Hannah Hoag

Category: news

  • Canadian software helps Syrian activists avoid web censors

    Late last year, Syrian activists found their Internet connections blocked. In need of a way to communicate, they turned to a Canadian technology company to deliver the networking system.

    “The request was channelled through a number of different sources. They wanted a way of getting around Internet censorship,” says Rafal Rohozinski, CEO of the Psiphon Inc.

    In December, the company distributed Psiphon 3 to the activists. From his Ottawa headquarters, Rohozinski watched the number of online connections in Syria grow — to 30,000. The software enabled them to tunnel past Internet filters and barriers to websites, social media and other online communications technologies.

    “The act of communicating, of empowering yourself through knowledge, is an essential component of democratization,” says Rohozinksi.

    Psiphon grew out of an experiment at the Citizen Lab, a research and development program focused on the intersection of global security, human rights and cyberspace and based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

    In 2003, the OpenNet Initiative, a group that tracks Internet censorship, found only a few countries filtered content. Today, it counts more than 40 countries controlling the online content that is accessed within their borders.

    “When you’re engaged in analyzing and tracking Internet censorship worldwide, you find out a lot about how Internet content is blocked on the web,” says Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab and an investigator at the OpenNet Initiative.

    Deibert says people would contact the group to find out how to bypass the censors. Though circumvention technologies existed, they lacked security or required an almost hacker-like level of knowledge to operate, he says.

    The Citizen Lab set out to create software that lacked an Achilles heel.

    Keep reading this story in the Toronto Star.

  • Regime Change: Q&A with John Smol

    Nature

    A freshwater ecologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, Smol studies lake sediments to understand climatic and environmental change. Nature Outlook asks him to share his experience.

    What can we learn from lake sediments?
    One of the biggest challenges in environmental science is the lack of long-term data, so we have to use indirect proxies. All over the planet, lakes act as passive samplers of the environment, recording information 24 hours a day. They contain biological, chemical and physical information. The deeper you go in the sediment, the older it gets. Typically, in North America you can go back 12,000 years to the last Ice Age. In ponds near the Arctic Ocean, it’s closer to 5,000 years, because before that those areas were below sea level. We focus on the changes that have occurred in the past few hundred years and compare them with the long-term record. So we can ask: is there anything peculiar going on now, or is this just part of a long-term cycle?

    What have these remote ponds told us about climate change?

    We chose shallow ponds because they would be the most sensitive. They’re the bellwethers. The palaeo-data show that some very striking ecological changes started happening since the 1800s. The most plausible interpretation is that it was climate change and that it was human related. This conclusion was very controversial when we published it in 1994 (ref.1).

    We started going to these ponds on Cape Herschel in far northern Canada in 1983. We were going up every two or three years, and we could see they were getting shallower. We thought they could eventually disappear, but none of us thought it could happen in our lifetime. By 2006, many of the ponds had gone dry. It was stunning. We wondered if it was a one-off event, but we checked the 2005 data from the probes that we had left in some of the ponds in 2004 and saw that they were dry even then. We could tell that the ponds were evaporating, not draining, because the water’s conductivity — which is proportional to the concentration of dissolved ions — had steadily been increasing. Nothing like this had ever happened before, although the drying trend has occurred since. We called it crossing the final ecological threshold.

    Keep reading this article in Nature. 

  • Radioactive medicine without the nuclear headache

    Radioactive medicine without the nuclear headache

    The Globe and Mail

    A made-in-Canada solution to our medical-isotope problem could come from a machine with a name that could have been pulled straight from the pages of a science fiction novel: the cyclotron.

    “It was really pooh-poohed, this idea of using cyclotrons; they said there was no way we could produce enough in a commercially meaningful way,” says John Wilson, the cyclotron facilities manager at the University of Alberta’s Cross Cancer Institute.

    In mid-2010, scientists at the University of Sherbrooke and the University of Alberta made technetium-99m, the most commonly used medical isotope, without a nuclear reactor. Last fall, the Alberta scientists began putting the cyclotron-produced technetium-99m through its paces, testing it in animals and humans, and found that the medical scans looked the same as those done using the regular stuff.

    Now they’re looking to make more of it using more powerful machines, to prove that a cross-country cyclotron network could meet most of Canada’s medical isotope needs. Success could lift the country from its dependency on the aging reactor at the Chalk River Laboratories near Ottawa.

    Last week, the University of Sherbrooke received a higher-current cyclotron from Advanced Cyclotron Systems Inc., a company based in Richmond, B.C. The University of Alberta will install the same model in an old curling club on its south campus by the end of March.

    “Cyclotrons are a novel and very exciting way of producing technetium-99m,” says Kevin Tracey, vice-president of the Ontario Association of Nuclear Medicine and the medical director of nuclear medicine at Hôtel-Dieu Grace Hospital in Windsor.

    “There remain some technical impediments to making it efficient in day-to-day operations, but if we can produce it close to home, in our communities, that is a much better solution,” he says.

