Churchill port could further stunt polar bear growth: U of M researcher

Manitoba’s bold plan to transform the Port of Churchill into a shipping powerhouse could have a negative effect on the area’s treasured polar bear population, which fuels its tourism trade, new research shows.

Oldest known whale recording could unlock mysteries of the ocean

A haunting whale song discovered on decades-old audio equipment could open up a new understanding of how the huge animals communicate, according to researchers who say it’s the oldest such recording known.

Indigenous partnerships key to wildfire preparation

More than 5.3 million acres in Manitoba burned — second only to Saskatchewan — as wildfires raged across Western Canada last summer, and 32,000-plus residents, most of whom were Indigenous, were evacuated from their communities.

In Winnipeg, air quality due to the smoke was so terrible that by August, the year’s poor conditions had broken a 65-year record.

In northern places such as Thompson, the smoke was life-threatening. For most of the summer the city was engulfed in smoke, causing wide-scale lung irritation. Anyone with respiratory conditions like asthma and heart disease was forced to stay indoors.

The fires began after the May 10-11 weekend, when temperatures rose above 35 C, drying the underbrush and creating dangerous conditions.

After 43-year career at the zoo, Janice Martin returns to lend a hand

Armed with a zoology degree from the University of Manitoba, Janice Martin started work at Assiniboine Park Zoo in 1980 and never looked back.

She spent 43 years in various roles at the zoo until she retired in 2023. Retirement, however, was just a long lunch break for Martin. After four months away, she was back as a dedicated volunteer.

“I first started in Aunt Sally’s Farm in the summer of 1976 before going into university in the fall. Right after I graduated, there was an opening at the zoo. It was the perfect opportunity and I grabbed it. I worked my way through different areas over the years, first as a zookeeper, then a supervisor and finally as a curator for 10 years before I retired,” Martin, 68, says.

She volunteers approximately three times a week. For two of those days, she supports the zoo’s enrichment program by creating items to engage and stimulate natural animal behaviour.

Speed limits and safety — follow the science

The premier of Manitoba recently appeared hesitant about collaborating with Winnipeg City Council on a public works proposal to lower the city’s default residential speed limit from 50 km/h to 40 km/h. Without a provincial amendment to the Highway Traffic Act, the city says implementing the change would require installing signs on hundreds of streets, at a cost of up to $10 million to taxpayers.

Canada, Manitoba lagging behind promise to meet 2030 target of protecting more land and water

There are just four years left on the clock for Manitoba — and the rest of the country — to meet a promise to conserve 30 per cent of land and water by 2030.

But halfway through the timeline adopted at the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity in 2022, Canada has made little progress, adding less than one percentage point to its protected land tally and three points to its protected waters.

The country needs to double its protected areas to meet its target, known as 30-by-30. But conservation groups, including the Wilderness Committee and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, warn progress could stall even further as federal funding for conservation initiatives is set to run out at the end of the month — and there’s no indication it will be renewed.

“We have a conservation economy that we can build on, that gives local jobs, that helps honour our Indigenous reconciliation commitments,” Sandra Schwartz, national executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, said.

NASA clears its Artemis moon rocket for an April launch with four astronauts following repairs

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA cleared its moon rocket on Thursday for an April launch with four astronauts after completing the latest round of repairs.

The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket will roll out of the hangar and back to the pad next week at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, leading to a launch attempt as early as April 1. It will mark humanity's first trip to the moon in more than 50 years.

The Artemis II crew should have blasted off on a lunar flyaround earlier this year, but fuel leaks and other problems with the Space Launch System rocket interfered.

Although NASA managed to plug the hydrogen fuel leaks at the pad in February, a helium-flow issue forced the space agency to return the rocket to the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs, bumping the mission to April.

King penguins are the rare species benefiting from a warming world. But that could change

WASHINGTON (AP) — The warming world has disrupted the timing for plant and animal reproduction, and it's usually bad news for species that depend on each other — like flowers blooming too early and pollinating bees arriving too late. But researchers have found the rare critter that's getting a boost from the change: King penguins.

A new study of 19,000 king penguins in a sub-Antarctic island chain found their breeding is starting 19 days earlier than it did in 2000. Mating earlier has increased the breeding success rate by 40%, according to a study in Wednesday's journal Science Advances.

The study of timing in nature is called phenology. It's been a major concern for biologists because predators and prey and pollinators and plants are mostly adapting to warmer climates at different rates. And that means crucial mismatches in timing.

