Jaida Lee becomes first female to pitch in Canada Games men's competition
WELLAND, Ont. — Jaida Lee made history at the Canada Games on Monday, becoming the first female to play in the male baseball competition since it began in 1967.
Lee pitched 1 1/3 innings for Newfoundland and Labrador in a 17-7 loss to Alberta to kick off the day's slate of games.
The 16-year-old from St. John's, who was Newfoundland and Labrador's flag-bearer in the opening ceremony, pitched a scoreless fourth inning, but Alberta came back with a six-run fifth to put the game away.
The baseball she threw will be enshrined in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in St. Marys, Ont.
In other results at the Games held in Ontario's Niagara region, Quebec's Mathis Beaulieu won the men's sprint triathlon, with Daniel Damian of British Columbia taking silver and Tristen Jones of Ontario picking up bronze.
Colette Reimer of B.C. won the women's event, with Ontario's Anja Krueger second and Alberta's Sophia Howell third.
Ontario's Ava Holmgren won the women's cross-country mountain bike, followed by B.C.'s Marin Lowe and Quebec's Marie-Fay St-Onge.
Mia West of Winnipeg was thrilled to win Manitoba's first gold of the Games, as she swam to victory in the 200-metre butterfly event. Teagen Purvis of Selkirk, Man., captured silver in the Special Olympics 50-metre breaststroke, and Halle West of Winnipeg won a bronze in the 50-metre breaststroke event.
Maxime St-Onge and Charles-Antoine St-Onge took the top two podium spots for Quebec in the men's event, with Ontario's Matthew Leliveld finishing third.
British Columbia, on the strength of one gold, eight silver and four bronze, leads the medal standings with 13. Ontario, with a Games-high nine golds, is next at 12. Alberta and Quebec each have eight medals, followed by Manitoba with four.
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador each have one medal.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 8, 2022.
The Canadian Press
Tuesday, August 09, 2022
Alberta girls' softball team thrilled to represent Canada at Little League World Series
Anna Wdowczyk
For the first time in more than two decades, an all-girls team from Alberta will compete at the Little League Softball World Series in Greenville, N.C. — kicking off their opening game on Tuesday night.
© Submitted by Dianna Jordison
Aged 13 and under, the St. Albert Angels will represent Canada in a game against a team from the Philippines on Aug. 9.
"We have to prove ourselves every single game," said Ella Stranaghan, a 13-year-old pitcher for the Angels.
The U13 St. Albert team won gold at the Canada Little League Softball Championships over the Heritage Day weekend in Victoria, B.C. With an undefeated track record for every game at nationals, the team managed to snag a final spot in the global tournament.
According to the Little League Softball World Series, the St. Albert group is the first Alberta team to play for the global title since 2000, when Calgary's Sunridge Little League competed.
"It's kind of overwhelming," Stranaghan said.
Stranaghan said she was inspired to try softball less than a year ago, after watching many videos of the game online.
But when Stranaghan tried to talk about the sport at school, she said boys in her class would often taunt her by saying, "that's not a real sport."
Stranaghan said being chosen to play for Canada internationally was gratifying — convincing her and her teammates that girls have a place in competitive sports.
She said she still can't believe she will be competing at the event she used to watch for hours.
"We're representing all of Canada. It's huge for everyone," she said.
"It just kind of shows you that you can go somewhere with this."
For head coach Dianna Jordison, the world championship event will mark her international debut.
"I'm hoping that it opens the doors and lets other teams know that this is a possibility, so that we can get bigger competition within Little League in Canada," she said.
"You can build dreams out of this and have goals and aspire to have a future in sport."
According to Jordison, players and softball fans wish the championship event would be live-streamed across Canada, like the boys' tournament.
The St. Albert Angels will play a team from the Philippines at 5 p.m. on Thursday. The Little League Softball World Series runs until Aug. 15.
Anna Wdowczyk
For the first time in more than two decades, an all-girls team from Alberta will compete at the Little League Softball World Series in Greenville, N.C. — kicking off their opening game on Tuesday night.
© Submitted by Dianna Jordison
Ella Stranaghan, a 13-year-old pitcher for the St. Albert Angels, says she's excited to represent Canada at the 2022 Little League Softball World Series in Greenville, N.C.
Aged 13 and under, the St. Albert Angels will represent Canada in a game against a team from the Philippines on Aug. 9.
"We have to prove ourselves every single game," said Ella Stranaghan, a 13-year-old pitcher for the Angels.
