Canada

A tighter wastewater rule in China didn't just cost firms money, it reshaped what they could sell: export quality rose 4.8% after one crackdown, then fell 9.3% after a stricter one. The lesson for Canada's carbon price fight: stringency alone doesn't decide the outcome, a firm's room to adapt does.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Longzhou Wang, Assistant Lecturer, Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta

Canada is quietly planning for a war it insists is unlikely: new reserve plans could swell forces to 400,000, a number researchers say only makes sense if the homeland faces a real threat. Ukraine and Iran offer the blueprint for how a vastly weaker military could make a U.S. attack costly.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Aisha Ahmad, Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Toronto

A contractor hired by Amazon drove a skid steer through a protected Winnipeg tallgrass prairie without permission, crushing grass and tearing up soil in one of the world's rarest ecosystems. Amazon says it will fund repairs; the city is investigating.

— via The Narwhal, Eva Wasney

Nearly every lake in North America has been touched by wildfire smoke, with many shrouded for a month or more each year, researchers say. Scientists are now heading to Ontario's Experimental Lakes Area to figure out what that smoke is actually doing to the water.

— via The Narwhal, Leah Borts-Kuperman

One cheap starting material, one light-driven step, dozens of new drug candidates in weeks instead of months. The Simon Fraser University team behind it already found three molecules with promising anti-HIV activity in early lab tests.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Robert Britton, Professor, Simon Fraser University

A third of farms surveyed in Algeria's Béjaïa province have been abandoned outright because of crop raids by endangered Barbary macaques, with 68% reporting daily foraging during peak season. The culprit isn't aggression or disease but lost figs, apples and roofing, and the monkeys seem to be learning their way around every fence and dog farmers try.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Rassim Khelifa, Assistant Professor, Department of Biology; Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Global Change Biology, Concordia University

A recruiter's TikTok claiming iced coffee reads as unprofessional in interviews sparked a generational pile-on. Research says the real problem is bigger: snap judgments like this barely predict job performance, and structured interviews do it far better.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Eddy Ng, Smith Professor of Equity and Inclusion in Business, Queen's University, Ontario

Ontario's free menstrual products reached schools years ago, but a survey of 863 students found 45 per cent said dispensers were rarely or never stocked. Younger girls fared worst, and those with reliable access reported roughly three times better attendance and well-being.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Kamilla Bonnesen, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Brain and Behaviour Lab, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

"Find a job you love" sounds inspiring until it becomes an excuse for employers to demand unpaid overtime and blurred boundaries from passionate workers. Research on career identity and burnout suggests the real fix is treating work as one part of a life, not its entire meaning.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Valerie Onyia Babatope, Assistant Professor of Human Resource Management, MacEwan University

You can now bet on who becomes mayor of London, Ont. Researchers warn these markets dress up high-frequency gambling as trading, and their swelling scale raises fresh fears about addiction and about warping how voters read elections.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven, PhD, Political Science, Western University

An Ontario farmer buried a pair of underwear in his soil and dug up an intact pair of tighty-whities, proof his dirt was nearly dead. Years later a second buried pair came back shredded, and that "Soil Your Undies" trick is now spreading through farm country as a low-tech soil health test.

— via The Narwhal, Matt McIntosh and Bryan Dickie

Shell and its partners just committed $33 billion to double Canada's biggest LNG plant, even as its first phase keeps breaking permit rules with a flare visible for miles. The stack has burned non-compliant since 2024, and fixing the design won't happen until 2028.

— via The Narwhal, Matt Simmons

Fossilized jaws in a Muskoka lakebed date back more than 350 years, decades before the spiny water flea's supposed 1980s arrival from Europe. The finding upends the official invasion timeline and raises questions about where conservation dollars actually belong.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Andrew J Tanentzap, Professor and Canada Research Chair, Trent University; University of Cambridge

MrBeast's YouTube stunt empire now has a novel, co-written with James Patterson, that doubles as a funnel into a $1 million contest. It's the latest evolution of a formula that trades strategy and story for a blunter question: what will people do for cash.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Tiara Sukhan, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western University

LNG Canada's flare stack was one of the world's highest emitters last year, and a design flaw meant nearly 10 per cent of all gas piped to the plant got burned off just to keep it lit. Now the company wants permission to keep flaring around the clock until 2028, even as it eyes a expansion that would double production.

— via The Narwhal, Matt Simmons and Marty Clemens

Researchers won an Ig Nobel Prize for turning dead mosquitoes into 3D-printing nozzles, using their proboscises to print structures the size of a grain of sand. The trick beats pricey commercial micro-nozzles that run about $80 apiece and brittle glass alternatives.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Changhong Cao, Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, McGill University

The Supreme Court just shielded Monsanto and hundreds of other pesticide sellers from cancer warning lawsuits, ruling only the EPA can decide what labels say. The catch: EPA judgments lean heavily on confidential industry data, sidelining published research the WHO's cancer agency relied on to call glyphosate a probable carcinogen.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Bill Jeffery, Contract Instructor, Health Law, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University

Doctors call it "the heart attack of the leg," and Canadian medical students reportedly get about 15 minutes of training on it. A new national action plan lays out why peripheral artery disease goes undiagnosed until amputation is already on the table.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Matthew Ades, Assistant Professor. Department of Medicine. McGill University, McGill University

B.C. greenlit a tenfold expansion of FortisBC’s Tilbury LNG plant less than a day before Eby called the election, pushing capacity to 3.4 million tonnes a year. Critics call it a rubber stamp on a project that could hike emissions and tanker traffic near Delta, Richmond and New Westminster.

— via The Narwhal, Shannon Waters

Nova Scotia lifted its four-decade uranium ban this year and opened three mining sites for bids. Not a single company applied, but residents near one site say that's cold comfort while the door to future exploration stays open.

— via The Narwhal, Jeremy Hull