Calgary floods spotlight cities' costly failure to plan for climate change

Many Canadian cities and towns are ill-prepared for the rising frequency of catastrophic weather events like the southern Alberta floods, and it's a problem that taxpayers will ultimately end up paying for, climate change experts say.

"There are other disasters waiting to happen in other parts of Canada, but Calgary is a good poster child for inaction on warnings they received not too long ago," said James P. Bruce, former Environment Canada assistant deputy minister.

Many have heaped praise on southern Alberta's emergency response after extremely heavy rain pummelled communities, with several months' worth of rain falling in the span of hours for some areas.

"From a disaster response point of view, the Calgary mayor did a fantastic job in running the whole show," said Kaz Higuchi, a York University professor in environmental studies and former Environment Canada scientist.

But a community's ability to react during a disaster is one thing. Minimizing the impact of a flood is another. Now, the province faces a potentially decade-long cleanup effort that could cost $5 billion by BMO Nesbitt Burns estimates.

Disaster risk management experts say the Alberta situation should serve as a wake-up call to municipalities across the country of the need to spend money and time mitigating the risks before disaster strikes, especially as climate change is predicted to bring bigger and more frequent severe weather events.

"We go from disaster to disaster … being sure that we protect a life so people are protected and then finding the best way how we pay for that," said Slobodan Simonovic, author of Floods in a Changing Climate: Risk Management. "But what we are doing is we are simply reacting to that, paying for that. We are not investing in the reduction or minimization of the future."

'Tremendous increase'

On average, Canada gets 20 more days of rain now than it did in the 1950s. While flooding – the costliest natural disaster for Canadians – was once mainly a spring event due to the combination of frozen ground and rainfall, it's now increasingly happening in the summer.

'The climate change community is predicting that we will be seeing a tremendous increase in these heavy and extreme rainfall events.'—Slobodan Simonovic, risk management report author

"The climate change community is predicting that we will be seeing a tremendous increase in these heavy and extreme rainfall events," said Simonovic. "They're going to be much more frequent."

Since the 1950s, the cost of natural disasters has also risen 14-fold, according to the Centre for Research in the Epidemiology of Disasters.

Before 1990, only three Canadian disasters exceeded $500 million in damages. In the past decade alone, nine surpassed that amount.

Simonovic notes that it's not only in the federal government's interest to help communities minimize the risks of disasters because of the amount of money it forks over for relief, but also because there are economic benefits to prevention.

Studies around the world show that the economic benefits of disaster mitigation can range from $3 to $10 dollars for each dollar spent on prevention.

Feds active in past

Bruce says decades ago the Canadian government took a more active role in trying to reduce the risks to life and property from floods, ensuring municipalities weren't building on vulnerable flood plains.

The Flood Damage Reduction Program, which ran from 1975 until 1990, saw the federal and provincial governments share costs of mapping all the floodplains and creating standard flood risk evaluations.

The federally initiated program also got provinces and territories, with the exception of the Yukon, to agree to inhibit development in the floodplain areas. Alberta didn't join until 1989, a year before the program began to disintegrate.

"I think they were worried about what that would mean, designating all of downtown as floodplain," said Bruce.

But the federal government hasn't sought a similar approach to helping communities prepare for the increased risk of disasters expected from climate change.

Bruce helped write a 2010 guide for municipalities that helps them figure out specifically how climate change could affect them and then design a way to minimize the risks of future damages. The voluntary guide saw uptake in several provinces across the country and aims to help municipalities wade through an area where there's dire need for long-term planning but currently little financial impetus.

"Many municipalities have risk management framework, applied to investments and structural problems. None of them had a risk management frameworks that they applied to climate change," said Bruce.

U.S. helping municipalities

In the United States, the federal government has clearly signaled that it will help the local governments mitigate the risks that come with climate change.

On Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama outlined a sweeping climate change plan. Part of the plan includes new standards for roads to ensure they are built above flood levels. It also states that local governments will get assistance to help them plan for extreme weather.

'We all agree that there is a new reality now, which is climate change. Unfortunately, those that have to pay the bills are taxpayers or property owners.'—Claude Dauphin, Canadian Federation of Municipalities president

A new Climate Data Initiative will also provide climate preparedness tools and information for state and local governments, plus the private sector.

The news came after a study by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that predicted the risk of flooding in the U.S. would increase by 45 per cent by 2100, largely due to climate change. Ultimately, it's in the government's interest to reduce risk since it funds a flood insurance program that's already draining its budget with payouts.

Canada is currently the only G8 country where people cannot buy insurance for overland flooding. Private insurers cover sewage backup, but won't offer flood protection because the small population base of Canada means it's difficult for the companies to cover the cost of their risk. As a result, provincial and federal governments foot the bill for large-scale floods, meaning all taxpayers are on the hook.

"We all agree that there is a new reality now, which is climate change," said Canadian Federation of Municipalities president Claude Dauphin. "Unfortunately, those that have to pay the bills are taxpayers or property owners."

A 2010 report by the insurance industry's Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction recommended that Canada adopt the United Kingdom model — where the private sector offers flood insurance on the condition that the federal government take steps to mitigate disaster.

As an example, insurers offer coverage to residents in flood plains if the government builds a dyke to try to prevent flooding.

Simonovic, who is director of engineering for the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, says the federal government never responded to the report. "We didn't succeed at all," he lamented.

As climate change brings increased frequency of flooding events, the likelihood that Canada's insurance companies would want to partake in a joint federal government initiative looks dismal.

"With more frequent floods and with more higher damage, I think we're getting further and further from the involvement of the private sector," said Simonovic.

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Canada's tiny space telecope marks 10th anniversary

One of this country's most notable achievements will be spending Canada Day weekend marking its own milestone anniversary in a unique place, floating up in space.

After 10 years in the ether, several times farther from Earth than the International Space Station, it remains the world's smallest space telescope.

MOST was also Canada's first-ever space telescope when it was launched into space on June 30, 2003.

Dr. Jaymie Matthews, principal investigator for the MOST mission, gestures during testing at the University of Toronto Institute of Aerospace Studies (UTIAS). (Canadian Space Agency/Canadian Press)

Project head Jaymie Matthews just can't stop singing its praises. Why? Because the suitcase-sized satellite, which cost the federal space program $10 million, has been helping to lay a roadmap for where to search for life outside our planet.

It has helped make Canada a leader in the field of micro satellites.

But Matthews is particularly enthused about all the other possibilities that might be opened up by the 60-kilogram MOST.

The colourful University of British Columbia astrophysicist firmly believes there is life outside our solar system.

"Certainly simple forms of life like microbial life is probably very common — and I hope complex life," Matthews said in a recent interview. "If it's out there, we're finding the places where it's most likely to live."

MOST stands for "microvariability and oscillations of stars," the type of data it has been collecting over the past decade.

The space telescope, which is orbiting 820 kilometres above the Earth, was only supposed to have an 18-month mission to observe 10 stars.

But it's looked at more than 5,000 stars over 10 years.

Matthews said MOST has been doing science it was never intended to do and looking at parts of the sky he never thought would be accessible.

The Canadian Space Agency mission has determined the characteristics of two exoplanets that are circling two bright stars.

Exoplanets are planets that orbit a star outside our solar system.

"One of them (55 Cancri e) is this super-exotic, super-Earth that goes around its star in 17 hours and 41 minutes," Matthews said.

Study of planet possibly with diamond core

"Science is now outpacing science fiction."

A super-Earth is a planet that has a mass larger than our own planet, but smaller in size than a planet like Uranus which is 14 times larger than Earth.

"Our determination of the planet's properties led theorists to claim this planet has a carbon-rich interior and the core could be essentially diamond."

"The other (HD 97658 b) is a planet that may have a rocky, maybe solid metallic, core and liquid mantle atmosphere," he said.

Just recently, three planets that could potentially support alien life were discovered by researchers around a star (Gliese 667C) that's orbited by at least six planets.

The UBC scientist even boldly predicted that one of the hundreds of Grade Four students he's met may eventually be making a big announcement.

Evidence of life in 20 years?

"On a time scale of 10, maybe 20 years, there will be somebody who will be announcing the first evidence of life," he said.

Matthews also boasted that MOST could even outlast two bigger and more expensive space telescopes.

NASA's $600 million Kepler telescope, which also hunts planets, recently lost two of its four reaction wheels which act as gyroscopes. The 1,000-kilogram satellite was sent into orbit around the sun in 2009 and scientists are trying to save it.

The main computers have also failed on the COROT space telescope, a French space agency mission launched in 2006, which Matthews said cost $250 million.

"We went up three-and-a-half years before the COROT mission and more than six-and-a-half years before the NASA Kepler mission," he noted.

"Suddenly Canada had a front-row seat doing the kind of science which normally had an admission price of millions of dollars and we did it first and set the way."

David Cooper, is the CEO of Microsat Systems Canada Inc. That company used to be the space division of Dynacon Inc., which was the lead contractor for MOST.

