Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Roxana Suehring, Assistant Professor in Environmental Analytical Chemistry, Toronto Metropolitan University

The Arctic has been in the news a lot lately. Between the increased geopolitical interest in Greenland, claims over sovereignty, resource exploitation and the devastating impacts of climate change, the region has become a sentinel for global change.

But away from these headlines, a quieter crisis is unfolding that threatens Canada’s role in global environmental science, law and policy: the dismantling of research teams at the department responsible for Canada’s environmental policies and programs. The federal government’s plan to reduce the public service by 15 per cent over three years means that more than 800 positions at Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) will be cut.

As an environmental scientist who has been involved in the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) since 2016 and an interdisciplinary legal scholar focused on water governance in Canada, we have seen how science can shape policy. For decades, ECCC research scientists have been integral to the work of AMAP, a working group that provides advice and assessments to the Arctic Council.

This intergovernmental group comprised of Indigenous Peoples, Arctic states and non-Arctic states with observer status is the major platform for protecting the environment and co-ordinating sustainable development initiatives in the Arctic.

Scientists at ECCC have played a leading role in more than 20 international reports on persistent organic pollutants and mercury. In fact, ECCC researchers have acted as the largest group of chapter leads in these global assessments since the 1990s.

Budget cuts at ECCC raise concerns about how governments will develop effective polices and laws that rely upon scientific research.

The risks from budget cuts

Many of the scientists who lead projects on the long-term trends of toxins in Arctic wildlife face cuts or might lose their jobs entirely. Scientists at ECCC are often the ones to identify and assess “chemicals of emerging Arctic concern” — newly discovered chemical threats to human and environmental health that scientists are only just beginning to understand.

Losing the scientists who lead and interpret contaminant data in Arctic wildlife will take much more from Canada than scientific expertise; we risk losing our ability to understand and effectively react to chemical threats and their potential environmental and health impacts.

Data collection for unique monitoring datasets spanning up to 50 years is at risk of being discontinued. Even more concerning is the potential loss of national tissue archives if monitoring and research projects are cut. Contaminant data in Canadian wildlife have been instrumental to the listing of toxins under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, an international treaty to control the global production and use of particularly hazardous chemicals.

Similarly, monitoring for mercury in Arctic air and biota is an important part of the rationale for the Minamata Convention, a global treaty designed to protect human and environmental health from mercury contamination.

In many ways, these global agreements exist because Canadian data, produced by ECCC scientists, proved that chemicals used thousands of miles away end up in the bodies of Arctic wildlife and Indigenous Peoples who rely on healthy wildlife for food security, cultural identity and practices.

These international treaties set out the norms, legal principles and regulatory schemes that have been incorporated into Canadian law. They support the risk assessment and management of many toxic chemicals under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

Losing these samples and monitoring programs would set back Canadian and global contaminant research and reinforce criticisms that Canada is a laggard in environmental law and policy.

Risk for Indigenous communities

Budget cuts could also intimately impact the daily lives of those living in the Arctic and raise questions of environmental justice. Indigenous communities in the Arctic face higher exposure to many toxins than other Canadians due to their reliance on foods like fish, belugas and seals.

Despite global efforts, blood mercury levels in many Inuit communities remain higher than the general Canadian population. Furthermore, concentrations of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, also known as “forever chemicals,” are consistently higher in these communities than in the south.

Without ongoing research, we risk creating a vacuum in environmental governance and law. Current legislation, like the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, aims to protect vulnerable populations and uphold the right to a healthy environment and environmental justice. But we cannot uphold these rights if we stop measuring how contaminants are impacting the health of the environment, food and water of the populations most affected by these chemicals.

Across Canada, the cuts undermine effective chemical management. Canada’s chemical management plan depends heavily on the expert assessment of government scientists. This expert-based risk assessment has enabled the discovery and monitoring of new chemical risks with comparatively few bureaucratic hurdles. However, it also means that the proposed cuts are particularly devastating to this program.