The U13 St. Albert team won gold at the Canada Little League Softball Championships over the Heritage Day weekend in Victoria, B.C. With an undefeated track record for every game at nationals, the team managed to snag a final spot in the global tournament.
According to the Little League Softball World Series, the St. Albert group is the first Alberta team to play for the global title since 2000, when Calgary's Sunridge Little League competed.
"It's kind of overwhelming," Stranaghan said.
Stranaghan said she was inspired to try softball less than a year ago, after watching many videos of the game online.
But when Stranaghan tried to talk about the sport at school, she said boys in her class would often taunt her by saying, "that's not a real sport."
Stranaghan said being chosen to play for Canada internationally was gratifying — convincing her and her teammates that girls have a place in competitive sports.
She said she still can't believe she will be competing at the event she used to watch for hours.
"We're representing all of Canada. It's huge for everyone," she said.
"It just kind of shows you that you can go somewhere with this."
For head coach Dianna Jordison, the world championship event will mark her international debut.
"I'm hoping that it opens the doors and lets other teams know that this is a possibility, so that we can get bigger competition within Little League in Canada," she said.
"You can build dreams out of this and have goals and aspire to have a future in sport."
According to Jordison, players and softball fans wish the championship event would be live-streamed across Canada, like the boys' tournament.
The St. Albert Angels will play a team from the Philippines at 5 p.m. on Thursday. The Little League Softball World Series runs until Aug. 15.
Sabrina Maddeaux: How did a misogynistic screed place third in Alberta's female-empowerment essay contest?
Sabrina Maddeaux - NATIONAL POST
The following is a tale of political folly that is exceptional, even by today’s standards.
© Provided by National Post
Imagine for a minute you’re a member of Alberta’s United Conservatives — a party that habitually suffers from being accused of seeking to restrict abortion and dismissing women in the workplace . You want to put these allegations to rest ahead of the upcoming provincial election, so one of your caucus members proposes an essay contest.
Run by the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, it encourages young women to submit visions for the province’s future and what they would do as MLAs. It even has an appropriately feminist-sounding name: “Her Vision Inspires Essay Contest.” But somehow, somewhere along the way, someone forgets one crucial thing: the winning essays of this female-empowerment exercise should not explicitly argue against said empowerment. D’oh.
And so, the Her Vision Inspires third-place prize went to a screed that opens with, “Women have a unique strength: our ability to give birth,” and goes on to argue that, “To promote that women break into careers that men traditionally dominate is not only misguided, but it is harmful. Such a focus distracts from the languishing unique strength and the truly important role that women have in the preservation of our community, culture and species.”
For good measure, it also promoted replacement theory: “While it is sadly popular nowadays to think … Albertan children are unnecessary as we can import foreigners to replace ourselves, this is a sick mentality that amounts to a drive to cultural suicide.”
This prize-winning essay was proudly posted for all to read on the legislative assembly of Alberta’s website. Naturally, the public had some feelings — and they weren’t feelings of empowerment.
Screenshots of the essay circulated on Twitter and multiple NDP MLAs demanded answers, particularly from the MLA who launched the contest, Jackie Armstrong-Homeniuk, Alberta’s associate minister for the status of women.
It wasn’t long before the entire Her Vision Inspires page was scrubbed from the assembly’s website. If you try to visit it now, you’ll encounter an error message that says the page does not exist.
And so far, there have been no answers. Who judged the contest? Why did they pick this essay as a winner? Why were no red flags raised before it was publicly posted — an act that would’ve required it to pass through multiple people? Was the contest always little more than a rushed PR exercise?
Armstrong-Homeniuk did provide Edmonton Journal reporter Lisa Johnson with a statement that can be summed up as inadequate. It opened by conceding that the essay “has gathered negative attention on social media” — as if that were the problem, rather than the essay itself.
She went on to say that, “The essay contest was intended to reflect a broad range of opinions from young Alberta women on what democracy means for them. While the essay in question certainly does not represent the views of all women, myself included, the essay in question should not have been chosen.”
That’s a big, lingering “while” in that last sentence, one that could be read to suggest an earlier draft attempted to legitimize the essay’s views. Moreover, the real questions of who judged the contest and why this particular piece was crowned a winner went unacknowledged and unanswered.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Speaker and UCP caucus member Nathan Cooper issued a statement that said the contest was “conceived and administered by the chair of Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians Canadian Region Alberta branch” and neither the “Speaker’s Office nor the Legislative Assembly office were involved.” While he accurately called the essay’s content “abhorrent,” he stopped short of explaining how exactly it came to win third place or naming the MLAs who judged the contest.