Telescope only expected to last 18 months

He said that when the space telescope was being built, his engineers were concerned it would have a short lifespan because of radiation from the sun.

"They were predicting 18 months, maybe because they thought the radiation by that time would kill the electronics as it had killed other satellites," Cooper said.

"But we chose the parts very well and, 10 years later, the proof is in the pudding."

Cooper also said he expected MOST to continue to operate for several more years until it runs out of power that's being supplied by its solar panels.

"There's no reason that the satellite couldn't at least be partially functional, to do what it's doing for another three or four years," he said.

The technology developed for MOST has created a niche for Canada, which has become a developer of small, inexpensive satellites.

Clone satellite hunts asteroids

In February, an Indian rocket helped launch NEOSSat, a $12 million Canadian Space Agency asteroid-hunting satellite, which is a clone of MOST.

It was joined by Sapphire, Canada's first military satellite, which was also launched by the Indian Space Research Organization. Sapphire had a price tag of $65 million.

Two other car-battery-sized satellites, which are part of the BRITE Constellation series of six satellites, were also on board. They will eventually make up the first space astronomy mission, which will use "nanosats" to study the evolution of stars.

All six were designed by the Space Flight Laboratory at UTIAS, the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies.

The BRITE (Bright Target Explorer) nanosatellites, a Canadian-Austrian-Polish collaboration, each weigh about seven kilos.

A nano satellite is described as a small satellite between one and 10 kilograms, while a micro satellite weighs between 10 and 100 kilograms.

Simon Grocott, the head of engineering at the U of T's SFL, said in an interview that the space-flight lab was first organized in order to build MOST.

Now, 10 years later, the Toronto lab is producing small satellites for countries that include Norway, Australia, and Slovenia which has ordered an Earth observation micro satellite.

Grocott said that when it comes to nano satellites, the Space Flight Lab is one of the most successful groups in the world.

"We've got 14 satellite programs in development — that's certainly more than any nanosatellite manufacturer around the world," he added.

"People are coming to us because of our experience and our capabilities in our area."

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Big Brother's power is building, warns George Orwell biographer

Earlier this month, the most talked about novelist in the English language wasn't Dan Brown, Stephen King or George R. R. Martin and his Game of Thrones series. It was George Orwell, whose most famous novel, 1984, saw its sales spike by a reported 7,000 per cent.

Of course, this happened after Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain on a massive surveillance program in which the U.S. National Security Agency could scour the data on the cellphone and internet activity of U.S. citizens. Terms like Orwellian and Big Brother became ubiquitous in the media and everyday conversation.

That came as no surprise to Michael Shelden, a professor of English at Indiana State University and the author of Orwell: The Authorized Biography.

"People realize that this problem of Big Brother watching you is not going to go away," professor Shelden told The Sunday Edition's guest host, Kevin Sylvester.

Michael Shelden, author of Orwell: The Authorized Biography, says George Orwell was prophetic on the subject of government surveillance capabilities. "Orwell could see how the power would accumulate and would be imposed whether you wanted it imposed or not." (Courtesy Michael Shelden)

"It's an incredible phrase. I think we've taken it for granted for many years, but it probably is one of the most prophetic things said in a novel in the past hundred years."

Orwell, professor Shelden pointed out, is still the reference point whenever stories emerge about surveillance of the public and increasing government controls over civilian populations.

"Orwell is the one who saw this. He's the one who got it right. Orwell could see how the power would accumulate and would be imposed whether you wanted it imposed or not. There was a certain acquiescence, of course, but he once said, 'The object of power is power.'"

But after the initial burst of outrage at the growing appetite of governments for surveillance and data on their citizens in the name of fighting terrorism, there's also a sense that a lot of people are not all that upset. Many people still happily make their private lives very public on social media and pay little heed to the omnipresent security cameras in the public sphere.

And a survey by the Pew Research Centre found that a majority of Americans think that tracking phone records to investigate potential terror threats is more important than the right to privacy.

'"We have a situation now where a lot of people take this kind of intrusion into our private lives increasingly for granted. I don't think we should.'—Michael Shelden

"We have a situation now where a lot of people take this kind of intrusion into our private lives increasingly for granted. I don't think we should," said professor Shelden.

"Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning. He felt that if someone didn't sound the alarm loudly enough, eventually a lot of the freedoms he cherished would be lost, and people would wake up one day and wonder where they'd gone."

You can hear Kevin Sylvester's full interview with Michael Shelden about the vision and continued relevance of George Orwell on The Sunday Edition's site, or through the link at the top-left of this story.

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Calgary floods spotlight cities' costly failure to plan for climate change

Many Canadian cities and towns are ill-prepared for the rising frequency of catastrophic weather events like the southern Alberta floods, and it's a problem that taxpayers will ultimately end up paying for, climate change experts say.

"There are other disasters waiting to happen in other parts of Canada, but Calgary is a good poster child for inaction on warnings they received not too long ago," said James P. Bruce, former Environment Canada assistant deputy minister.

Many have heaped praise on southern Alberta's emergency response after extremely heavy rain pummelled communities, with several months' worth of rain falling in the span of hours for some areas.

"From a disaster response point of view, the Calgary mayor did a fantastic job in running the whole show," said Kaz Higuchi, a York University professor in environmental studies and former Environment Canada scientist.

But a community's ability to react during a disaster is one thing. Minimizing the impact of a flood is another. Now, the province faces a potentially decade-long cleanup effort that could cost $5 billion by BMO Nesbitt Burns estimates.

Disaster risk management experts say the Alberta situation should serve as a wake-up call to municipalities across the country of the need to spend money and time mitigating the risks before disaster strikes, especially as climate change is predicted to bring bigger and more frequent severe weather events.

"We go from disaster to disaster … being sure that we protect a life so people are protected and then finding the best way how we pay for that," said Slobodan Simonovic, author of Floods in a Changing Climate: Risk Management. "But what we are doing is we are simply reacting to that, paying for that. We are not investing in the reduction or minimization of the future."

'Tremendous increase'

On average, Canada gets 20 more days of rain now than it did in the 1950s. While flooding – the costliest natural disaster for Canadians – was once mainly a spring event due to the combination of frozen ground and rainfall, it's now increasingly happening in the summer.

'The climate change community is predicting that we will be seeing a tremendous increase in these heavy and extreme rainfall events.'—Slobodan Simonovic, risk management report author

"The climate change community is predicting that we will be seeing a tremendous increase in these heavy and extreme rainfall events," said Simonovic. "They're going to be much more frequent."

Since the 1950s, the cost of natural disasters has also risen 14-fold, according to the Centre for Research in the Epidemiology of Disasters.

Before 1990, only three Canadian disasters exceeded $500 million in damages. In the past decade alone, nine surpassed that amount.

Simonovic notes that it's not only in the federal government's interest to help communities minimize the risks of disasters because of the amount of money it forks over for relief, but also because there are economic benefits to prevention.

Studies around the world show that the economic benefits of disaster mitigation can range from $3 to $10 dollars for each dollar spent on prevention.

Feds active in past

Bruce says decades ago the Canadian government took a more active role in trying to reduce the risks to life and property from floods, ensuring municipalities weren't building on vulnerable flood plains.

The Flood Damage Reduction Program, which ran from 1975 until 1990, saw the federal and provincial governments share costs of mapping all the floodplains and creating standard flood risk evaluations.

The federally initiated program also got provinces and territories, with the exception of the Yukon, to agree to inhibit development in the floodplain areas. Alberta didn't join until 1989, a year before the program began to disintegrate.

"I think they were worried about what that would mean, designating all of downtown as floodplain," said Bruce.

But the federal government hasn't sought a similar approach to helping communities prepare for the increased risk of disasters expected from climate change.

Bruce helped write a 2010 guide for municipalities that helps them figure out specifically how climate change could affect them and then design a way to minimize the risks of future damages. The voluntary guide saw uptake in several provinces across the country and aims to help municipalities wade through an area where there's dire need for long-term planning but currently little financial impetus.

"Many municipalities have risk management framework, applied to investments and structural problems. None of them had a risk management frameworks that they applied to climate change," said Bruce.

U.S. helping municipalities

In the United States, the federal government has clearly signaled that it will help the local governments mitigate the risks that come with climate change.

On Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama outlined a sweeping climate change plan. Part of the plan includes new standards for roads to ensure they are built above flood levels. It also states that local governments will get assistance to help them plan for extreme weather.

'We all agree that there is a new reality now, which is climate change. Unfortunately, those that have to pay the bills are taxpayers or property owners.'—Claude Dauphin, Canadian Federation of Municipalities president

A new Climate Data Initiative will also provide climate preparedness tools and information for state and local governments, plus the private sector.

The news came after a study by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that predicted the risk of flooding in the U.S. would increase by 45 per cent by 2100, largely due to climate change. Ultimately, it's in the government's interest to reduce risk since it funds a flood insurance program that's already draining its budget with payouts.