    Technetium-99m is the most common medical isotope used in the practice of nuclear medicine. About 80 per cent of all medical radioisotope tests—from cardiac perfusion tests to bone scans for cancer—require technetium-99m. In Canada, it’s used in roughly 1.8 million procedures annually.

    But there’s almost no natural technetium-99m on Earth. Instead it is produced via a precursor called molybdenum-99 that must be made in a nuclear reactor from highly enriched uranium.

    Keep reading this story in The Globe and Mail.
  • Acidic oceans threaten fish

    Acidic oceans threaten fish

    Stocks could suffer as seas soak up more carbon dioxide. 

    Ocean acidification looks likely to damage crucial fish stocks. Two studies published today in Nature Climate Change reveal that high carbon dioxide concentrations can cause death and organ damage in very young fish.

    The work challenges the belief that fish, unlike organisms with shells or exoskeletons made of calcium carbonate, will be safe as marine CO2 levels rise.

    Fish could be most susceptible to carbon dioxide when in the egg, or just hatched.

    Oceans act like carbon sponges, drawing CO2 from the atmosphere into the water. As the CO2 mixes with the water, it forms carbonic acid, making the water more acidic. The drop in pH removes calcite and aragonite — carbonate minerals essential for skeleton and shell formation — from the marine environment.

    This can mean that corals, algae, shellfish and molluscs have difficulty forming skeletons and shells or that their shells become pitted and dissolve.

    Flawed belief? 

    At present, atmospheric CO2 levels exceed 380 parts per million and are expected to climb throughout the century to approximately 800 p.p.m. if emissions are not kept in check. And the oceans are expected to continue to sop up the gas, dropping ocean pH by 0.4 units to about 7.7 by 2100 [2].

    However, many scientists have suggested that acidification wouldn’t be problematic for marine fish because they don’t have exoskeletons and because as adults they possess mechanisms that allow them to tolerate high concentrations of CO2.

    But a handful of studies have shown that increased CO2 levels can wreck the sense of smell of orange clown fish larvae and increase the size of the otolith — a bony organ akin to the human inner ear — in white sea bass larvae.

    Continue reading this story at Nature.

    Image: Hannes Baumann

  • International group calls for end to selective reporting of clinical trials

    Free access to all data will provide the best care for patients, says Cochrane Collaboration.

    People don’t like to reveal their failures. But when it comes to clinical trials, researchers should be compelled to make even their negative results public, according to a statement issued by an international group that reviews medical research studies. The release of all information and data from randomized clinical trials would allow physicians to provide the best possible care for patients, says the Cochrane Collaboration.

    In 2004, the pharmaceutical company Merck withdrew its blockbuster arthritis drug rofecoxib (Vioxx) from pharmacies around the world because of an increased risk of heart attacks following long-term use. “The widespread use of rofecoxib has likely caused about 100,000 unnecessary heart attacks in the U.S. alone, corresponding to about 10,000 deaths, which could have been avoided by using other, equally effective drugs causing less harm,” Peter Gøtzsche, director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Demark, wrote in an editorial. The crux of the issue was that the clinical trial results had been selectively reported, dampening the potential risks.

    “There’s been evidence of this publication bias for a long time,” says Jeremy Grimshaw, a professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa and co-chair of the steering group of the Cochrane Collaboration. “We’re not getting an unbiased view of the information. The selective reporting of trial results can overestimate the benefits of a drug and underestimate the harms,” says Dr. Grimshaw, who is also a senior scientist in the clinical epidemiology program at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.

    In early October, the Cochrane Collaboration recommended changes to the way clinical trials are managed and reported so that patients can receive the best treatment. The group called on those who conduct trials to register all randomized clinical trials prior to patient recruitment and to make publicly available, free of charge, all data from all randomized clinical trials as well as the corresponding protocols. It also asked governments to introduce legislation to require data sharing within 12 months following the end of the randomized phase of the trial and to consider punitive measures for non-compliance.

    Some headway had already been made on the first point. The member journals of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which includes the Canadian Medical Association Journal, require authors to pre-register the clinical trial in a public trials registry, such as www.clinicaltrials.gov, a database managed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, if they aim to publish their results in one of these top journals. The committee also encourages editors to publish important studies even if the results are not statistically significant. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research requires registration of all CIHR-funded randomized controlled trials, the disclosure of adverse events and submission of a final report within 12 months of the end of the trial.

    Those measures, though important, aren’t sufficient to reduce publication bias, says Matthew Herder, a lawyer and assistant professor in the faculty of medicine at Dalhousie University, who recently argued in a CMAJ article that Health Canada should disclose the design and results of clinical trials. “If you’ve run a trial that doesn’t show a difference between those that received the treatment and those that didn’t, there is no requirement to disclose that information,” he says. “We need stronger enforcement measures to require information sharing.”

    Keep reading this article in University Affairs.