This was followed by Armstrong-Homeniuk herself issuing a statement apologizing for the essay being selected for third place, but didn’t elaborate further on how it happened.
It’s clearly too late to put the misogynistic, racist essay back in the box, but the public does deserve to know what happened. There should be an explanation. Refusing to provide one will only prolong the pain of this entirely unprovoked and supremely silly act of self-immolation.
National Post
Sabrina Maddeaux - NATIONAL POST
The following is a tale of political folly that is exceptional, even by today’s standards.
© Provided by National Post
Imagine for a minute you’re a member of Alberta’s United Conservatives — a party that habitually suffers from being accused of seeking to restrict abortion and dismissing women in the workplace . You want to put these allegations to rest ahead of the upcoming provincial election, so one of your caucus members proposes an essay contest.
Run by the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, it encourages young women to submit visions for the province’s future and what they would do as MLAs. It even has an appropriately feminist-sounding name: “Her Vision Inspires Essay Contest.” But somehow, somewhere along the way, someone forgets one crucial thing: the winning essays of this female-empowerment exercise should not explicitly argue against said empowerment. D’oh.
And so, the Her Vision Inspires third-place prize went to a screed that opens with, “Women have a unique strength: our ability to give birth,” and goes on to argue that, “To promote that women break into careers that men traditionally dominate is not only misguided, but it is harmful. Such a focus distracts from the languishing unique strength and the truly important role that women have in the preservation of our community, culture and species.”
For good measure, it also promoted replacement theory: “While it is sadly popular nowadays to think … Albertan children are unnecessary as we can import foreigners to replace ourselves, this is a sick mentality that amounts to a drive to cultural suicide.”
This prize-winning essay was proudly posted for all to read on the legislative assembly of Alberta’s website. Naturally, the public had some feelings — and they weren’t feelings of empowerment.
Screenshots of the essay circulated on Twitter and multiple NDP MLAs demanded answers, particularly from the MLA who launched the contest, Jackie Armstrong-Homeniuk, Alberta’s associate minister for the status of women.
It wasn’t long before the entire Her Vision Inspires page was scrubbed from the assembly’s website. If you try to visit it now, you’ll encounter an error message that says the page does not exist.
And so far, there have been no answers. Who judged the contest? Why did they pick this essay as a winner? Why were no red flags raised before it was publicly posted — an act that would’ve required it to pass through multiple people? Was the contest always little more than a rushed PR exercise?
Armstrong-Homeniuk did provide Edmonton Journal reporter Lisa Johnson with a statement that can be summed up as inadequate. It opened by conceding that the essay “has gathered negative attention on social media” — as if that were the problem, rather than the essay itself.
She went on to say that, “The essay contest was intended to reflect a broad range of opinions from young Alberta women on what democracy means for them. While the essay in question certainly does not represent the views of all women, myself included, the essay in question should not have been chosen.”
That’s a big, lingering “while” in that last sentence, one that could be read to suggest an earlier draft attempted to legitimize the essay’s views. Moreover, the real questions of who judged the contest and why this particular piece was crowned a winner went unacknowledged and unanswered.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Speaker and UCP caucus member Nathan Cooper issued a statement that said the contest was “conceived and administered by the chair of Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians Canadian Region Alberta branch” and neither the “Speaker’s Office nor the Legislative Assembly office were involved.” While he accurately called the essay’s content “abhorrent,” he stopped short of explaining how exactly it came to win third place or naming the MLAs who judged the contest.
This was followed by Armstrong-Homeniuk herself issuing a statement apologizing for the essay being selected for third place, but didn’t elaborate further on how it happened.
It’s clearly too late to put the misogynistic, racist essay back in the box, but the public does deserve to know what happened. There should be an explanation. Refusing to provide one will only prolong the pain of this entirely unprovoked and supremely silly act of self-immolation.
National Post
Alberta awards prize to essay that argues women should pick babies over careers
EDMONTON — Alberta has awarded a prize to an essayist who argues the sexes are not equal and that women should pick babies over careers to avoid the province having to import more foreigners and risk “cultural suicide.”
© Provided by The Canadian PressAlberta awards prize to essay that argues women should pick babies over careers
The United Conservative government removed the essay from its legislature website on Tuesday following a wave of social media condemnation.
Jackie Armstrong-Homeniuk, Alberta’s associate minister for the Status of Women, was the contest organizer and the head of the judging panel.
She initially distanced herself from the affair then, as criticism mounted, took responsibility without explaining which judges decided to award the prize and why.
“The essay contest was intended to reflect a broad range of opinions from young Alberta women on what democracy means for them,” Armstrong-Homeniuk said in a statement Tuesday morning.