Canada is currently the only G8 country where people cannot buy insurance for overland flooding. Private insurers cover sewage backup, but won't offer flood protection because the small population base of Canada means it's difficult for the companies to cover the cost of their risk. As a result, provincial and federal governments foot the bill for large-scale floods, meaning all taxpayers are on the hook.

"We all agree that there is a new reality now, which is climate change," said Canadian Federation of Municipalities president Claude Dauphin. "Unfortunately, those that have to pay the bills are taxpayers or property owners."

A 2010 report by the insurance industry's Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction recommended that Canada adopt the United Kingdom model — where the private sector offers flood insurance on the condition that the federal government take steps to mitigate disaster.

As an example, insurers offer coverage to residents in flood plains if the government builds a dyke to try to prevent flooding.

Simonovic, who is director of engineering for the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, says the federal government never responded to the report. "We didn't succeed at all," he lamented.

As climate change brings increased frequency of flooding events, the likelihood that Canada's insurance companies would want to partake in a joint federal government initiative looks dismal.

"With more frequent floods and with more higher damage, I think we're getting further and further from the involvement of the private sector," said Simonovic.

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Canadian ePassports arrive July 1

Come Canada Day, Canadian travellers will have a more high-tech and high-priced passport.

Starting July 1, Canadians will receive a redesigned ePassport featuring several new security and anti-counterfeiting measures, including an electronic chip that stores the user's personal information.

There's also been an esthetic overhaul, as the new document features images of iconic Canadiana, including the RCMP, Terry Fox and the Vimy Ridge memorial. The watermarked images double as a security measure as well, making it more difficult to forge a passport.

Maybe of more interest to travellers is that the new 36-page passports also come with a heftier price tag.

Canada's new ePassports feature artwork showing iconic moments, places and people, including explorer Samuel de Champlain.

The price for a five-year passport will jump to $120 from $87. But 10-year passports will become available for the first time, with a $160 price tag.

Travellers are not required to replace their current passports. Older passports will remain valid until their stated expiry date, Passport Canada says.

Addressing privacy concerns, the agency says the passport chips can only be read from a 10-centimetre range, making it unlikely that the chip can be read without the user's knowledge

When introducing the new documents in December, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird noted it's been a decade since Canada's last passport redesign, and Passport Canada says its fees haven't increased since 2001, meaning the agency actually loses money when issuing new ones.

Canada is the last G7 country to adopt chip-enhanced passports; over 100 countries, including the U.S., France, Germany and the U.K. already employ ePassports.

Canadian passports are a valuable commodity, since they generally allow visa-free access to many countries.

That advantage also makes them a popular target for forgers and thieves. Foreign intelligence services like Israel's Mossad have used forged Canadian travel documents to carry out operations abroad and in March, a CSIS official warned MPs that militant group Hezbollah was actively seeking operatives with Canadian passports.

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Space shuttle Atlantis to go on display in Florida

Tourists will soon be able to view the retired U.S. space shuttle Atlantis, which is part of a new $100-million exhibit at NASA's centre in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

CBC's David Common talks to astronauts with ties to the shuttle program and gets a preview of the exhibit, which includes a replica of the Canadarm.

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BlackBerry shares open 25% lower on TSX

BlackBerry, based in Waterloo, Ont., reported a first-quarter net loss of $84 million US on Friday, compared to a $518-million net loss a year ago, but short of expectations. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)

Shares in BlackBerry were down by as much as 25 per cent when stock markets opened Friday, after the company posted a disappointing $84 million net loss in the first quarter.

BlackBerry shares, which closed at $14.48 US on the Nasdaq stock market in New York Thursday, were trading at below $11 in what's known as premarket trading on the Nasdaq this morning.

Those losses held when the broader markets opened at 9:30 a.m. ET.

More than 40 per cent of BlackBerry shares are held by so-called short sellers, who bet against the company. That's a heavy weight on the stock, and heavily shorted stocks tend to move up and down in much more extreme ways.

Short interest in BlackBerry has almost doubled over the past 12 months.

The quarterly loss came in at 16 cents per share. While the $84 million figure is narrower than the $518 million the company lost in the same period a year ago, it wasn't what analysts had forecast.

The results were the first since BlackBerry unveiled its newest phones, the Z10 and the Q10, which BlackBerry is banking on turning the company around.

Cost-saving plans will continue

The company said it shipped 6.8 million smartphones in the first quarter, an increase of 13 per cent from the previous quarter when sales of the new phones were just getting started.

Chief executive Thorsten Heins said about 40 per cent of those phone shipments were of new models, well short of the ratio that analysts were expecting.

Sales rose to $3.07 billion from $2.81 billion a year ago.

"During the first quarter, we continued to focus our efforts on the global rollout of the BlackBerry 10 platform," chief executive Thorsten Heins said in a release.

Heins hinted that the company's numbers aren't showing signs of improving in the near term. He said he expects BlackBerry will book an operating loss in its second-quarter earnings results, due to heightened competition in the smartphone industry.

"The company will also continue to implement the cost savings and process-improving initiatives it started last year," he added.

With files from The Canadian Press

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Is using Google Maps while driving a crime?

Nova Scotia brought in its cellphone ban in April 2008. (CBC)

The case of a Nova Scotia woman first acquitted and then found guilty of using her phone as a navigation tool sheds light on the problem of prosecuting offences involving smartphones.

Texting and driving, or talking while driving on a cellphone without a Bluetooth headset is illegal in Nova Scotia. However, using a global positioning system for navigation is not. Nowadays smartphones act not only as telephone and texting devices, but also as navigation tools that drivers can use just as they would a standalone GPS.

The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia upheld an appeal by the Crown involving Pamela Ferguson, who was using her phone's map software while driving.

According to court documents, in May of 2012 police pulled Ferguson over just off of Highway 103 near Exit 14 in Lunenburg County.

Ferguson told the officer she wasn't texting or talking, that she was simply checking a Google map on her phone.

Used phone while driving

The matter went to court, and the judge in the original trial acquitted Ferguson. The judge ruled the Motor Vehicle Act only applies to a cellphone's "traditional function."

But the Crown appealed that decision.

On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court ruled that Ferguson was guilty of using "a hand-held cellular telephone" while driving.

"The trial judge erred in adopting the definition of a hand-held cellular telephone," the court documents say. "Ms. Ferguson was using her hand-held cellular device while operating a vehicle on a highway."

Justice Richard Coughlan said he will receive submissions from counsel before sentencing.

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Calgary floods spotlight cities' costly failure to plan for climate change

Many Canadian cities and towns are ill-prepared for the rising frequency of catastrophic weather events like the southern Alberta floods, and it's a problem that taxpayers will ultimately end up paying for, climate change experts say.

"There are other disasters waiting to happen in other parts of Canada, but Calgary is a good poster child for inaction on warnings they received not too long ago," said James P. Bruce, former Environment Canada assistant deputy minister.

Many have heaped praise on southern Alberta's emergency response after extremely heavy rain pummelled communities, with several months' worth of rain falling in the span of hours for some areas.

"From a disaster response point of view, the Calgary mayor did a fantastic job in running the whole show," said Kaz Higuchi, a York University professor in environmental studies and former Environment Canada scientist.

But a community's ability to react during a disaster is one thing. Minimizing the impact of a flood is another. Now, the province faces a potentially decade-long cleanup effort that could cost $5 billion by BMO Nesbitt Burns estimates.

Disaster risk management experts say the Alberta situation should serve as a wake-up call to municipalities across the country of the need to spend money and time mitigating the risks before disaster strikes, especially as climate change is predicted to bring bigger and more frequent severe weather events.

"We go from disaster to disaster … being sure that we protect a life so people are protected and then finding the best way how we pay for that," said Slobodan Simonovic, author of Floods in a Changing Climate: Risk Management. "But what we are doing is we are simply reacting to that, paying for that. We are not investing in the reduction or minimization of the future."

'Tremendous increase'

On average, Canada gets 20 more days of rain now than it did in the 1950s. While flooding – the costliest natural disaster for Canadians – was once mainly a spring event due to the combination of frozen ground and rainfall, it's now increasingly happening in the summer.

'The climate change community is predicting that we will be seeing a tremendous increase in these heavy and extreme rainfall events.'—Slobodan Simonovic, risk management report author

"The climate change community is predicting that we will be seeing a tremendous increase in these heavy and extreme rainfall events," said Simonovic. "They're going to be much more frequent."

Since the 1950s, the cost of natural disasters has also risen 14-fold, according to the Centre for Research in the Epidemiology of Disasters.

Before 1990, only three Canadian disasters exceeded $500 million in damages. In the past decade alone, nine surpassed that amount.

Simonovic notes that it's not only in the federal government's interest to help communities minimize the risks of disasters because of the amount of money it forks over for relief, but also because there are economic benefits to prevention.

Studies around the world show that the economic benefits of disaster mitigation can range from $3 to $10 dollars for each dollar spent on prevention.

Feds active in past

Bruce says decades ago the Canadian government took a more active role in trying to reduce the risks to life and property from floods, ensuring municipalities weren't building on vulnerable flood plains.

