An estimated ten percent of Canadians struggle with depression, flashbacks and panic attacks associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). So do 14,000 Canadian veterans. Locked brain circuits may be to blame.
Health
Listen, Read, Watch
Insomniacs are more than just lonely. Their brains are less flexible. A good night’s sleep re-wires grey matter and sheds chemical waste, boosting healthy brain activity in the day.
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Recent studies report that a glass of wine in the evening is good for your heart. This may be so, but a bottle of wine is not something you’d expect to buy at a hospital. In the French city of Strasbourg, you most definitely can.
The fortieth anniversary of America’s hasty retreat from Vietnam is upon us. A true memetic moment, that frantic, April 25, 1975 escape from the US Embassy rooftop is engraved in popular consciousness. The toxic legacy of the war is less known.
BiodiversityBiologyEconomic developmentEuropeInfectious DiseasePodcastsSci-TechVoicesWaste Management
Picture a landscape buried beneath a sky-high heap of dead plants and animal corpses. This is what Earth’s surface would look like if it weren’t for fungi. Fungi are the biosphere’s recyclers. Human society depends on them absolutely.
There’s a quiet killer living in the walls of traditional adobe houses in Central and South America. You can’t see it; you can’t hear it. It sneaks out at night, crawling or tumbling into your bed.
Activism & SolidarityAir & Water QualityAir QualityEnergyEnvironmental healthHealthHuman habitatIndustryMiningPodcastsToxics
In the rolling foothills of the Canadian Rockies, where cattle peacefully graze and ranchers retire to handsome chalets, a purple haze hovers. Fracking is being blamed not only for air pollution, but for a litany of health complaints.
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Of all the medical afflictions a person or family can suffer from, none is as burdensome as a rare genetic condition that hasn’t even been named. Winnipeg physician-geneticist Cheryl Greenberg advocates for patients.
Rosie Redfield spat in a tube and mailed it to a Mountain View, California outfit called 23andMe. A month later, the University of British Columbia geneticist and MOOC instructor received the results by email.
Tom Hudson is a busy guy. Few have contributed more to our understanding of how the human genome works — and how to map it, using ‘haplotypes’ — than this congenial native of Arvida, Quebec. .
There’s hardly a facet of drug action that isn’t determined in some way by our DNA — by our genome. On a recent trip to Vancouver, I visited the offices and labs of the Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety.
Have you ever popped the recommended dose of an over-the-counter analgesic, and it did absolutely nothing? Or perhaps you suffered a life-threatening adverse reaction. If so, you’re in large company.
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Diana Daunheimer and her husband Derek were a typical young couple pursuing their dreams — raising kids and growing good food at their Alberta homestead. But in 2008, a nastier crop sprouted around her property.
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The slow-food movement has reached the sun-baked, Bolivian altiplano. Here, small-scale producers are making the most of scarce water supplies, ample sun and local expertise to grow food at the top of the world.
Air QualityEconomic developmentEnvironmental healthEnvironmental lawHealthHuman & Civil RightsHuman habitatIndustryMiningPodcastsPollutionToxicsTwelve CanadiansVoicesWater
Imagine what it would be like to have your home water supply morph into a fire hazard — the liquid flowing from your tap liable to explode if you light a match.
Activism & SolidarityAir QualityEnvironmental healthEnvironmental lawFisheriesHealthHealth & DiseaseHuman habitatIndustryLabourMarine ecologyMiningPodcastsPollutionToxicsTwelve CanadiansVoices
Inka Milewski was a marine biologist, not a public health researcher or epidemiologist, when she received a phone call from worried residents of her community. She took up that call. Had no choice. It was something she had to do.
Midwives catch babies. The “mid” part of the word is derived from the German mit, or with. The French phrase for midwife is “sage femme,” or wise woman.
Cerro Posokoni towers over the town of Huanuni, on the eastern slopes of the Andes, in the Bolivian department of Oruro, like an upside-down ice cream cone. Thousands of miners pick away at its entrails each day, among them children.
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When ten “tech” divers travel to Bikini Atoll for a week’s adventure in paradise, preparing to feast their eyes on the most famous collection of sunken nuclear warships in the world, the couldn’t guess what would happen next.
Activism & SolidarityAgricultureAir & Water QualityAir QualityClimate changeEarth ScienceEconomic developmentFirst NationsFoodHealthHuman & Civil RightsHuman habitatMiningPodcastsToxicsTwelve CanadiansVoicesWaste ManagementWater
In the summer of 2014, several hundred people gathered at a fracking “Day of Protest” in Kent County, between Moncton and Miramichi — Elsipogtog First Nations territory.
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[…] Toxic pollution is not just an urban problem, as the purple haze hovering over Alberta’s lovely Lochend district suggests. Past GPM stories have focused