The MP representing B.C.'s Sea-to-Sky region wants to see passenger rail introduced in the booming region north of Vancouver, just weeks after CN Rail said it intends to discontinue its operations in the area.

"And it's having a major impact on the communities — not just in the Sea-to-Sky, but actually all the way down to creating congestion into Metro Vancouver. So ... there is a major need for alternative transportation options."

Weiler said the Sea-to-Sky region, which has been seeing an influx of residents ever since Highway 99 was expanded for the 2010 Olympics, has had its population grow by 60 per cent since then.

The MP representing B.C.'s Sea-to-Sky region wants to see passenger rail introduced in the booming region north of Vancouver, just weeks after CN Rail said it intends to discontinue its operations in the area.

"And it's having a major impact on the communities — not just in the Sea-to-Sky, but actually all the way down to creating congestion into Metro Vancouver. So ... there is a major need for alternative transportation options."

Weiler said the Sea-to-Sky region, which has been seeing an influx of residents ever since Highway 99 was expanded for the 2010 Olympics, has had its population grow by 60 per cent since then.

The MP representing B.C.'s Sea-to-Sky region wants to see passenger rail introduced in the booming region north of Vancouver, just weeks after CN Rail said it intends to discontinue its operations in the area.

"And it's having a major impact on the communities — not just in the Sea-to-Sky, but actually all the way down to creating congestion into Metro Vancouver. So ... there is a major need for alternative transportation options."

Weiler said the Sea-to-Sky region, which has been seeing an influx of residents ever since Highway 99 was expanded for the 2010 Olympics, has had its population grow by 60 per cent since then.

The summer has arrived and so did the new Open Prices community challenge! As always, we’re looking for contributors to collect prices on a specific type of products. With the shining sun and blistering heat in parts of the world, the topics are: sunscreens, ice creams & sorbets! Check out the challenge page for more info: https://prices.openfoodfacts.org/challenges/3

When?

All summer! Starting from 2025/07/01, ending 2025/08/31

See the link for details on how to participate

The summer has arrived and so did the new Open Prices community challenge! As always, we’re looking for contributors to collect prices on a specific type of products. With the shining sun and blistering heat in parts of the world, the topics are: sunscreens, ice creams & sorbets! Check out the challenge page for more info: https://prices.openfoodfacts.org/challenges/3

When?

All summer! Starting from 2025/07/01, ending 2025/08/31

See the link for details on how to participate

TLDR: the current treatment requires anesthesia, a ride home, bowel prep with laxatives and clear liquid diet, and it is painful once the stones come out. The new procedure doesn't require anesthesia or bowel prep, patients can drive home alone after a 30 minute treatment, and the patient reports that there is "no real pain" when the stones come out. The article suggests this is because the stones are whittled down to be smaller than the current treatment can do.

Some excerpts:

Now 67 years old, Chiquita has been a regular patient at the Stone Centre at Vancouver General Hospital, receiving screenings and treatment for recurrent kidney stones. Surgical removal is the last resort in kidney stone treatment; so, after his first procedure, Chiquita has mostly received a treatment called extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL).

ESWL directs many intense bursts of acoustic sound waves — between 60 to 120 per minute — to each stone to break it apart from the inside out. Because of its intensity, the treatment requires sedation and accompaniment home from the hospital. Patients must also take a laxative and follow a clear liquid diet prior to the procedure.

“The bowel prep the day before was awful,” says Chiquita, who has received dozens of these treatments over the years. “After ESWL, the stones would come out in a couple of days. If they came out all at once, the pain was over a 10 out of 10.”

When Chiquita was approached by Stone Centre urologist and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute researcher Dr. Ben Chew about a new procedure called Break Wave Lithotripsy (BWL), he was intrigued and signed up to participate in the first ever clinical trial of the novel technology, led by Chew.

“Dr. Chew told me that, with Break Wave, there is no need for anesthesia, bowel prep or X-ray; so, I said: ‘sign me up!’” Chiquita recalls.

Because BWL uses low-intensity sound waves, anesthesia is not required. Patients can drive themselves to and from the hospital, with the procedure lasting around 30 minutes. Clinicians use non-radiating ultrasound imaging, with BWL able to piggyback on existing ultrasound machines, making the technology smaller and more portable than ESWL equipment, which is only available at certain hospitals.

“BWL has potential applications in rural and remote communities that do not have access to the larger, dedicated machines needed to perform ESWL,” notes Chew. “For BWL, we can replace the diagnostic generator component of existing ultrasound machines with a therapeutic one used to send ultrasonic waves to treat the stones.”

BWL whittles down stones from the outside in, carving larger stones into smaller pieces that are easier to pass.

“With BWL, the stones seemed to come out one or two weeks later and with no real pain,” Chiquita shares.

While Chiquita was thrilled with the procedure and its overall results, there was a downside: having to hold his breath for extended periods of time.

Nariman Ajjur has been fighting for more than 19 months to bring her family to safety.

Her nephew was in the hospital recently; the toddler was hurt in an airstrike that killed his father and injured his mother. Ajjur says her parents and four other siblings are also trapped in the middle of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

“I have been forced to find the certificate for my brother to complete this application, including extensive information of background checks and even after doing all that, our families are still waiting. We have no words left. I don’t know what to say to my family now. They are asking if they will get to safety soon.”

Her family completed the security screenings under Canada’s Special Immigration Measures for Gaza.

The last step is to get their biometrics done to have their visa approved.

Unfortunately, there is no place in Gaza to get that done, unless they are evacuated to a place where they can do biometrics, Ajjur explained.