If we remove the scientists the regulatory system depends on, the system breaks. This means that these proposed cuts could not only cost jobs and reduce scientific excellence in Canada, but also leave the health of Canadians and our environment less protected.

Roxana Suehring receives funding from NSERC, Tri-Council, Mitacs, NCP, MECP, and ECCC.

Patricia Hania receives funding from SSHRC and NSERC.

– ref. Budget cuts at Environment and Climate Change Canada threaten Arctic science – https://theconversation.com/budget-cuts-at-environment-and-climate-change-canada-threaten-arctic-science-276606

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Meghan McCue, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University

One in five Canadians is living with mental health challenges such as anxiety and depression at any one time.

This number has climbed steadily in recent years, and while we have improved how we talk about mental health, significant stigma remains. In fact, people are almost three times less likely to report a mental illness than a physical one.

There are many effective mental health treatments available. However, access to diagnosis and treatment can take years. Sometimes prescriptions used to treat mood disorders have side-effects that can cause people to avoid or stop taking their medication. Traditional therapy can be costly and is not always covered by insurance or benefits.

Meanwhile, there is another tool — regularly prescribed for improving heart health and metabolic health — that can be an incredibly useful addition to mental health care and management. What tool could possibly treat so many conditions? Exercise!

Yes! Lifting weights does lift your mood

Many people have experienced the feeling of post-workout bliss, but
can hitting the gym actually help with depression and anxiety? The science says — absolutely!

Exercise has been proven to actually improve symptoms of anxiety and depression in both the short and long term. It can help with mood regulation, and in particular, emotional resilience to acute stress. While reports on improved mood following a workout can seem subjective, the benefits of exercise on mental health can actually be observed at the biochemical level.

You may have heard the term “runner’s high,” which stems from the feeling of bliss or euphoria many people experience following exercise. This is largely caused by an increase in what we call endocannabinoids and endorphins — hormones and molecules that make you feel happy or content.

‘Good’ and ‘bad’ tryptophan metabolites

There may also be another important molecule to thank, though — tryptophan.

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid that we absorb through our diet, and it plays many important roles within the human body. Tryptophan makes serotonin — often called the feel-good hormone — but it can also be broken down to produce molecules that have differing effects on the brain and body.

The main pathway responsible for breaking down tryptophan is called the kynurenine pathway. Some of the products from this pathway, like kynurenic acid, can be protective against inflammation, and good for brain health. Others, like quinolinic acid, can be associated with toxicity and inflammation.

In fact, many chronic conditions such as depression, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer have been associated with increased levels of “bad” kynurenine metabolites.

Given tryptophan’s association with both mental health and neurodegenerative conditions, researchers have started to investigate how we can generate more of the good molecules, and less of the bad. By influencing which route is taken in the kynurenine pathway, we may be able to switch towards a healthier, neuro-protective state.

Exercise seems to be a strong regulator of this switch.

An immediate return on investment

Studies have shown that working out can cause immediate and direct increases in brain-protective molecules like kynurenic acid, which have been measured within the blood and muscle following exercise. These beneficial changes have been found following endurance cycling, weight lifting and HIIT training.

Populations with additional metabolic conditions, like Type 2 diabetes, have also seen beneficial changes to tryptophan metabolites following a single exercise session.

Better yet, these improvements have been reported across different age groups, suggesting benefits for both younger and older populations.

So far, laboratory-based studies have largely used traditional exercise protocols like cycling and resistance training. However, being more physically active in general appears to improve your profile of these metabolites, meaning you don’t necessarily need to workout in a lab to see improvements.

While exercise shows a lot of promise as a source of mood enhancement and brain protection, research in this field is still growing. More work is required to understand the exact mechanisms at the molecular level that explain how and why exercise plays such an important role in regulating these metabolites.

Don’t sweat the small stuff; get sweaty!