“While the essay in question certainly does not represent the views of all women, myself included, the essay in question should not have been chosen.”
Later in the afternoon, Homeniuk issued an updated statement saying some of her caucus and cabinet colleagues had raised concerns.
“It’s clear that the process failed, and I apologize for my role in that," she said.
“The selection of this particular essay and awarding it with third prize was a failure on my part as the head of the judging panel.”
Armstrong-Homeniuk had been the face of the contest since it was introduced in February.
The “Her Vision Inspires” contest challenged women ages 17 to 25 to describe their ideas for a better Alberta.
The contest advertised that essays would be judged by Armstrong-Homeniuk and other legislature members but did not specify the names of the other judges. The Opposition NDP said it did not participate.
The top two essays suggest ways to get more women, and the public in general, involved in public life.
The third-place winner — identified only as S. Silver — won a $200 prize to be spent at the legislature gift shop.
Silver's essay posits that the governing mission of humanity is to reproduce itself, but that Alberta has lost its way to instead pursue “selfish and hedonistic goals.”
The solution, she argues, is to acknowledge that “women are not exactly equal to men.”
Society, she writes, should celebrate and embrace the birthing role of women and stop pushing them to put off prime procreation years while they “break into careers that men traditionally dominate.”
She says the idea that Alberta can put off procreation and instead “import foreigners to replace ourselves … is a sickly mentality that amounts to a drive for cultural suicide.”
NDP critic Rakhi Pancholi said Armstrong-Homeniuk owes the public a full explanation of how this view was not condemned, but honoured and rewarded.
“Sexism, racism, hate — this is not what any government should be celebrating, yet increasingly these views are becoming acceptable in this UCP government, and even now applauded,” Pancholi told reporters.
Pancholi zeroed in on the "cultural suicide" reference, likening it to 1930s Nazi Germany urging women to be baby vessels to propagate the Aryan race.
“This is an absolutely reprehensible claim. It is a nod to the racist replacement theory that drives white nationalist hate,” she said.
The contest was run through the legislative assembly office, which is headed by Speaker Nathan Cooper.
Cooper’s office, in a statement, said the contest was conceived and administered by Armstrong-Homeniuk in her role as regional chair of the Commonwealth Women’s Parliamentarians group. It added that neither the Speaker's nor the legislative assembly office were involved in picking the essays "in any capacity."
“As soon as the content of the third-place winner was brought to the Speaker’s attention, he immediately made the decision for the content to be removed," said the statement.
Three candidates in the race to replace Premier Jason Kenney as party leader and premier also took to Twitter to criticize the award.
“It’s a disgrace that an essay saying women are not equal to men won an award sponsored by government. Women, and their contributions, are equally valuable and amazing whether we are moms or not. Can’t believe this needs to be said,” wrote Rebecca Schulz.
Rajan Sawhney followed up: “Agree, Rebecca. Same goes for the comments about 'foreigners.' Alberta is the proud home of people from all over the world — from Ukraine, to the Philippines, and everywhere in between.”
Leela Aheer said: “Well, I read 1st and 2nd place (essays). Those were great! I’m not sure how the 3rd essay elevates women."
Lise Gotell, a women’s and gender studies professor at the University of Alberta, said the essay perpetuates an essentialist, sexist and racist point of view stemming from the long discredited and outdated concept that a women’s role is to reproduce as a bulwark against immigration.
“The fact that it was chosen says a great deal about the views on appropriate gender roles being advanced by this government,” said Gotell.
“This essay reads like something that quite frankly could’ve been written in the 19th century.”
— With files from Angela Amato in Edmonton
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 9, 2022.
Dean Bennett, The Canadian Press
EDMONTON — Alberta has awarded a prize to an essayist who argues the sexes are not equal and that women should pick babies over careers to avoid the province having to import more foreigners and risk “cultural suicide.”
© Provided by The Canadian PressAlberta awards prize to essay that argues women should pick babies over careers
The United Conservative government removed the essay from its legislature website on Tuesday following a wave of social media condemnation.
Jackie Armstrong-Homeniuk, Alberta’s associate minister for the Status of Women, was the contest organizer and the head of the judging panel.
She initially distanced herself from the affair then, as criticism mounted, took responsibility without explaining which judges decided to award the prize and why.
“The essay contest was intended to reflect a broad range of opinions from young Alberta women on what democracy means for them,” Armstrong-Homeniuk said in a statement Tuesday morning.
“While the essay in question certainly does not represent the views of all women, myself included, the essay in question should not have been chosen.”