It's especially common in birds and pollinating species such as bees. Most birds, especially in North America, aren't keeping pace with changes in phenology, according to Clemson University biological sciences professor Casey Youngflesh, who wasn't part of the study.

‘Uncover what’s really going on’: UFO researcher in Manitoba supports AI tracking

WINNIPEG - Artificial intelligence is going to make it easier to spot whether a bird, a plane or an otherworldly creature is in the sky, as Canadians continue to report sightings of unidentified flying objects, says Canada's top UFO expert.

Chris Rutkowski has spent decades researching the phenomenon and is part of Ufology Research, a Manitoba-based organization that tracks UFO sightings in Canada and publishes an annual report.

The group's 2025 analysis, released Monday, includes data taken from observation stations set up by passionate UFO enthusiasts across the country.

"They're gathering scientific data above and beyond just the average person seeing something in the night sky. This is an attempt to quantify UFO sightings," said Rutkowski.

Transfer program adds to Manitoba First Nation’s bison population

The herd of bison that calls Chitek Lake Anishinaabe Provincial Park in Manitoba home just grew a little larger.

Pentagon’s chief tech officer says he clashed with AI company Anthropic over autonomous warfare

A top Pentagon official said Anthropic's dispute with the government over the use of its artificial intelligence technology in fully autonomous weapons came after a debate over how AI could be used in President Donald Trump's future Golden Dome missile defense program, which aims to put U.S. weapons in space.

U.S. Defense Undersecretary Emil Michael, the Pentagon's chief technology officer, said he came to view the AI company's ethical restrictions on the use of its chatbot Claude as an irrational obstacle as the U.S. military pursues giving greater autonomy to swarms of armed drones, underwater vehicles and other machines to compete with rivals like China that could do the same.

“I need a reliable, steady partner that gives me something, that’ll work with me on autonomous, because someday it’ll be real and we’re starting to see earlier versions of that," Michael said in a podcast aired Friday. "I need someone who’s not going to wig out in the middle.”

The comments came after the Pentagon formally designated San Francisco-based Anthropic a supply chain risk, cutting off its defense work using a rule designed to prevent foreign adversaries from harming national security systems.

Spacecraft’s impact changed asteroid’s orbit around the sun in a save-the-Earth test, study finds

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — An asteroid that NASA used for target practice a few years ago was nudged into a slightly different route around the sun, findings that could help divert a future incoming killer space rock, scientists reported Friday.

It’s the first time that a celestial body’s orbit around the sun was deliberately changed. The asteroid that NASA's Dart spacecraft slammed into was never a threat to Earth.

“This study marks a notable step forward in our ability to prevent future asteroid impacts on Earth,” the international research team wrote in Science Advances.

The changes were slight — reductions of just one-tenth of a second and one-half of a mile (720 meters) to a solar lap spanning two years and hundreds of millions of miles (kilometers), according to the scientists.

Last spring forward for B.C. as it moves to permanent daylight time

VICTORIA - British Columbia's southern population centres will be facing winter sunrises around 9 a.m. — and around 9:30 a.m. in the north — after the decision to adopt year-round daylight time, springing forward by one hour this Sunday for the last time.

Premier David Eby said Monday the decision is about making life easier for families, reducing disruptions for businesses and supporting a stable, thriving economy.

"British Columbians have been clear that seasonal time changes do not work for them,” Eby said.

He announced the change inside the legislature's Hall of Honour, surrounded by about 40 local elementary schoolchildren, and he addressed them first.

Infrequent lunar eclipse performs Copper Side of the Moon early Tuesday morning

Stargazers in Manitoba have the chance Tuesday to watch the last total lunar eclipse on this side of the world until 2029.

Big dreams, cold reality: Buzz builds for Port of Churchill, but risks could outweigh rewards

The marine town of Churchill, cherished for its wildlife, landscapes and history, has recently taken on a new sense of national importance. Plans to expand Canada’s lone deepwater Arctic port on the shores of Hudson Bay have gained momentum — and investment — in the last year as the country looks north for solutions to an unprecedented conflict with its southern neighbour.

Premier Wab Kinew has pitched the Port of Churchill as an answer to Canada’s trade concerns, and a means of galvanizing both provincial and national economies.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has designated a plan to upgrade the port facilities as “transformative,” committing millions in federal dollars to the project and touting its merits in meetings with European trade partners.

In late January, Kinew announced the province was in talks with several companies, including at least one major energy company, about investing in port expansion.

New football chinstrap designed to lessen force of blows to facemask

Erin Hanson wants to make taking it on the chin in football much safer in Canada.