Ultimately, exercise is a potent tool for contributing to improved mental health. There is strong evidence to support the use of exercise for stress management and production of extra feel-good hormones and metabolites which can aid in the management of mood disorders.

Exercise can also offer an important change of scenery, social outing or simply a dedicated distraction for a short period of time. These factors can be important for mental health. Group activities, like run clubs and pickle ball leagues, could serve as multipurpose mood enhancers.

So, while working out may feel like the very last thing you want to do, especially in the midst of a Canadian winter, the benefits are absolutely worth braving the cold for.

As with any factor of health, there is no “cure-all” approach. Exercise can be a powerful tool for the brain but may not be sufficient to manage complex mental health conditions. Decisions regarding treatment should always be made in consultation with a primary care provider. If you or someone you know needs mental health assistance please see the following resources.

Meghan McCue, Ph.D. received salary support as a post-doctoral researcher from a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) project grant, and has previously received funding from the Canadian Cancer Society and the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer.

– ref. The tryptophan switch? Why exercise boosts your mood – https://theconversation.com/the-tryptophan-switch-why-exercise-boosts-your-mood-275411

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Megan Shipman, Behavioural Neuroscientist and Fellow at the Cascade Institute, Royal Roads University

With the internet and its widespread accessibility, many of us have front-row seats to widespread suffering and death across the globe for the first time in history, even when we are not directly affected.

We’re living in what scholars describe as a “polycrisis” — a set of interconnected crises that compound and intensify one another. Climate change intensifies displacement and conflict, economic precarity fuels political extremism and public health emergencies expose structural inequality.

As a result, the future can feel more uncertain than ever. If you feel overwhelmed by the constant influx of bad news and find it difficult to focus on day-to-day tasks, that response is understandable.

But research in psychology and cognitive science suggests there are ways to fight back against this and reclaim your attention.

No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.

Read more from Quarter Life:

• Burned out by smartphones, young people are choosing flip phones, cameras and MP3 players instead

• Are you a Dink, Alice or Henry? How social mobility is different for today’s young people
  

• White Lotus hotels target gen Z travellers – but luxury resorts don’t reflect their travel habits

The business model of outrage

Developing a critical awareness of how digital systems operate is an important first step. This sense of overwhelm is deliberately amplified by the way digital platforms and their profit-driven algorithms are designed.

Many of us go online to cope with stress or to escape, but the content that captures our attention most effectively often makes it worse.

Content that provokes anger, fear or moral outrage generates higher engagement. Negative headlines tend to attract more clicks than positive ones, creating incentives for media outlets to push content that increases engagement.

One study found that social media users are nearly twice as likely to share negative news articles that evoke strong negative emotions. Each interaction — a like, share or comment — signals to algorithms that similar content should be shown again. Increased engagement also reinforces users’ continued posting of negative material.

The result is a positive feedback loop in which emotionally charged content is amplified, often leading to the spread of misinformation and sowing of conflict.

Your brain in a 24/7 threat environment

Part of why we are so drawn to outrage lies in human neurobiology. Studies show that we choose to read more negative or cynically framed news stories even when positive stories are also available.

Much of this is just how humans have been wired: we evolved to pay attention to the most threatening stimuli. From a very early age, we show a biased attention toward spiders, snakes and threatening faces, which activate an acute stress response from the sympathetic nervous system and trigger a fight-or-flight response.

Read more:
Rage bait: the psychology behind social media’s angriest posts

However, we have only just recently started living in a world where negative stimuli are constantly at our fingertips. Digital media now intentionally uses these neural biases to hijack our attention for profit.

At the same time, we can only pay attention to so much at once. Our cognitive capacity is limited by what psychologists call our perceptual load.

If you’ve ever tried to work in an environment with many distractions — like in an office with construction next door — or attempted to juggle multiple tasks at once, you have experienced how quickly your attention can fragment. Multitasking typically results in poorer performance across tasks.