Later in the afternoon, Homeniuk issued an updated statement saying some of her caucus and cabinet colleagues had raised concerns.
“It’s clear that the process failed, and I apologize for my role in that," she said.
“The selection of this particular essay and awarding it with third prize was a failure on my part as the head of the judging panel.”
Armstrong-Homeniuk had been the face of the contest since it was introduced in February.
The “Her Vision Inspires” contest challenged women ages 17 to 25 to describe their ideas for a better Alberta.
The contest advertised that essays would be judged by Armstrong-Homeniuk and other legislature members but did not specify the names of the other judges. The Opposition NDP said it did not participate.
The top two essays suggest ways to get more women, and the public in general, involved in public life.
The third-place winner — identified only as S. Silver — won a $200 prize to be spent at the legislature gift shop.
Silver's essay posits that the governing mission of humanity is to reproduce itself, but that Alberta has lost its way to instead pursue “selfish and hedonistic goals.”
The solution, she argues, is to acknowledge that “women are not exactly equal to men.”
Society, she writes, should celebrate and embrace the birthing role of women and stop pushing them to put off prime procreation years while they “break into careers that men traditionally dominate.”
She says the idea that Alberta can put off procreation and instead “import foreigners to replace ourselves … is a sickly mentality that amounts to a drive for cultural suicide.”
NDP critic Rakhi Pancholi said Armstrong-Homeniuk owes the public a full explanation of how this view was not condemned, but honoured and rewarded.
“Sexism, racism, hate — this is not what any government should be celebrating, yet increasingly these views are becoming acceptable in this UCP government, and even now applauded,” Pancholi told reporters.
Pancholi zeroed in on the "cultural suicide" reference, likening it to 1930s Nazi Germany urging women to be baby vessels to propagate the Aryan race.
“This is an absolutely reprehensible claim. It is a nod to the racist replacement theory that drives white nationalist hate,” she said.
The contest was run through the legislative assembly office, which is headed by Speaker Nathan Cooper.
Cooper’s office, in a statement, said the contest was conceived and administered by Armstrong-Homeniuk in her role as regional chair of the Commonwealth Women’s Parliamentarians group. It added that neither the Speaker's nor the legislative assembly office were involved in picking the essays "in any capacity."
“As soon as the content of the third-place winner was brought to the Speaker’s attention, he immediately made the decision for the content to be removed," said the statement.
Three candidates in the race to replace Premier Jason Kenney as party leader and premier also took to Twitter to criticize the award.
“It’s a disgrace that an essay saying women are not equal to men won an award sponsored by government. Women, and their contributions, are equally valuable and amazing whether we are moms or not. Can’t believe this needs to be said,” wrote Rebecca Schulz.
Rajan Sawhney followed up: “Agree, Rebecca. Same goes for the comments about 'foreigners.' Alberta is the proud home of people from all over the world — from Ukraine, to the Philippines, and everywhere in between.”
Leela Aheer said: “Well, I read 1st and 2nd place (essays). Those were great! I’m not sure how the 3rd essay elevates women."
Lise Gotell, a women’s and gender studies professor at the University of Alberta, said the essay perpetuates an essentialist, sexist and racist point of view stemming from the long discredited and outdated concept that a women’s role is to reproduce as a bulwark against immigration.
“The fact that it was chosen says a great deal about the views on appropriate gender roles being advanced by this government,” said Gotell.
“This essay reads like something that quite frankly could’ve been written in the 19th century.”
— With files from Angela Amato in Edmonton
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 9, 2022.
Dean Bennett, The Canadian Press
Defence lawyers begin work stoppages to protest ‘perpetual underfunding’ of Legal Aid Alberta
Emily Mertz - 9h ago
Criminal Defence Lawyers in Alberta have started job action to demand a provincial government response to what they call its "perpetual underfunding of Legal Aid Alberta."
© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Emily Mertz - 9h ago
Criminal Defence Lawyers in Alberta have started job action to demand a provincial government response to what they call its "perpetual underfunding of Legal Aid Alberta."
© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
A woman wears a mask as she enters the Calgary Courts Centre during COVID-19 restrictions in Calgary, Monday, May 17, 2021.
Between Aug. 8 and 19, members of the Criminal Defence Lawyers Association (Calgary) (CDLA), the Criminal Trial
Lawyers Association (Edmonton) (CTLA) and the Southern Alberta Defence Lawyers' Association (SADL) will not accept any legal aid files that require:
bail only services
courtroom duty counsel services
complainant counsel services (pursuant to s. 276 of the Criminal Code)
cross-examination of complainant services (in cases where an accused is otherwise self represented).
