major information about the identities of any of the bombers, please send a tip to the FBI or [Boston Police Department]."

The RCMP declined to be interviewed about this topic, but said in an email that "for reasons such as the safety of the victims, interest in public safety and protecting the integrity of police investigations, the RCMP does not advocate vigilantism."

In Tripathi's case, his mis-identification by members of the public as a possible suspect led to news vans descending on his family's home in suburban Philidelphia, according to a report on philly.com.

No one answered the door, the report said, but "a statement posted on a 'Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi Facebook,' which at one point was taken down and then posted again, said: 'A tremendous and painful amount of attention has been cast on our beloved Sunil Tripathi in the past twelve hours.'

"We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil."

Don't blame social media

Of course, any vigilante action would ultimately depend on someone deciding to take that step, but University of British Columbia journalism professor Alfred Hermida suggests that social media shouldn't take the blame for vigilantism.

"The truth isn't in the individual fragment. It's in the overall discussion of all these conversations."

Hermida says that too often it's the mainstream media that takes online comments and amplifies them, distorting their importance. What appears online is simply raw, unfiltered information.

"This is the process of journalism, the process of investigation, happening before our eyes."

And that process has been evolving as technology — and social media — have been changing.

Toronto Police spokesman Mark Pugash says that, over the years, technology has opened a number of investigative avenues.

"One is the ability to send information to more people more quickly than ever before, but it's also the ability to view what's in open-source locations. Developments with [closed-circuit] CCTV cameras have made a fundamental difference to police investigations."

Challenges with any evidence

Pugash says the difficulty that can arise around online information turning out to be incorrect is the same as could develop in any investigation.

"You have to determine whether what you're seeing is accurate or not, if it represents what it claims to represent or not, if it's been altered or if it hasn't. But those are challenges you have with any evidence."

Still, someone has to sort through all the evidence if any investigation is to progress.

"The important factor here is that it's going to take old-fashioned police work, it's going to take humans, it's going to take human journalists that can go through all of this information that's being created," says Matrix.

She considers what has evolved online around the Boston bombings to be "a perfect example of using social media for social good."

"It's a textbook of how we're getting better at this. We're pulling together and we're responding more quickly, more professionally. We have more responders."

She also thinks that we've only seen the beginning of the role social media will play in police investigations. "It's early days, and it's not going anywhere."

With files from the CBC's Chris Brown

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