Doomscrolling and the stress spiral

This is where doomscrolling enters the picture. Doomscrolling refers to compulsive scrolling through negative news on digital platforms.

An unlimited stream of negative information that our brains must both react to (through sympathetic arousal) and sort through (perceptual load) can lead to information overload and chronic stress.

Stress and perceptual load interact to worsen our attention and diminish performance on certain attention-demanding tasks, suggesting that each utilize similar attentional resources.

You may find yourself in a vicious cycle: stress impairs your attention and task performance, leading to more stress, which then worsens your attention. You may then reach for your phone seeking distraction or relief, only to encounter more alarming content.

Research shows doomscrolling is more likely to cause psychological distress and worsen mental well-being, since the content that we are using to distract ourselves is often negative.

How to reclaim your attention

In the face of our current global polycrisis, the algorithmic manipulation of our emotions poses a serious challenge. If you want to interrupt this cycle, research suggests there are several practical steps you can take.

First, try to reduce time online. A particularly healthy time to be screen-free is before bed as screens can negatively impact sleep. Notably, poor sleep can lead to stress, and high stress can impair sleep.

Read more:
How a mindful hobby could help you break your after-work ‘doomscrolling’ habit

Second, replace screen time with new hobbies. Behavioural economics shows that reducing unwanted behaviour, such as drinking alcohol, may be easier when people engage with other activities they enjoy. Ride a bike, do a puzzle or take a cooking class.

Third, reduce stress through exercise, meditation or spending time with friends to break the negativity cycle. Form new, healthy habits that bring you joy.

But perhaps the most important step is simply becoming more aware of the behind-the-scenes forces vying for our attention that exploit our most visceral emotions. While we shouldn’t completely disengage from the news media, we need to better equip ourselves to defend against these threats to our attention and well-being.

Megan Shipman is affiliated with Cascade Institute

Zachary Pierce-Messick receives funding from The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and is a postdoctoral research fellow (T32DA007209)

– ref. Digital media is using negativity to steal our attention — here’s how to reclaim it – https://theconversation.com/digital-media-is-using-negativity-to-steal-our-attention-heres-how-to-reclaim-it-274101

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Geoffrey Wood, Professor, Co-Director, Institute for Comparative Cancer Investigation, University of Guelph

They live in our houses, drink our water and even sleep in our beds. Cats have become an integral part of many households and share much of our lives.

They also share much of their biology with humans. Pet cats get cancer at a rate similar to humans and often develop the same types of cancer. Just like in humans, as health care and diets have improved, cats are living longer, which puts them at a higher lifetime risk of cancer.

But how similar are cat cancers to human cancers at the genetic level? Research colleagues and I have conducted the largest-ever cancer DNA sequencing study of cat tumours. Our research reveals striking similarities between feline and human cancers, and the results reveal benefits for cats as well as humans.

Newly published work from our international collaboration studied the tumours of 500 cats, including 13 different tumour types. We isolated DNA from these tumours, and mapped the sequence of 1,000 genes that are often found mutated in human cancers.

Cat and human cancers

Overall, the most commonly mutated gene was a cancer protective gene called TP53, which is also the most commonly mutated gene in human cancers. Another example is the gene PIK3CA, which is mutated in about 40 per cent of human breast cancers and was found to be altered in about 50 per cent of cat mammary cancers.

There are drugs that have been specifically developed to work on human cancers with certain mutations like those in PIK3CA. Now that we know what mutations are common in cat cancers, there is an opportunity to test these drugs for treating cats.

How do we study cancer in cats? Since 2009, the Ontario Veterinary College’s Veterinary Biobank, part of the Institute for Comparative Cancer Investigation at the University of Guelph, has been banking samples of tumours from cats treated at the Animal Cancer Centre.