Danielle Boisvert, a criminal defence lawyer in Edmonton and the president of the Criminal Trial Lawyers' Association, said that means lawyers started refusing duty counsel certificates (per-service contracts) from Legal Aid this week.
Boisvert said Tuesday that she estimates between 450 and 600 lawyers are taking part in the job action -- about half of Legal Aid Alberta's overall roster.
Read more:
Legal aid lawyers step up job action in Alberta
Boisvert added that a fourth group has also joined the cause: the Red Deer Defence Lawyers Association.
Effective Aug. 4, the lawyers withdrew their representatives from the Legal Aid Tariff Modernization Committee.
All three groups are asking Justice Minister Tyler Shandro to consider increasing Legal Aid's budget and reviewing the current financial eligibility guidelines for applications.
Read more:
Legal aid lawyers reach breaking point, request more funding from province
A meeting with the province on Monday was "disappointing," Boisvert said.
"As someone who's never gone to one of these political meetings, it was both enlightening and frustrating," she said Tuesday morning.
She said the two parties were at an "impasse" -- there was no recognition from the province of the need for immediate funding, nor were any solutions presented.
"There was only discussions of why there could not be solutions," Boisvert said.
There was a commitment to review Legal Aid funding and eligibility in the 2023 budget, she said.
"They heard our concerns and they did give us a lot of their time yesterday, which we appreciated."
Plans were made to meet again in the next few weeks, Boisvert said.
Video: Ask a lawyer: Navigating the court system for the first time
Meanwhile, the four lawyer groups will reconvene Wednesday evening to update members and discuss potential future steps. She said it's possible, if members desire, the current job action could last beyond Aug. 19 or additional steps could be taken.
"If the government's neglect of Legal Aid Alberta continues, our members will withdraw all duty counsel services provided to the Justice of the Peace Bail Office between Sept. 1-15," the groups said in an Aug. 3 news release.
"Our members have been clear: if Minister Shandro persists in his failure to ensure equal access to justice for all Albertans, further services will be withdrawn."
Global News has reached out to Legal Aid Alberta. This article will be updated when a response is received.
In a news release shared on its website, Legal Aid Alberta explained Albertans can continue to access legal aid support in provincial courts but there may be some delays.
"We're making efforts to ensure a duty counsel lawyer will be available either in person or virtually at all courthouses.
"We are committed to taking all reasonable steps to minimize service disruptions and to prioritize those who are in the most disadvantaged situations."
Read more:
A ‘broken’ system: Canadians can’t afford lawyers but don’t qualify for legal aid
The organization said roster lawyers who do legal aid are not employees of Legal Aid Alberta; but rather contracted by LAA "to provide legal advice and representation services in the areas of criminal and family law. The three criminal defence organizations that voted in favour of withdrawing duty counsel services do not represent all roster lawyers.
"Roster lawyers are integral to Legal Aid Alberta. While LAA is unable to change the rate of pay for roster lawyers, we are included in the discussions with them. We are hopeful a solution can be reached soon. We will continue to press forward with modernizing the tariff structure and remain committed to delivering a proposal to the ministry by budget time in October."
Video: Ask a Lawyer: Duty Counsel Day and the importance of the role
A spokesperson for Alberta Justice told Global News on Aug. 5 that a review of Alberta's Legal Aid program is underway "to address administrative efficiencies for billing, block fees, and other simplifications of the tariff system."
Joseph Dow said Alberta is willing to consider increasing Legal Aid's operating budget and eligibility guidelines but "that work must be done after the current review is complete and must be done through the development of the 2023 budget."
Alberta Justice said: "publicly funded and affordable legal services are critical to ensuring that every Albertan has fair and equitable access to the legal system. We appreciate the work that all criminal lawyers undertake on the behalf of Albertans and their advocacy to increase funding for Alberta's Legal Aid program."
On Aug. 8, Dow said work is already underway "to modernize the legal aid tariff in our province.
"The government will be able to explore potential changes to tariff rates and the current financial eligibility guidelines as part of the development of the 2023 budget."
Read more:
Alberta’s Crown prosecutors consider walking off the job
The justice department says Alberta ranks sixth provincially for the hourly tariff rate for roster lawyers with 10 years experience ($92.40/hour).
"Throughout this process, Alberta's government will continue to engage our justice partners, including these organizations, to ensure we continue to prioritize the accessibility and long-term sustainability of legal aid in our province."
According to Alberta Justice, the province has increased funding to Legal Aid Alberta by 47 per cent since 2015.