The Flood Damage Reduction Program, which ran from 1975 until 1990, saw the federal and provincial governments share costs of mapping all the floodplains and creating standard flood risk evaluations.

The federally initiated program also got provinces and territories, with the exception of the Yukon, to agree to inhibit development in the floodplain areas. Alberta didn't join until 1989, a year before the program began to disintegrate.

"I think they were worried about what that would mean, designating all of downtown as floodplain," said Bruce.

But the federal government hasn't sought a similar approach to helping communities prepare for the increased risk of disasters expected from climate change.

Bruce helped write a 2010 guide for municipalities that helps them figure out specifically how climate change could affect them and then design a way to minimize the risks of future damages. The voluntary guide saw uptake in several provinces across the country and aims to help municipalities wade through an area where there's dire need for long-term planning but currently little financial impetus.

"Many municipalities have risk management framework, applied to investments and structural problems. None of them had a risk management frameworks that they applied to climate change," said Bruce.

U.S. helping municipalities

In the United States, the federal government has clearly signaled that it will help the local governments mitigate the risks that come with climate change.

On Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama outlined a sweeping climate change plan. Part of the plan includes new standards for roads to ensure they are built above flood levels. It also states that local governments will get assistance to help them plan for extreme weather.

'We all agree that there is a new reality now, which is climate change. Unfortunately, those that have to pay the bills are taxpayers or property owners.'—Claude Dauphin, Canadian Federation of Municipalities president

A new Climate Data Initiative will also provide climate preparedness tools and information for state and local governments, plus the private sector.

The news came after a study by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that predicted the risk of flooding in the U.S. would increase by 45 per cent by 2100, largely due to climate change. Ultimately, it's in the government's interest to reduce risk since it funds a flood insurance program that's already draining its budget with payouts.

Canada is currently the only G8 country where people cannot buy insurance for overland flooding. Private insurers cover sewage backup, but won't offer flood protection because the small population base of Canada means it's difficult for the companies to cover the cost of their risk. As a result, provincial and federal governments foot the bill for large-scale floods, meaning all taxpayers are on the hook.

"We all agree that there is a new reality now, which is climate change," said Canadian Federation of Municipalities president Claude Dauphin. "Unfortunately, those that have to pay the bills are taxpayers or property owners."

A 2010 report by the insurance industry's Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction recommended that Canada adopt the United Kingdom model — where the private sector offers flood insurance on the condition that the federal government take steps to mitigate disaster.

As an example, insurers offer coverage to residents in flood plains if the government builds a dyke to try to prevent flooding.

Simonovic, who is director of engineering for the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, says the federal government never responded to the report. "We didn't succeed at all," he lamented.

As climate change brings increased frequency of flooding events, the likelihood that Canada's insurance companies would want to partake in a joint federal government initiative looks dismal.

"With more frequent floods and with more higher damage, I think we're getting further and further from the involvement of the private sector," said Simonovic.

Sarah Watts is one of thousands of Calgarians cleaning up after devastating floods in southern Alberta. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)

22.12 | 0 komentar | Read More

Ancient Yukon horse yields oldest genome ever

A 700,000-year-old horse bone found in the permafrost of a Yukon gold mine has yielded a complete genetic profile, breaking scientific records and revealing many new insights about the evolution of horses.

The analysis of the ancient genome suggests that it is likely possible to piece together the genomes of organisms that lived as far back as a million years ago, said Ludovic Orlando, the lead author of the paper describing the discovery, at a press briefing organized by the journal Nature in which the paper was published Wednesday.

That "obviously opens great perspective as to the level of details we could reconstruct [about] our own origins and actually, the evolutionary history of almost every single species living on the planet," Orlando added.

Previously, the oldest genome ever reconstructed — one belonging to an ancient human relative — was just 70,000 years old.

Found in a gold mine

Duane Froese, an earth sciences professor at the University of Alberta, found the metapodial bone from the horse's leg, equivalent to bones found in the palm of a human hand, about a decade ago in the Thistle Creek gold mine, about 100 kilometres south of Dawson City.

The 700,000-year-old bone from a horse's lower leg was'exceptionally well preserved. (Ludovic Orlando/Natural History Museum of Denmark)

At the time, he and his colleagues were hunting for fossils in the permafrost and trying to understand the age of the sediments that hosted the fossils and preserved ancient plant material.

It's not uncommon to find bones in the region from pony-sized horses from within the last 100,000 years during a period called the Late Pleistocene, Froese said in a phone interview Wednesday.

But this particular metapodial bone was distinctive because it was so much larger.

"This was really domestic horse sized," said Froese, who has just returned from another fossil-hunting trip in the Yukon. "I had a pretty good idea that it was old. But unlike most of the other fossils like that I've found in the past, this one was exceptionally preserved. It had come right out of the permafrost. So we knew it was quite significant."

Based on the surrounding volcanic ashes, the bone was likely 500,000 to 700,000 years old — from a time called the Middle Pleistocene when horses and mammoths roamed the cold, dry grasslands of the Yukon and much of the rest of Canada was covered by ice sheets. The fossil's age was later confirmed using other techniques.

The trouble with old DNA

"We thought this fossil was simply too old to yield DNA," Froese recalled.

The ancient horse's DNA was compared to that of modern domestic horses and donkeys as well as to that of the Przewalski's horse, above, the only living wild horse species. (Claudia Feh/Association pour le cheval de Przewalski)

That's because DNA degrades over time, shredding into smaller and smaller bits that make it increasingly difficult to piece everything back together again.

However, different kinds of proteins remained preserved in the bone, making other scientists optimistic about the possibility of it yielding useable DNA.

In the end, using new technology, researchers were able to do what many would have thought to be impossible.

"All of the tiny bits we were are able to piece back together and reconstruct informatically the entire genome," Orlando said. It wasn't easy — Orlando said only one out of 200 DNA molecules sequenced by his team belonged to the horse. The other 199 belonged to bacteria that colonized the bone after the horse died.

But once the task was complete, and the ancient horse's genome was compared with that of the only living wild horse species, the Przewalski's horse; modern horses; and donkeys, the team learned a lot about horse evolution.

They found that the common ancestor of the species they analyzed arose around four million years ago — twice as early as previously thought. It appears the Przewalski's horse diverged from the modern domestic horse about 50,000 years ago and hasn't mixed with the domestic horse since. Over time, some parts of the genome that showed the biggest changes were the genes that control the ability to smell and the animal's immune system.

Horse populations fluctuated with climate

The DNA analysis also showed that horse populations fluctuated with the climate over the ages.

"Basically, when it's fairly cold, it's good to be a horse. When it's warm, it's pretty bad," said Eske Willerslev, another co-author of the report, at the press briefing.

Froese said that was likely because during warmer times, the boreal forest would have invaded the horses' grassland habitat. The researchers hope to be able to refine the horse genome in the future to get information so they are able to look at any single gene they want, Willerslev said. They also hope to be able to do a similar analysis of other fossil bones.

While permafrost can do an exceptional job at preserving DNA, Orlando said even in more temperate environments, small pieces of DNA can survive as long as 400,000 years.

Meanwhile, Froese is still hunting for fossils in the Canadian Arctic, taking advantage of access to buried permafrost provided by mining operations and trying to collect as much as he can before the permafrost warms and melts.

"There's this incredible natural history in permafrost in the Yukon and … this horse fossil really is a testament to this incredible natural history," he said. "None of this would be possible without permafrost."

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5 Google Reader alternatives

When Google Reader shuts down on July 1, which RSS reader can you use in its place?

Google announced the demise of its popular reader in March. The seven-year-old free service allows people to manage and read RSS feeds, keeping them updated about new content on sites such as blogs and news sites.

While Google doesn't know how many users the service has, its top feed had more than 24 million subscribers in March. Its demise creates a big opportunity for both existing RSS reader services and companies such as AOL and Digg, which launched their new RSS readers on Monday and Wednesday, respectively.

Here are some options for managing your RSS feeds after Google Reader retires.

1. Feedly

cloud.feedly.com

This free service tripled its user base to 12 million between Google's announcement and the end of May, and has been listed by a number of technology sites and media outlets as one of the best Google Reader alternatives.

Feedly is openly courting former Google Reader users with new features such as one-click migration of their account and a Google Reader-like title-only view. (Feedly's normal view is more magazine-like, with lots of images.) It has also launched a large number of apps that allow Feedly to be used on almost any web browser or device, both online and offline, and to connect to the cloud to keep a single account synched across different devices. Some features of Google Reader, such as search within your feeds, aren't yet available, but Feedly is promising them in the future.

2. Newsblur

www.newsblur.com

This is another popular pick among tech blogs and sites, partly because of its ability to update feeds in real time. Newsblur updates faster than Google Reader, but it commands a fee. A $24-per-year subscription to a premium account also allows users to add an unlimited number of feeds. A slower, basic service with a maximum of 64 feeds, as well as some usage restrictions, is available for free.