With owner consent, part of a cat’s tumour that is already being removed during surgery is saved and frozen for future studies. Also banked are blood samples, which serve as a resource for developing more non-invasive cancer tests using cancer-associated molecules found in blood.

Recently, the Veterinary Biobank has joined the Ontario Biobanks consortium of human biobanks to help facilitate more cross-species cancer studies. In addition, cancer clinical trials are being conducted in cat and dog patients to help translate research findings into better outcomes for pets with cancer, and to better inform us about human cancers as well.

Read more:
Treating pets for cancer can revolutionize care for humans

Cats can potentially teach us quite a lot about human cancer. There are several cancers or cancer subtypes that are common in cats but rare in humans. “Triple negative” breast cancer — which lacks estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors and a growth factor receptor called HER2 — is by far the most common subtype in cats. However, it accounts for only 15 per cent of human breast cancers.

This subtype tends to occur in younger women, Black women and women with an inherited genetic predisposition (BRCA1 gene mutation) and is particularly aggressive and hard to treat.

Another example is pancreatic cancer. The acinar subtype that cats get most commonly is relatively rare in humans. Studying these rare human subtypes is potentially easier to do in cats as there are more cases.

Our cat sequencing study also found a few differences in mutation patterns between cat and human cancers. About 25 per cent of human cancers have mutations in RAS genes, whereas RAS mutations are rare in cat cancers. Studying these cancers in cats can help us to understand the biology of RAS genes in cancer.

Cat and mouse genomes

Cancer charities and agencies that provide grants to study human health routinely support studies that use rodent models of human cancer, but studying cancer in other species has been a harder sell.

Rodent models are either genetically engineered to develop cancer or are engineered to have a severely deficient immune system so that they can host human cancer cells.

These models are very powerful for examining the molecular mechanisms of cancer but have a poor track record for developing cancer drugs. More than 90 per cent of new cancer treatments developed using mouse models fail in human cancer trials and are never approved for clinical use.

In stark contrast, cat cancers frequently develop spontaneously in the same environment as humans. They also often have many of the same underlying or co-occurring medical conditions as humans, such as obesity, autoimmune diseases, kidney disease, diabetes and various other endocrine disorders.

Cat and human genomes are much more similar than mouse and human genomes, and the organization of cat genomes (the order of genes on the chromosomes) is much closer between cats and humans than between dogs and humans.

The (human) Cancer Genome Atlas is a massive open-access resource of mutations found in different types of cancer. Until now, no such resource existed for cats.

The data from our recent publication is available through the Wellcome Sanger Institute and will serve as a fundamental — and free — resource for researchers studying cancer in cats and humans for the benefit of both species.

Geoffrey Wood receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Pet Trust, and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

– ref. What pet cats can tell us about human cancer – https://theconversation.com/what-pet-cats-can-tell-us-about-human-cancer-276620

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Brodie Ramin, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Medicine, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

You are driving fast, maybe too fast, on a highway at night. Maybe it’s snowing, or raining, or your eyes are glazing over as you feel the fatigue of a long day set in, or maybe your phone dings and you look down for an instant. Suddenly the car in from of you stops and you hit the brakes. You feel your tires skid and for a second, you are sure you have crashed.

But then: Nothing.

You stopped just in time. Heart pounding, you exhale. You are shaken but also impressed by your speedy reflexes. You think to yourself: No harm done.

But harm nearly done. And that’s the problem.

Near-misses like this often disappear from our minds as fast as they happen. But they are the most valuable safety information we have. People, organizations and societies often fail to prevent disasters, not for lack of warnings, but because they don’t take near misses seriously.

Safety scientist James Reason saw near misses as “immunizations” for a safety system, chances to detect and fix underlying vulnerabilities before real harm occurs. But too often, we waste these chances. We get lucky, and instead of investigating or analyzing what went wrong, we move on.

My interest in near-misses comes from practising medicine and from my research into the history of disasters and system failures, work that informed my book Written in Blood. Studying accidents across fields, from fires to transportation to health care, shows that warning signs are often visible long before catastrophe strikes.