She said this leaves her family stranded with more than 3,000 Gazans who’ve met the same requirements with family in Canada.

Copying the At a glance section from CIHR site:

Issue

Neonatal sepsis is the third major cause of death for babies 28 days or younger. It is difficult to diagnose sepsis in newborns and if not treated quickly it can cause developmental delays, learning disabilities and death. Research

Dr. Bob Hancock and his team, including MD/PhD student Andy An at UBC and collaborator Dr. Amy Lee from Simon Fraser University, developed a software program that can predict sepsis in newborns, even in babies that do not have any symptoms of the condition.

The article isn't that long, and worth a read if you're curious. Here are some excerpts:

Two babies are born minutes apart.

One is lethargic, has a fever and is breathing rapidly.

The other is alert, has a normal temperature, and is breathing regularly.

Both have sepsis. Both could die if the sepsis is left untreated.

That’s the challenge with neonatal sepsis. It is hard to detect, hard to diagnose and the longer you wait to treat it, the more life threatening it becomes.

Sepsis is an overwhelming response to an infection that spreads throughout the bloodstream. Normally the body uses its immune system to fight infection, but in sepsis, the immune response is impaired causing serious damage to tissues and organs.

Sepsis is one of the leading causes of death in newborns in The Gambia. Microbiologist Dr. Bob Hancock and his lab at the University of British Columbia extracted RNA from blood cells collected from 700 babies in the West African country to find out why neonatal sepsis rates were so elevated. They sequenced the RNA to look for changes in gene expression linked to sepsis. Out of the 700 babies, they detected that 15 had sepsis in the first week of life.

“The Eureka was when we went back and looked at the babies, we saw big changes occurring at the time of birth in babies that were going to go on to acquire sepsis compared to babies who just had a local infection, or babies who didn't have any infection at all,” said Dr. Hancock. “In other words, sepsis was already starting, even though those babies looked healthy.”

The team used their findings to apply bioinformatics tools—software programs that analyze gene expression patterns in the blood of newborns—to identify specific molecular markers associated with sepsis. “So, we can predict sepsis before it occurs,” Dr. Hancock explained, “and that is astonishingly important because those babies can now be carefully monitored and treated as early as possible, rather than waiting until they're really getting sick.”

A relatively small number of babies born in Canada have sepsis—1 to 5 cases per 1,000 live births—but those that do can be born in rural or remote areas where getting rapid lab results is challenging. A predictive tool like the one Dr. Hancock’s lab developed could help physicians detect sepsis in newborns more quickly, averting long term health issues and even death.

CIHR recently awarded Dr. Hancock’s collaborators a grant to conduct clinical studies on a predictive tool for sepsis in the general population. The tool is integrated into a point-of-care device that enables physicians to predict sepsis at the patient’s bedside, accelerating treatment and improving chances of recovery.

Author: Heather Roberts | PhD Candidate in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, Queen's University, Ontario

Am excerpt:

When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and fiancée Lauren Sánchez held their lavish three-day wedding celebration in Venice recently, it wasn’t just a party — it was a spectacle of wealth, reportedly costing between US$47 million and US$56 million.

Critics highlighted the environmental toll of such an event on the fragile, flood-prone city, while protesters took to the streets to condemn the wedding as a tone-deaf symbol of oligarchical wealth at a time when many can’t afford to pay rent, let alone rent an island.

The excessive show of opulence felt like the opening of a horror film, and lately, that’s exactly what horror has been giving us. In films like Ready or Not (2019) and The Menu (2022), the rich aren’t simply out of touch; they’re portrayed as predators, criminals or even monsters.

These “eat-the-rich” films channel widespread anxieties about the current socioeconomic climate and increasing disillusionment with capitalist systems.

In a world where the wealthy and powerful often seem to act with impunity, these films expose upper-class immorality and entitlement, and offer revenge fantasies where those normally crushed by the system fight back or burn it all down.

The article dives into it further

Some excerpts to cover what the title is referring to, please see the article for the original text in case my excerpt selection introduced any unintended biases:

Decades of gold mining at Giant Mine in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, has left a toxic legacy: 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust stored in underground chambers.

As a multi-billion government remediation effort to clean up the mine site and secure the underground arsenic ramps up, the Canadian government is promising to deal with the mine’s disastrous consequences for local Indigenous communities.

In March, the minister for Crown-Indigenous relations appointed a ministerial special representative, Murray Rankin, to investigate how historic mining affected the treaty rights of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation.

The story begins when prospectors discovered a rich gold ore body at Giant Mine in the 1930s. While mining started at the nearby Con Mine in the late 1930s, Giant’s development was interrupted by the Second World War. Only with new investment and the lifting of wartime labour restrictions in 1948 did Giant Mine start production.

Mining at Giant was a challenge. Much of the gold was locked within arsenopyrite formations, and to get at it, workers needed to crush, then roast the gold ore at very high temperatures.

This burned off the arsenic in the ore before using cyanide treatment to extract gold. One byproduct of this process was thousands of tonnes per day of arsenic trioxide, sent up a smokestack into the local environment.

Throughout the 1960s, public health officials continually downplayed concerns about arsenic exposure in Yellowknife, whether via drinking water or on local vegetables.

By the 1970s, however, latent public health concerns over arsenic exposure in Yellowknife became a major national media story. It began with a CBC Radio As it Happens episode in 1975 that unearthed an unreleased government report documenting widespread, chronic arsenic exposure in the city. Facing accusations of a cover-up, the federal government dismissed health concerns even as it set up a local study group to investigate them.