The Old Reader

theoldreader.com

This web-only free service, which has been running as a beta version since it launched a year ago, was started by some developers in their spare time after Google Reader made changes to its look and eliminated social features in 2011. Their goal was to re-create the old version of Google Reader for themselves and their friends, but they "like the way it turned out, so we are sharing it with everyone." The Old Reader's blog makes it sound as though it may be having trouble coping with the recent influx of ex-Google Reader users. This isn't completely surprising given its available resources — namely donations.

AOL Reader

reader.aol.com

A beta, web version of this brand new reader launched Monday. So far, reviewers seem to be impressed with its speed. Some sites, including AOL-owned TechCrunch, reported that the reader had some glitches at launch, but a day later, AOL said the reader was already at capacity, and was adding prospective users to a waiting list. Besides TechCrunch, AOL owns a number of other websites that produce popular RSS feeds, including The Huffington Post and Engadget. AOL is promising new features for its reader soon, including search and mobile apps.

5. Digg Reader

digg.com/reader

On Wednesday, social news website Digg rolled out the beta, web version of its new reader, which is "aimed first and foremost at Google Reader users looking for a new home." It features easy migration from Google and Google-like keyboard shortcuts, as well as social features similar to those on Digg itself, such as the ability to "digg" (publicly endorse), save and share posts you like. The iOS apps are to be released Thursday. New features, including search and an Android app, are expected in the next few months.

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Space junk armour tested by UNB scientists

New Brunswick scientists are firing special guns to test armour that could eventually protect airplanes, military equipment and even spacecrafts.

The Planetary and Space Science Centre at the University of New Brunswick is using large guns to fire objects at different materials.

The scientists hope the data from these tests will help design more advanced materials to protect people and equipment.

The Fredericton-based ballistics facility has a light gas gun that sets its tests apart from others in the country.

The University of New Brunswick's Planetary and Space Science Centre uses a light gas gun for unique tests, such as simulating collisions with space junk. (CBC)

The light gas gun can shoot projectiles at hypersonic speeds, which is ideal for testing how well armour will stand up against collisions with space junk.

The equipment is vital to simulate the potential strikes that spacecrafts could receive in orbit.

"It's the speeds that we are dealing with are extremely high, So we're typically talking more than seven kilometres per second up to tens of kilometres a second," said John Spray, the director of the space science centre.

Surrounding the Earth in orbit is a minefield of leftover garbage from space launches and micro-meteorites, some as small as a grain of sand.

Even tiny objects can be lethal because of the high speeds they travel at in space. In an effort to protect satellites and spacecraft, the focus is often on lighter materials.

That's where new multi-layer materials armour comes into play, which combines woven mesh and plates.

"We have multiple layers of these such that the tiny projectiles are progressively fragmented and decelerated such that they don't hit the main body of the spacecraft," Spray said.

The next step is to create armour that not only keeps what's inside safe, but starts repairing itself as soon as it's hit.

Aurel Giroux, the facility manager at the laboratory, said the centre also simulates the impact of a bird hitting an airplane. (CBC)

Those are advances that scientists at the Fredericton say will be made thanks to thousands of test fires at their ballistics facility.

Researchers at the UNB centre are also focusing on potential collisions with objects closer to the Earth's surface.

Aurel Giroux, the facility manager at the Fredericton laboratory, said another of the centre's guns fires objects, such as ballistic jelly, that simulates the impact of a bird hitting an airplane.

"It's used to replace four-pound bird shots. Those types of tests are common in aerospace sector for testing airplane parts," Giroux said.

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Ouya console a nice idea, but deeply flawed

If there's one thing to be learned from the recent controversy over Microsoft's Xbox One console, it's that the business of video games is due for a major upending.

At the core of the issue was the price of games. Typically around $70, modern titles are simply too expensive, which is why people revolted at the notion of Microsoft restricting or even eliminating their ability to resell used discs with its upcoming successor to the Xbox 360. Trading in old games generally provides a discount on new games, which makes those high price tags a little more digestible.

The company last week reversed itself and said the Xbox One will indeed honour the second-hand status quo, but many gamers are still mad. They want change.

Into this showdown steps the Ouya, the fledgling game console known for raising millions of dollars from those same disgruntled gamers through crowd-funding on Kickstarter. The San Francisco-based company is promising that very change.

The console is premised on all games being free, with players only paying for full versions — or, in some cases, relying on an honour system — if they like the game after trying it. The device itself is now available to Canadians through Amazon.ca and is modestly priced at only $99, a far cry from the $399 and $499 price tags, respectively, on the upcoming PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles.

The Ouya is also designed to appeal to game makers themselves. Since it is based on open-source Android software, anyone can tinker around and build games for it, which is the opposite of how it works on big consoles. There, developers often need millions of dollars to build a game and have it succeed. Ouya is thus hoping developers take to its device in the same way they've jumped onto mobile phones and tablets.

In light of the Xbox controversy, the Ouya's launch this week couldn't be better timed. But does it deliver?

After spending a weekend with it, the answer is no – or at least, not yet.

Slow response time

On the plus side, set-up is a breeze. The Ouya finds your wi-fi network and easily connects to it, then prompts you to create an account. While games are free, you are required to punch in your credit card in the event that you do ultimately make purchases.

The device itself is amazingly small, about the size of an apple or a can of beans. It makes you wonder why the bigger consoles need to be so big. Then again, the Ouya is significantly less powerful, with only a fraction of the graphics and processing capability.

A scene grab from the Ouya game Beast Boxing Turbo. (Ouya)

The controller is similar to the Xbox 360's, featuring essentially the same button configuration. It's a bit more boxy, though, and it definitely feels more plasticky, like a cheap knock-off of its big-console cousin. It also doesn't have a rechargeable lithium battery, instead requiring one AA battery in each handle.

A console generally lives and dies by the quality of its controller. The Ouya's handheld feels nowhere near as nice as those of its rivals, but those tradeoffs are to be expected with such an inexpensive proposition, so it's not necessarily a deal breaker.

The actual deal breaker is its poor responsiveness. In just about every game I tried, there was a noticeable lag between pressing the button and seeing the corresponding action on screen.

I tried Vector, for example, a promising-looking game that features a silhouetted man running from a pursuer. The idea is to jump over and duck under obstacles using timed parkour moves. Yet half the time, he'd miss his cues and get captured, forcing me to start over. It might have been a game I'd pay for, but I'll never know, because it's unplayable at this point.

The Ouya is marred by other, similar flaws. The first-person exploration game Polarity also looked intriguing, but the notes attached to it explained that it needed to be deleted and re-downloaded to work properly. I tried that, only to get stuck in an infinite download loop, with no apparent way of stopping it.

Not only could I not play the game, I became worried that the loop would eat up my monthly internet download limits. I suspect a factory reset of the Ouya might solve the problem, but that shouldn't be the only fix. A "stop download" button is sorely needed.

162 games, but no 'system seller'

The console boasts 162 games at launch, but it's definitely lacking any system sellers. Most of the games are repurposed from other platforms, such as Android and iOS. One of the more entertaining titles, the third-person dungeon-crawler The Bard's Tale, was originally released for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 way back in 2004. That's positively ancient.

That's perhaps the console's other big problem – there really isn't much you can do with it that you can't accomplish through other means. Many tablets can be connected to a television and then further linked to a decent handheld controller, for example. Using the tablet as a sort of intermediate console in this way actually has several advantages over the Ouya — a wider assortment of games, for one.

Many of the games are simple affairs without the sort of uber-realistic graphics found on the major consoles. That's to be expected, and really, good games don't necessarily need super production values.

But in the end, the Ouya has something of a chicken-or-egg issue. If it sells enough units, it might convince developers to spend their time creating games for it. But without those games, it probably won't sell many units.

There's no doubt the console touches on several great ideas. The games market is in need of some disruption, and it's only a matter of time before someone – perhaps even Ouya in future iterations – figures out how to do it properly in the living room.

As is, the device still has several big problems to overcome before it can start to shake things.

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Parks Canada hoping to resume Franklin search in high Arctic this summer

Before chemist Ron Martin took a close look at the bones of the British sailors who died during the 19th-century Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, he figured their demise was the result of the widely circulated theory that they died of lead poisoning from the soldering on the tins that held their food.

Then, with help from other scientists using high-tech laser and X-ray imagery to look deep inside bits of tibia and vertebra from the few corpses that have been found, the professor from Western University in London, Ont., discovered the new scientific data couldn't support that older hypothesis.

Fragments of vertebra from a Franklin expedition sailor thought to have died in 1846 were found on Beechy Island. (Keith Jones/Brookhaven national Laboratory)

Sure, the bones of the men who set out with Sir John Franklin in 1845 were riddled with lead, but Martin's research suggested it had been in the bones so long it couldn't all have come from the canned food.

"To me it just becomes more and more puzzling," says Martin.

"They had a lot of lead in them, but they had a lot of lead in them when they arrived. It's a mystery within a mystery within a mystery. What I want to know is where all the lead came from in the first place."

In the overall Franklin mystery, the role of lead is just one of many intruiguing questions surrounding the sad fate of the 129 sailors, including Franklin, who set out from England on the ships Erebus and Terror.

