Science & Earth

Canopy Venao, led by Caroline Howell with Momentis Family Office, uses sensor-informed siting and ecological restoration at Playa Venao, including more than 40,000 native trees planted and year-long environmental monitoring to guide design.

A University of Toronto team used fractal-patterned surfaces to encourage podocytes to develop more branched, mature features; the study was published in Nature Communications.

Researchers report a quasar, ID830 at z = 3.4351, accreting around 15 times the Eddington limit while showing unusually strong X-ray and radio emission; this combination is unexpected under standard super-Eddington scenarios.

A new pre-print from the HWO Technology Maturation Project Office says the Habitable Worlds Observatory has advanced from Concept Maturity Level 2 to 3 and highlights that components will need stability at the picometer scale—about 1,000 times better than James Webb—to directly image Earth-like planets.

Parks Canada incident commander Dean MacDonald led the response to the Jasper Wildfire Complex in 2024, a lightning-started series of fires that burned more than 33,500 hectares and was brought under control after 47 days.

CHORD is installing hundreds of six‑metre radio dishes near Penticton, B.C.; 37 are in place and the project aims for 512 by next year.

JWST observations of the periodically bursting protostar EC 53 detected crystalline silicates (forsterite and enstatite) appearing during accretion outbursts. The team reports that thermal annealing in the hot inner disk and layered magnetohydrodynamic winds could carry those crystals outward toward comet-forming zones.

Pope Leo XIV met senior mining and energy executives at the Vatican to press for more ethical approaches to resource extraction, and the meeting was part of the Vatican's Building Bridges Initiative focusing on social and environmental justice.

Researchers used networks of seismometers to record sonic shock waves from the Shenzhou-15 orbital module's 2024 reentry and reconstructed its path, finding the seismic trajectory about 40 kilometres north of the official prediction.

A University of Strathclyde study led by Dr Vassilis Inglezakis compares technologies for recovering Martian water and reports subsurface ice as the most promising long-term source, while soil heating and atmospheric harvesting have higher energy or time costs.

A St. Stephen resident says rising electricity bills have doubled his home costs and put his reptiles' heat-dependent habitats at risk; N.B. Power has asked regulators for a 4.75% rate increase and says colder weather raises customer bills.

A January 2026 white paper proposes a new integrated water regulator, preventative regulation and other changes to oversight; environmental groups, industry and scientific bodies have offered differing responses.

Applications are open for the PEI 2 Billion Trees program, which will plant native seedlings on private property at no labour cost and is administered by the P.E.I. Watershed Alliance.

Seven winning warming hut designs were unveiled at The Forks and will be built and placed along the Nestaweya River Trail; judges selected finalists from more than 200 international submissions.

Hugging Face is an open platform for hosting and sharing machine learning models, datasets, and applications, supporting NLP, computer vision, and audio use cases. The platform combines community-driven open-science practices with enterprise-ready tooling to promote transparency and reproducibility.

Hubble observations of 3,419 blue straggler stars across 48 globular clusters show a higher blue straggler frequency in lower-density regions, and the fraction of binary systems in a cluster correlates with blue straggler counts.

Sunita Williams has retired from NASA after a 27-year career; she logged 608 days in space and 68 hours of spacewalk during her service.

A large-scale study comparing 100,000 people with leading generative models found some AI systems exceed average human performance on defined creative language tasks, while the most creative humans continue to outperform all tested AI.

Elon Musk said his companies aim to extend consciousness beyond Earth and that AI and robotics could create widespread abundance while also posing risks that require careful attention.

A PLOS Biology paper reports that bacteriophages evolved on the International Space Station developed mutations that made them more effective at killing certain antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infection bacteria when returned to Earth.

A team led by Dr. Tony Gargano analyzed Apollo lunar samples with high-precision triple oxygen isotopes and concluded that meteorites since the Late Heavy Bombardment could only have supplied a small fraction of Earth's water; the paper was published in PNAS.

Astronomical images highlight the Lupus 3 dark molecular cloud about 500 light-years away, showing young T-Tauri stars, dense dust filaments, and a reflection nebula created by two hot young stars. A 2006 study identified two age groups of T-Tauri stars in Lupus 3, near 1 million years and between 5 and 27 million years old.

Astronauts evacuated from the International Space Station said a portable ultrasound was helpful during a recent medical crisis; the crew declined to identify who was treated and NASA called it its first medical evacuation in 65 years of human spaceflight.

A 72-page UN report, produced with the Government of Canada, states the world is in an era of 'global water bankruptcy' and says freshwater systems have been pushed outside safe planetary boundaries.

A University of Toronto course by Brent Berry examines how long work hours, digital life, managed play and social inequalities shape leisure so that free time can feel more like work.

The ALMA ARKS survey imaged 24 exo‑Kuiper debris disks and found a wide range of substructures — multiple rings, halos, asymmetries — and signs that some disks retain gas longer than expected.

A Canadian study finds that climate change will sharply reduce the number of reliably snowy host sites for future Winter Olympics and Paralympics — estimating about 16 of 93 locations could reliably host the Paralympics in March by 2080 — and it highlights timing shifts and snowmaking as key adaptation options.

An arXiv study models Earth–Moon very long baseline interferometry and finds that placing radio dishes at five lunar sites could, under favorable geometry, let an Earth–Moon array resolve nearly 30 additional supermassive black hole shadows at sub-microarcsecond scales.

Indonesia will revoke permits held by 28 resource companies after authorities linked alleged forest misuse to December floods that killed more than a thousand people, and the government plans to restore around 900,000 hectares of seized land to conservation forest.

North Carolina State University researchers developed a modified fiber‑reinforced polymer that uses 3D‑printed EMAA and embedded heaters to re-bond layers, and lab samples were intentionally broken and repaired more than 1,000 times; the university has licensed the technology to a startup, Structeryx Inc.