Between Aug. 8 and 19, members of the Criminal Defence Lawyers Association (Calgary) (CDLA), the Criminal Trial
Lawyers Association (Edmonton) (CTLA) and the Southern Alberta Defence Lawyers' Association (SADL) will not accept any legal aid files that require:
bail only services
courtroom duty counsel services
complainant counsel services (pursuant to s. 276 of the Criminal Code)
cross-examination of complainant services (in cases where an accused is otherwise self represented).
Danielle Boisvert, a criminal defence lawyer in Edmonton and the president of the Criminal Trial Lawyers' Association, said that means lawyers started refusing duty counsel certificates (per-service contracts) from Legal Aid this week.
Boisvert said Tuesday that she estimates between 450 and 600 lawyers are taking part in the job action -- about half of Legal Aid Alberta's overall roster.
Read more:
Legal aid lawyers step up job action in Alberta
Boisvert added that a fourth group has also joined the cause: the Red Deer Defence Lawyers Association.
Effective Aug. 4, the lawyers withdrew their representatives from the Legal Aid Tariff Modernization Committee.
All three groups are asking Justice Minister Tyler Shandro to consider increasing Legal Aid's budget and reviewing the current financial eligibility guidelines for applications.
Read more:
Legal aid lawyers reach breaking point, request more funding from province
A meeting with the province on Monday was "disappointing," Boisvert said.
"As someone who's never gone to one of these political meetings, it was both enlightening and frustrating," she said Tuesday morning.
She said the two parties were at an "impasse" -- there was no recognition from the province of the need for immediate funding, nor were any solutions presented.
"There was only discussions of why there could not be solutions," Boisvert said.
There was a commitment to review Legal Aid funding and eligibility in the 2023 budget, she said.
"They heard our concerns and they did give us a lot of their time yesterday, which we appreciated."
Plans were made to meet again in the next few weeks, Boisvert said.
Video: Ask a lawyer: Navigating the court system for the first time
Meanwhile, the four lawyer groups will reconvene Wednesday evening to update members and discuss potential future steps. She said it's possible, if members desire, the current job action could last beyond Aug. 19 or additional steps could be taken.
"If the government's neglect of Legal Aid Alberta continues, our members will withdraw all duty counsel services provided to the Justice of the Peace Bail Office between Sept. 1-15," the groups said in an Aug. 3 news release.
"Our members have been clear: if Minister Shandro persists in his failure to ensure equal access to justice for all Albertans, further services will be withdrawn."
Global News has reached out to Legal Aid Alberta. This article will be updated when a response is received.
In a news release shared on its website, Legal Aid Alberta explained Albertans can continue to access legal aid support in provincial courts but there may be some delays.
"We're making efforts to ensure a duty counsel lawyer will be available either in person or virtually at all courthouses.
"We are committed to taking all reasonable steps to minimize service disruptions and to prioritize those who are in the most disadvantaged situations."
Read more:
A ‘broken’ system: Canadians can’t afford lawyers but don’t qualify for legal aid
The organization said roster lawyers who do legal aid are not employees of Legal Aid Alberta; but rather contracted by LAA "to provide legal advice and representation services in the areas of criminal and family law. The three criminal defence organizations that voted in favour of withdrawing duty counsel services do not represent all roster lawyers.
"Roster lawyers are integral to Legal Aid Alberta. While LAA is unable to change the rate of pay for roster lawyers, we are included in the discussions with them. We are hopeful a solution can be reached soon. We will continue to press forward with modernizing the tariff structure and remain committed to delivering a proposal to the ministry by budget time in October."
Video: Ask a Lawyer: Duty Counsel Day and the importance of the role
A spokesperson for Alberta Justice told Global News on Aug. 5 that a review of Alberta's Legal Aid program is underway "to address administrative efficiencies for billing, block fees, and other simplifications of the tariff system."
Joseph Dow said Alberta is willing to consider increasing Legal Aid's operating budget and eligibility guidelines but "that work must be done after the current review is complete and must be done through the development of the 2023 budget."
Alberta Justice said: "publicly funded and affordable legal services are critical to ensuring that every Albertan has fair and equitable access to the legal system. We appreciate the work that all criminal lawyers undertake on the behalf of Albertans and their advocacy to increase funding for Alberta's Legal Aid program."
On Aug. 8, Dow said work is already underway "to modernize the legal aid tariff in our province.
"The government will be able to explore potential changes to tariff rates and the current financial eligibility guidelines as part of the development of the 2023 budget."