Parks Canada marine archeologists hope to return to the frigid waters off the coast of Nunavut this summer to resume their three-year search for the ships that were, according to Inuit testimony, beset by ice in 1846 and deserted by their crews off King William Island two years later.

Skulls of members of the Franklin expedition were discovered and buried by William Skinner and Paddy Gibson in 1945 on King William Island. (National Archives of Canada/Canadian Press)

But they are still waiting on a final OK for this summer's efforts, and the search so far has proved elusive, while the questions only keep growing.

If lead in the tins wasn't the prime factor in the sailors' demise, what was? Where might more human remains be found? And, more than 170 years after the ships disappeared, what realistically might remain of the wooden vessels, even though they had been reinforced to try to counter the harsh Arctic conditions?

Those questions, however, rise from what is known about the mission, and there is so much that isn't.

"When Franklin received his orders from the Admiralty," says Ryan Harris, the Parks Canada marine archeologist leading the efforts to find the ships, "those directed him to proceed from Perry Channel, Cape Walker, southwest towards the mainland, to other stretches of the shoreline that had been surveyed previously by Franklin himself.

"That really sealed the fate of those 129 individuals. Because essentially they were directed into the grip of one of the most difficult ice choke points in the Canadian Arctic archipelago. They couldn't have found themselves in a more difficult spot."

Still, what exactly happened after they hit that tough spot is anything but clear. As part of their ongoing efforts, Harris and others at Parks Canada will review the latest research by Martin and his colleagues.

"If lead contaimination was an issue, and it certainly has been subject to much debate, maybe it made their final pangs that much more unbearable, I don't know," Harris says. "But the fact of the matter is that scurvy was probably the more pernicious influence."

That disease tended to afflict mid-19th-century maritime missions at about the three-year point, when supplies of lemon and lime juice would start to lose their potency, especially after going through several freeze-thaw cycles.

"Malnutrition and just incredible fatigue is really what would eventually break these men down," says Harris.

Still, he says, there are "many aspects that we don't know." The main one being where the ships ended up.

"There have been always theories that at least one of the ships was re-manned by a small contingent of the crew after the initial retreat and that, in fact, one ship may have been navigated further south into the Queen Maud Gulf where we've been looking for it.

"Potentially locating one of these wrecks would shed light on some of these questions. What were their final days like? What were the thought processes, what were the difficult decisions that they were making?"

In Ron Martin's case, he started asking his questions about lead after a scientific friend — Keith Jones of Brookhaven National Laboratory on New York's Long Island — told him he had some Franklin bone samples. Jones had examined the fragments in the lab's synchrotron and wanted Martin to take a look at the results.

Jones had received the fragments more than 20 years ago from Owen Beattie, the University of Alberta anthropologist whose 1980s research had concluded that, while the Franklin sailors had most likely died of tuberculosis and pneumonia, lead poisoning from the badly soldered tins was a contributing factor.

Jones says the bones had been sitting around the Brookhaven lab for quite a while when "we just decided in thinking about the Franklin expedition that we could go back and do a better job with current instrumentation."

Lead in bone is "very complex," says Jones, and he doesn't think it could be the "sole source" of the problem faced by Franklin's men.

"It may have come in, but I just think there are other factors that are probably more important."

Jones sent bone fragments and his results to Martin, who eventually wrote a paper incorporating work by other scientists from Western and the University of Windsor.

"When I looked at the images [Jones] presented, the one thing that struck me was that there was lead present everywhere in the bone," says Martin.

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, shown in an illustration from the Illustrated London News published on May 24, 1845, set sail from Greenhithe, England. (Illustrated London News/Getty Images)

"The one thing we're really confident of is, in the densest part of the bone, any lead in there has been there for about 20 years. Remember, the expedition only lasted for three or four."

Martin is quick to point out the scientists didn't "disprove" Beattie's hypothesis, just that they failed to support it.

"It does raise a very interesting problem. Where did all the lead come from and I don't know. I would love to know."

The scientific probings of the bone samples may not be over. After Martin gave a talk at a conference in Quebec this spring, representatives of Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon approached him suggesting the samples are worth a look with their synchrotron.

"I've got to think of what might reasonbly be done," says Martin. "I don't just start looking at things for the fun of it so I've got to think of something that would extend my existing research."

At Brookhaven, a new synchrotron, National Synchrotron Light Source II, is in the works, and Jones said it would be interesting to use the improved technology — it will produce X-rays that are 10,000 times brighter than NLSE I — to look at the Franklin bones again.

Harris says Parks Canada hopes to return to the Arctic this summer to continue the search for Erebus and Terror. Efforts so far have covered about 800 square kilometres, or half the "higher-priority" search areas. A review of last summer's sonar scanning efforts turned up no further details or hints of where the ships might be.

"We have a pretty good idea of exactly what we see in real time. We just double check everything when we get back to Ottawa," says Harris. "There were ... no surprises."

Sir John Franklin's expedition set out to find and traverse the cold waters of the fabled Northwest Passage. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)

He acknowledges that the search is a "long road to hoe," and that "we're confronted with an incredible expanse of ocean to systematically sift through."

The enormity of the task is not lost on Harris, but he remains hopeful the search efforts will pay off.

"It's really hard to escape the idea you couldn't possibly make a dent, but hour after hour and week after week, year after survey year, you see the aggregate coverage build up and yes … we're making steady headway toward eventually locating one of these ships.

"On any given day it's maybe not terribly exciting, but it will be a life-changing experience when it does happen, if it does."

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Possible Verizon bid for Wind Mobile slams Canadian telecoms

Shares in Canadian telecom giants Rogers, Telus and Bell fell sharply after a report in the Globe and Mail that the largest U.S. cellular company is ready to dip its toe into the Canadian market by buying Wind Mobile.

Citing two unnamed sources familiar with the negotiations, the Globe and Mail reported Wednesday that U.S. wireless giant Verizon has offered to buy Canadian cellular upstart Wind Mobile with an initial bid of $700 million, after weeks of advanced talks.

If market reaction is any indication, investors are concerned by the prospect of a monied U.S. player. Rogers shares dropped almost eight per cent, Telus was off more than five per cent, and BCE shed more than four per cent in early trading on the TSX.

When approached for the story by CBC News, Verizon declined comment on the report.

At a wireless industry conference last week, Verizon's chief financial officer Fran Shammo confirmed that the company is looking into "dipping its toe" into the Canadian wireless marketplace.

The deal would mark a major shift in the wireless industry in Canada, which has long been characterized as a three-headed oligopoly between Bell, Rogers and Telus. The entrance, however small for now, of a monied U.S. player with an extensive network and an international presence could change all that.

Changed telecom rules

Ottawa has a stated goal of wanting to see four viable competing wireless companies in every market across Canada. To that end, the government relaxed stringent rules over foreign ownership last year to allow foreign takeovers of telecom companies with less than 10 per cent of the market.

At just over 600,000 customers, Wind is well within that range.

Veritas Investment Research telecom analyst Neeraj Monga says the timing could be right for Verizon. The company had a minority stake in Telus more than a decade ago, but has only been interested in a Canadian foothold if it could own 100 per cent of the asset.

"If it's true, I think there's more than a high probability this can work for them," Monga said.

There are many synergies that make the tie-up sensible. Monga notes that Canadians spent $1.5 billion on cross-border roaming fees last year, so Verizon's plan could be to market to heavy smartphone users — not currently Wind's customer base.

"They can market to people interested in a North America wide voice and data plan, and make real gains on power users with the incumbents there," Monga said.

Verizon is also the largest smartphone buyer in North America, so it wouldn't be difficult to take what they're already doing with handsets and offer a new selection to Canadians at an incremental cost to them, he says.

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'Supermoon' arrives early Sunday

A "supermoon" rises this weekend.

The biggest and brightest full moon of the year graces the sky early Sunday as our celestial neighbour swings closer to Earth than usual.

While the moon will appear 14 per cent larger than normal, most sky watchers won't be able to notice the difference. Still, astronomers say it's worth looking up and appreciating the cosmos.

The moon will be closest and turn full around 4:30 a.m. PT or 7:30 a.m. ET, which means people living on the West Coast are more likely to get a better view.

As in any supermoon event, high tides are forecast because of the moon's proximity, but the effect is expected to be small.

Forget about the myths that swirl every time a supermoon appears. There's no link to higher crime or bizarre behaviour. Scientists say that's just lunacy.

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Charity crowdfunding site launched by Toronto firm

Three Toronto-based entrepreneurs have launched a new startup crowdfunding website, Giveffect, to raise money for charities by encouraging members of the millennial generation to donate.

Toronto-based Giveffect is a crowfunding service publicly launched this week by co-founders (left to right) Allan Shin, Anisa Mirza and Kevin Shin. (Giveffect)

Giveffect, which made its official debut this week, is betting charities will be willing to hand over a cut of their donations in return for access to a managed online payment and tax receipting system — and more importantly, access to a social network of donors in their teens and 20s.