Guardian Sports officially launched the Guardian Flex chinstrap on Thursday for individual and team sale, with the CFL being among the leagues to have reviewed the item. The product has been engineered to reduce the impact of blows to the facemask.

According to the company, the chinstrap reduces Head Acceleration Response Metric (HARM) scores by up to 35 per cent and targets facemask impacts, which research suggests account for about half of all hits and are an area where traditional helmets underperform.

The chinstrap will be far less noticeable to fans than the Atlanta-based company’s Guardian Cap. Introduced 14 years ago, the soft padded shell fits over a football helmet and is secured by elastic straps attached to the facemask.

The surprising complexity behind the squeak of basketball shoes on hardwood floors

NEW YORK (AP) — As he watched the Boston Celtics play from the stands of TD Garden, one noise kept catching Adel Djellouli's ear.

“This squeaking sound when players are sliding on the floor is omnipresent,” he said. “It’s always there, right?”

Squeaky shoes are part of the symphony of a basketball game, when rubber soles rasp against the hardwood floors as players jab step, cut and pivot and defenders move their feet to stay in front of their assignment.

Returning home from the game, Djellouli wondered how that sound was produced. And as a materials scientist at Harvard University, he had a way to find out.

Fossilized vomit provides insight on predator that lived 290 million years ago

BRANDON — A Brandon University paleontologist has helped identify prehistoric barf that’s nearly 290 million years old — and could be the oldest known example of fossilized vomit from a land-dwelling predator.

Mark MacDougall, an assistant biology professor, was part of a research team that identified 41 bones from at least three animals inside the regurgitated cluster by using CT scans and chemical analysis, the university said in a news release.

Signs point to the vomit coming from a top predator — likely an early relative of mammals — that gulped down a mixed meal that included a small reptile, a fast-moving lizard-like animal and part of a much larger plant-eater, and later coughed it back up.

“It’s rare to get such direct evidence of who was eating whom nearly 300 million years ago,” said MacDougall, co-author of the international study published last month in the journal Scientific Reports.

More Canadian athletes powered by artificial intelligence at Winter Games

Just for fun, Xavier McKeever and his cross-country ski teammates once tasked ChatGPT to design a training plan for them.

"It was the craziest training plan we've ever seen," said the 22-year-old from Canmore, Alta.

"It basically said you should do intensity every single day. You should do three hours of skiing and then an hour of intensity, and repeat that a few times -- and then you should take a week off completely. We know you can't do that.

"It was pretty funny to see and do, to see Chat GPT can't write a training plan, and that we need our coaching to help us with that."

What to know about EPA decision to revoke a scientific finding that helped fight climate change

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday revoked its own 2009 “endangerment finding,” a scientific conclusion that for 16 years has been the central basis for regulating planet-warming emissions from power plants, vehicles and other sources.

The finding itself is straightforward: Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — caused by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas — endanger public health and welfare.

It was adopted after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases are air pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The Trump administration says the finding hurts industry and the economy and that the Obama and Biden administrations twisted science to determine that greenhouse gases are a public health risk.

Get vaccinated for flu, COVID-19, measles to protect crowded hospitals: top doc

The province’s top doctor is asking Manitobans to get vaccinated as respiratory virus season threatens to strain hospitals and measles outbreaks tear though parts of Manitoba.

Babies given peanuts, fish, eggs early less likely to become allergic, study affirms

TORONTO - A new Canadian study says giving babies peanuts, eggs, fish and other common food allergens early and consistently decreases the risk they'll be allergic to them.

Senior author Dr. Derek Chu says researchers analyzed more than 190 food allergy studies from around the world to identify the strongest risk factors in developing food allergies.

Their findings, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, found that delaying the introduction of peanut-containing foods until babies were over 12 months old doubled their likelihood of becoming allergic to the nut.

The study showed similar results for fish and eggs.

As men’s health enters the national conversation, advocates call for co-operation

OTTAWA - The upcoming launch of a national strategy on men's and boys' health is a positive sign that men's well-being is becoming part of the mainstream conversation in Canada, advocates say — even as they warn that it should not become partisan political fodder.

The Movember Institute of Men's Health and researchers from the University of British Columbia called on the government to launch such a strategy in a report released last summer.

Health Minister Marjorie Michel said she plans to launch a national strategy on men's and boys' health in 2026 by working with colleagues in multiple departments, including Veterans Affairs, Women and Gender Equality and Indigenous Services.

Catherine Corriveau, Movember's director of policy and advocacy, said the government has taken an important first step by acknowledging the problem.