Luck is not a strategy

Take something as mundane as your phone. In late 2025, Apple released iOS 26.1, a routine software update. Except it wasn’t routine. It patched multiple critical vulnerabilities that could have allowed attackers to seize control of iPhones. Had hackers succeeded, millions of users’ data and privacy could have been compromised. And while some phones probably had been hacked, for most people, the crisis was avoided.

In health care, near-misses are common: A medication nearly given to the wrong patient but caught in time, or a surgical tool counted incorrectly but found before the patient’s incision is closed. These are serious signals, but too often they go unreported. The majority of health-care workers fail to report near misses due to fear of blame, lack of feedback or the false belief that no harm means no problem.

Often, staff in health care don’t even realize a near-miss has occurred. If we’re not looking for near-misses, we are nearly guaranteed not to learn from them.

Transportation shows the same pattern. Near-collisions on icy highways. Trains braking just before overshooting a signal. Aircraft diverting after onboard systems detect a mechanical fault mid-flight. In aviation and rail, these close calls are treated as data. In many other sectors, they are dismissed as background noise. But the data is there.

A recent Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) study found that at just 20 monitored intersections, more than 610,000 “near-miss” incidents — close calls between vehicles and pedestrians or cyclists — were recorded from September 2024 to February 2025.

Our systems are sending signals. Every time we get lucky is a chance to learn — a chance to build better layers of defence; a chance to prevent the next tragedy. Near-misses aren’t false alarms. They’re the most honest feedback a system gives: The future, whispering in the present.

Our brains aren’t wired for prevention

So why don’t we learn from close calls?

Psychologists have long understood the human brain is terrible at processing invisible risks. We overreact to dramatic events but underreact to near-misses. We confuse luck with safety. And we discount what “almost” happened.

Three psychological traps are especially pernicious:

1. Availability bias: We remember big disasters, but not the hundreds of times catastrophe was narrowly averted. This skews our risk radar.
2. Confirmation bias: We assume a system is safe because it didn’t fail. But many systems survive not because they’re strong, but because nothing has lined up to break them — yet.
3. Optimism bias: We know bad things happen to other people but assume our skill or luck will protect us.

Reason’s “Swiss cheese” model describes how disasters happen when weaknesses in multiple layers of defence align. A near miss is when they almost line up and something, often by chance, blocks the path. But unless we plug those holes, the next time, we might not be so lucky.

There are exceptions. Aviation, nuclear energy and air traffic control, so-called “high-reliability organizations,” understand this. Ideally, they treat every close call as a data point. They institutionalize reporting. They never forget to be afraid.

These organizations cultivate a chronic unease, a kind of productive paranoia. It’s not pessimism; it’s realism. They know that systems often drift toward failure unless they’re constantly corrected. That mindset is why they’re among the safest sectors in the world.

Imagine if we brought that mindset to more sectors — if every phishing text that almost fooled someone became a reason to upgrade security, if every minor medical error was reviewed like a crash. The price of ignoring near-misses is always paid eventually — in insurance claims, infrastructure failures, lawsuits and preventable grief.

What you can do now

If near-misses are warning flares, the simplest step is to stop ignoring them. When something almost goes wrong, the instinct is often to shrug it off as luck. But luck is data. It is evidence that a system came close to failing.

The real lesson of near-misses is that they allow us to learn without paying the full price of disaster. Aviation, nuclear power and other high-risk industries have built entire safety systems around studying these moments.

We should treat them the same way in everyday life: on the road, at home and at work. Notice them. Talk about them. Fix the conditions that made them possible.

Because the goal is not simply to avoid disaster. The goal is to learn from the moments when things almost go wrong.

Brodie Ramin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why we ignore the warnings that could save us – https://theconversation.com/why-we-ignore-the-warnings-that-could-save-us-277356