"As fundraisers and as organizations, we are striving and should be striving for ways to interact and be more in tune with donors," said Anisa Mirza, the company's CEO, who co-founded the company with developers Allan Shin and Kevin Shin. "With Giveffect, we correct for that huge problem, which is the relationship building."

Giveffect targets the challenge of building relationships with an elusive generation that nevertheless donates $800 million each year to charity, said 26-year-old Mirza, citing a 2010 study by consulting firms Stratcom, hjc and Convio.

Facebook, Twitter integration

Of course, Giveffect is also counting on young donors being comfortable about seeing some of their charitable donations pocketed by for-profit companies. Mirza notes that in return, they get a platform that allows them to lead fundraising campaigns for causes they care about within online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Mirza said Giveffect makes it easy to launch an online campaign for your favourite charity — for example, to celebrate your birthday — provided the charity has already signed up with the site and you want to raise money for one of their listed projects.

Giveffect lets users know when friends have made donations as a result of clicking on links from their Facebook or Twitter postings.

"We're able to track the ripple effect… the individual feels great, it helps us motivate people to give," said Mirza. She added that compared to older donors, Millennials tend to worry more about their donation having the greatest impact and are less concerned about the charity's overhead or administrative costs.

Charities get data about donors

Giveffect provides charities with demographic data about donors, as well as Facebook-like profiles that allows charities to contact them individually, if they don't choose to be anonymous. Mirza says unlike older donors, most millennials choose to share their information.

The Giveffect site features Facebook-like profiles of both donors and charities.

Dozens of crowdfunding sites have popped up in recent years, funding projects ranging from consumer products to documentary films, by seeking small individual amounts of money from a large number of people, typically in return for a "reward" such as a copy of the product.

In the case of Giveffect, the average donation since its soft launch three months ago has been $20 to $25 and charities are required to report back to donors about what they did with the money in lieu of a reward.

Typically, crowdfunding sites take a cut of the money raised — 6.2 per cent in Giveffect's case, slightly higher than the 5 per cent charged by Vancouver-based Fundrazr and by Kickstarter, arguably the best-known crowdfunding service. PayPal, which processes the online payments, takes another 2.9 per cent of the donation plus 30 cents per transaction. That means close to 10 per cent of donations made through Giveffect go to for-profit companies. Meanwhile, CanadaHelps.org, a registered charity that helps other charities receive electronic payments but doesn't offer crowdsourcing, charges a 3.9 per cent transaction fee, or 4.9 per cent for charities that aren't registered for Electronic Funds Transfer.

Kickstarter does not fund charity projects, but other crowdfunding competitors, such as Indiegogo and Vancouver-based Fundrazr already do.

However, Mirza says because Giveffect specializes in fundraising for charities, it has several advantages. It provides charities with a connection to individual donors, rather than just the person who launched the fundraising campaign. And because it connects donors directly to charity rather than the person who launched the campaign, there is no risk that the campaign launcher will pocket the money instead of giving it to the charity.

100 charities enrolled

Since the company's soft launch three months ago, it has signed up about 100 registered charities in Canada, Mirza said, although only 22 were visible on the site Friday, including War Child, Big Brothers and Sisters of Kamloops & Region, Epilepsy Canada and Communities in Bloom. The rest still need to take part in an orientation. There are about 80,000 registered charities in Canada.

Mirza said she was inspired to start Giveffect after working in the non-profit sector and wanting to become involved in charities at a bigger level — something she felt young people rarely had a chance to do.

She initially wanted to start her own youth-friendly, social media-savvy non-profit organization. Then she realized that existing charities needed a way to engage with young people and to catch up with the digital age.

"We're going for that generation that has a mindset of looking for impact, looking for lasting solutions," she said. " They want to know what happened with their money, they want to be engaged with charities, they want to feel like they're leaders, they want to get others engaged, and they want a platform that is savvy, up-to-date with this digital era. And that's what we're providing."

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Prairie dogs' language decoded by scientists

Did that prairie dog just call you fat? Quite possibly. On The Current Friday, biologist Con Slobodchikoff described how he learned to understand what prairie dogs are saying to one another and discovered how eloquent they can be.

Slobodchikoff, a professor emeritus at North Arizona University, told Erica Johnson, guest host of The Current, that he started studying prairie dog language 30 years ago after scientists reported that other ground squirrels had different alarm calls to warn each other of flying predators such as hawks and eagles, versus predators on the ground, such as coyotes or badgers.

Prairie dogs, he said, were ideal animals to study because they are social animals that live in small co-operative groups within a larger colony, or "town" and they never leave their colony or territory, where they have built an elaborate underground complex of tunnels and burrows.

In order to figure out what the prairie dogs were saying, Slobodchikoff and his colleagues trapped them and painted them with fur dye to identify each one. Then they recorded the animals' calls in the presence of different predators.

'With a sudden intuition, I thought, "What if they're describing the physical features of each predator?"'—Con Slobodchikoff, biologist

They found that the animals make distinctive calls that can distinguish between a wide variety of animals, including coyotes, domestic dogs and humans. The patterns are so distinct, Slobodchikoff said, that human visitors that he brings to a prairie dog colony can typically learn them within two hours.

But then Slobodchikoff noticed that the animals made slightly different calls when different individuals of the same species went by.

"With a sudden intuition, I thought, 'What if they're describing the physical features of each predator?'" he recalled.

He and his team conducted experiments where they paraded dogs of different colours and sizes and various humans wearing different clothes past the colony. They recorded the prairie dogs' calls, analyzed them with a computer, and were astonished by the results.

Clothing colour, size described

"They're able to describe the colour of clothes the humans are wearing, they're able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun," Slobodchikoff said.

The animals can even describe abstract shapes such as circles and triangles.

Also remarkable was the amount of information crammed into a single chirp lasting a 10th of a second.

"In one 10th of a second, they say 'Tall thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony.'"

Besides being a researcher, Slobodchikoff is an author of the book Chasing Doctor Doolittle: Learning the Language of Animals, in which he profiles many other animals with complex language, including crows and ravens, chickens and vervet monkeys. He believes complex speech is probably common within the animal kingdom.

"It's just that we have not looked," he said. He blames the fact that humans have long assumed animals are incapable of such intelligence.

Computer translation

Slobodchikoff said he has been working with a computer scientist to develop a device that uses voice pattern recognition techniques and artificial intelligence to translate between human and animal speech.

"We could potentially have something maybe the size of a cellphone in five to 10 years where a dog would say, 'Woof' and the device would say. 'I want to eat chicken tonight" or a cat could say, 'Meow,' and the device would say, 'My litterbox is filthy, please clean it.'"

He thinks if humans and dogs could understand one another more clearly, it would reduce the number of animals euthanized each year because of behavioural problems, which he blames on a lack of communication. In the meantime, Slobodchikoff said, he has found that just knowing that animals can share complex ideas makes people more empathetic toward them.

"When people realize that prairie dogs and other animals as well can talk … suddenly they see these animals with a new perspective," he said. "They're actually thinking, breathing things not that much different from us."

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'Supermoon' arrives early Sunday

A "supermoon" rises this weekend.

The biggest and brightest full moon of the year graces the sky early Sunday as our celestial neighbour swings closer to Earth than usual.

While the moon will appear 14 per cent larger than normal, most sky watchers won't be able to notice the difference. Still, astronomers say it's worth looking up and appreciating the cosmos.

The moon will be closest and turn full around 4:30 a.m. PT or 7:30 a.m. ET, which means people living on the West Coast are more likely to get a better view.

As in any supermoon event, high tides are forecast because of the moon's proximity, but the effect is expected to be small.

Forget about the myths that swirl every time a supermoon appears. There's no link to higher crime or bizarre behaviour. Scientists say that's just lunacy.

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Charity crowdfunding site launched by Toronto firm

Three Toronto-based entrepreneurs have launched a new startup crowdfunding website, Giveffect, to raise money for charities by encouraging members of the millennial generation to donate.

Toronto-based Giveffect is a crowfunding service publicly launched this week by co-founders (left to right) Allan Shin, Anisa Mirza and Kevin Shin. (Giveffect)

Giveffect, which made its official debut this week, is betting charities will be willing to hand over a cut of their donations in return for access to a managed online payment and tax receipting system — and more importantly, access to a social network of donors in their teens and 20s.

"As fundraisers and as organizations, we are striving and should be striving for ways to interact and be more in tune with donors," said Anisa Mirza, the company's CEO, who co-founded the company with developers Allan Shin and Kevin Shin. "With Giveffect, we correct for that huge problem, which is the relationship building."

Giveffect targets the challenge of building relationships with an elusive generation that nevertheless donates $800 million each year to charity, said 26-year-old Mirza, citing a 2010 study by consulting firms Stratcom, hjc and Convio.

Facebook, Twitter integration

Of course, Giveffect is also counting on young donors being comfortable about seeing some of their charitable donations pocketed by for-profit companies. Mirza notes that in return, they get a platform that allows them to lead fundraising campaigns for causes they care about within online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Mirza said Giveffect makes it easy to launch an online campaign for your favourite charity — for example, to celebrate your birthday — provided the charity has already signed up with the site and you want to raise money for one of their listed projects.

Giveffect lets users know when friends have made donations as a result of clicking on links from their Facebook or Twitter postings.

"We're able to track the ripple effect… the individual feels great, it helps us motivate people to give," said Mirza. She added that compared to older donors, Millennials tend to worry more about their donation having the greatest impact and are less concerned about the charity's overhead or administrative costs.

Charities get data about donors

Giveffect provides charities with demographic data about donors, as well as Facebook-like profiles that allows charities to contact them individually, if they don't choose to be anonymous. Mirza says unlike older donors, most millennials choose to share their information.

The Giveffect site features Facebook-like profiles of both donors and charities.

Dozens of crowdfunding sites have popped up in recent years, funding projects ranging from consumer products to documentary films, by seeking small individual amounts of money from a large number of people, typically in return for a "reward" such as a copy of the product.

In the case of Giveffect, the average donation since its soft launch three months ago has been $20 to $25 and charities are required to report back to donors about what they did with the money in lieu of a reward.

Typically, crowdfunding sites take a cut of the money raised — 6.2 per cent in Giveffect's case, slightly higher than the 5 per cent charged by Vancouver-based Fundrazr and by Kickstarter, arguably the best-known crowdfunding service. PayPal, which processes the online payments, takes another 2.9 per cent of the donation plus 30 cents per transaction. That means close to 10 per cent of donations made through Giveffect go to for-profit companies. Meanwhile, CanadaHelps.org, a registered charity that helps other charities receive electronic payments but doesn't offer crowdsourcing, charges a 3.9 per cent transaction fee, or 4.9 per cent for charities that aren't registered for Electronic Funds Transfer.

Kickstarter does not fund charity projects, but other crowdfunding competitors, such as Indiegogo and Vancouver-based Fundrazr already do.

However, Mirza says because Giveffect specializes in fundraising for charities, it has several advantages. It provides charities with a connection to individual donors, rather than just the person who launched the fundraising campaign. And because it connects donors directly to charity rather than the person who launched the campaign, there is no risk that the campaign launcher will pocket the money instead of giving it to the charity.

100 charities enrolled

Since the company's soft launch three months ago, it has signed up about 100 registered charities in Canada, Mirza said, although only 22 were visible on the site Friday, including War Child, Big Brothers and Sisters of Kamloops & Region, Epilepsy Canada and Communities in Bloom. The rest still need to take part in an orientation. There are about 80,000 registered charities in Canada.

Mirza said she was inspired to start Giveffect after working in the non-profit sector and wanting to become involved in charities at a bigger level — something she felt young people rarely had a chance to do.

She initially wanted to start her own youth-friendly, social media-savvy non-profit organization. Then she realized that existing charities needed a way to engage with young people and to catch up with the digital age.

"We're going for that generation that has a mindset of looking for impact, looking for lasting solutions," she said. " They want to know what happened with their money, they want to be engaged with charities, they want to feel like they're leaders, they want to get others engaged, and they want a platform that is savvy, up-to-date with this digital era. And that's what we're providing."

22.11 | 0 komentar | Read More

Prairie dogs' language decoded by scientists

Did that prairie dog just call you fat? Quite possibly. On The Current Friday, biologist Con Slobodchikoff described how he learned to understand what prairie dogs are saying to one another and discovered how eloquent they can be.

Slobodchikoff, a professor emeritus at North Arizona University, told Erica Johnson, guest host of The Current, that he started studying prairie dog language 30 years ago after scientists reported that other ground squirrels had different alarm calls to warn each other of flying predators such as hawks and eagles, versus predators on the ground, such as coyotes or badgers.

Prairie dogs, he said, were ideal animals to study because they are social animals that live in small co-operative groups within a larger colony, or "town" and they never leave their colony or territory, where they have built an elaborate underground complex of tunnels and burrows.

In order to figure out what the prairie dogs were saying, Slobodchikoff and his colleagues trapped them and painted them with fur dye to identify each one. Then they recorded the animals' calls in the presence of different predators.

'With a sudden intuition, I thought, "What if they're describing the physical features of each predator?"'—Con Slobodchikoff, biologist

They found that the animals make distinctive calls that can distinguish between a wide variety of animals, including coyotes, domestic dogs and humans. The patterns are so distinct, Slobodchikoff said, that human visitors that he brings to a prairie dog colony can typically learn them within two hours.

But then Slobodchikoff noticed that the animals made slightly different calls when different individuals of the same species went by.

"With a sudden intuition, I thought, 'What if they're describing the physical features of each predator?'" he recalled.

He and his team conducted experiments where they paraded dogs of different colours and sizes and various humans wearing different clothes past the colony. They recorded the prairie dogs' calls, analyzed them with a computer, and were astonished by the results.

Clothing colour, size described

"They're able to describe the colour of clothes the humans are wearing, they're able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun," Slobodchikoff said.

The animals can even describe abstract shapes such as circles and triangles.

Also remarkable was the amount of information crammed into a single chirp lasting a 10th of a second.

"In one 10th of a second, they say 'Tall thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony.'"

Besides being a researcher, Slobodchikoff is an author of the book Chasing Doctor Doolittle: Learning the Language of Animals, in which he profiles many other animals with complex language, including crows and ravens, chickens and vervet monkeys. He believes complex speech is probably common within the animal kingdom.

"It's just that we have not looked," he said. He blames the fact that humans have long assumed animals are incapable of such intelligence.

Computer translation

Slobodchikoff said he has been working with a computer scientist to develop a device that uses voice pattern recognition techniques and artificial intelligence to translate between human and animal speech.

"We could potentially have something maybe the size of a cellphone in five to 10 years where a dog would say, 'Woof' and the device would say. 'I want to eat chicken tonight" or a cat could say, 'Meow,' and the device would say, 'My litterbox is filthy, please clean it.'"

He thinks if humans and dogs could understand one another more clearly, it would reduce the number of animals euthanized each year because of behavioural problems, which he blames on a lack of communication. In the meantime, Slobodchikoff said, he has found that just knowing that animals can share complex ideas makes people more empathetic toward them.

"When people realize that prairie dogs and other animals as well can talk … suddenly they see these animals with a new perspective," he said. "They're actually thinking, breathing things not that much different from us."

22.11 | 0 komentar | Read More

Scientists fool veggies into being more nutritious

Researchers have found they can boost levels of nutritious, cancer-fighting compounds in vegetables such as cabbage by fooling the vegetables into thinking it's a certain time of day.

Janet Braam, a biologist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and her colleagues discovered in 2012 that Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant related to cabbages and broccoli, uses its internal biological clock or "circadian rhythm" to ramp up production of insect-fighting chemicals at the times of day when the insects are most likely to attack and feed on them.

'We understood that crops don't die as soon as you take them away from their roots ... But they're much more responsive and active than I think we were aware.'—Janet Braam, biologist

"That way, the plant prepares for the attack before it actually happens," Braam told Bob McDonald, host of CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks, in an interview that airs Saturday.

Plants keep their internal clocks synchronized to the environment by detecting the light and temperature conditions around them.

Braam was interested to find out if plants can maintain those rhythms, after they're harvested and waiting to be purchased and eaten, since some of the insect-fighting chemicals also have anti-cancer properties.

They discovered that cabbages, spinach, lettuce, zucchini, blueberries and even root vegetables such as carrots and sweet potatoes all maintained their internal clocks after being harvested if exposed to controlled lighting in a sealed chamber. The results came as a bit of a surprise, Braam said.

"We understood that crops don't die as soon as you take them away from their roots or dig them up from the soil," she said. "But they're much more responsive and active than I think we were aware."

The researchers also found they could make cabbage leaves increase their production of an anti-insect, anti-cancer compound called gluoraphanin at certain times of the day by manipulating the light conditions to trick the cabbage's internal clock.

The researchers found that if cabbage was exposed to regular light and day cycles after harvest, it remained more resistant to insect attacks. (iStock)

Typically, Braam said, cabbages produce more of the compound during the day than at night, and more of it later in the day than in the morning.

The researchers also found that if cabbage was exposed to regular light and day cycles after harvest, it remained more resistant to insect attacks during storage.

"It's beneficial to keep the clock running even after harvest," Bram said.

The findings were published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

Son's comments sparked idea

Braam said the study was inspired by a conversation with her teenage son, after she told him about her earlier discovery of the link between the time of day and a plant's production of anti-insect chemicals. He commented that he now knew what time of day to eat his vegetables.

Knowing about the plants' rhythms may indeed make it possible to eat or preserve fruits and veggies at the time of day when the accumulation of healthy compounds peaks, Braam said.

On the other hand, storing vegetables in dark trucks, boxes and refrigerators may interfere with their ability to maintain their daily biological rhythms. However, Braam said plants are very sensitive to stimuli such as light and temperature, so it may not take very much to keep their clocks ticking.

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