Read more:
Alberta’s Crown prosecutors consider walking off the job
The justice department says Alberta ranks sixth provincially for the hourly tariff rate for roster lawyers with 10 years experience ($92.40/hour).
"Throughout this process, Alberta's government will continue to engage our justice partners, including these organizations, to ensure we continue to prioritize the accessibility and long-term sustainability of legal aid in our province."
According to Alberta Justice, the province has increased funding to Legal Aid Alberta by 47 per cent since 2015.
'A vehement backlash': North Carolina senators blasted by constituents for opposing $35 insulin cap
AlterNet - 13h ago
By Alex Henderson
On Sunday, August 7, the U.S. Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a $750 billion package addressing energy, climate change, health care and taxes. The bill passed 51-50 via the process known as budget reconciliation, allowing the Senate’s narrow Democratic majority to bypass the 60-vote rule of the filibuster. Now, the bill will go to the U.S. House of Representatives for consideration, and Democrats are optimistic that it will pass in the House and make it to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law.
Both of North Carolina’s Republican U.S. senators, Richard Burr and Thom Tillis, voted against the bill. Journalist Danielle Battaglia, in an article published by the Raleigh News and Observer on August 8, stresses that they are facing a “vehement backlash” in their state for, during debates on the bill, opposing a proposal to limit how much private insurance companies can charge for the insulin used by diabetics.
“Debate on the bill began Saturday morning and stretched into Sunday,” Battaglia explains. “Senators went back and forth on numerous amendments, but one subjected Burr and Tillis to vehement backlash from their constituents: a $35 cap on insulin from private insurance companies…. Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough — who serves as the chamber’s official adviser and rule keeper — deemed an insulin price cap for private insurers a violation of the Senate’s rules for the reconciliation process to pass the bill on a bare majority. Senate Democrats sought to overrule MacDonough’s decision in a vote that needed 60 supporting members.”
READ MORE: Economist Paul Krugman explains why Democrats’ climate bill could be a 'major step toward saving the planet'
Battaglia adds, “The New York Times reported that, despite the rule violation, Democrats ‘dared’ Republicans to vote against the cap by keeping the provision in the bill. Tillis and Burr rarely cave to such political pressure. Both voted against capping insulin costs along with 43 other Republicans, forcing the provision to fail.”
Senate Democrats forced Burr, Tilllis and other Republicans to go on the record about whether or not they believed a $35 insulin cap should be part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — and both of them are being lambasted for, critics say, throwing diabetics under the bus.
“Several people took to social media Sunday and Monday ridiculing the North Carolina Senators for their ostensible apathy toward insulin users,” Battaglia reports. “The posts and tweets were laced with profanity. North Carolina’s Democratic Party spokeswoman Ellie Dougherty capitalized on the social media climate.”
Battaglia quotes Dougherty as saying, “While President Biden and Democrats are working day in and day out to lower the cost of prescription drugs, reduce the deficit and fight rising costs without raising taxes a single penny on middle class families, Burr and Tillis’ vote underscores the GOP’s commitment to protecting Big Pharma and special interests over easing costs for North Carolina families.”
READ MORE: 'A Bernie Sanders acolyte': Why Republicans went from praising 'wildcard' Joe Manchin to hating him
Cheri Beasley, the Democratic nominee in North Carolina’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, was quick to lambast Burr and Tillis on Twitter. On August 7, Beasley tweeted, “Both NC senators just voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, which would lower costs at a time when millions of families are struggling. North Carolinians deserve more. As Senator, I will always fight for the people — not cower to corporate special interests…. Senator Burr and Tillis’ votes today were inexcusable.
READ MORE: What is the Inflation Reduction Act?
AlterNet - 13h ago
By Alex Henderson
On Sunday, August 7, the U.S. Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a $750 billion package addressing energy, climate change, health care and taxes. The bill passed 51-50 via the process known as budget reconciliation, allowing the Senate’s narrow Democratic majority to bypass the 60-vote rule of the filibuster. Now, the bill will go to the U.S. House of Representatives for consideration, and Democrats are optimistic that it will pass in the House and make it to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law.
Both of North Carolina’s Republican U.S. senators, Richard Burr and Thom Tillis, voted against the bill. Journalist Danielle Battaglia, in an article published by the Raleigh News and Observer on August 8, stresses that they are facing a “vehement backlash” in their state for, during debates on the bill, opposing a proposal to limit how much private insurance companies can charge for the insulin used by diabetics.
“Debate on the bill began Saturday morning and stretched into Sunday,” Battaglia explains. “Senators went back and forth on numerous amendments, but one subjected Burr and Tillis to vehement backlash from their constituents: a $35 cap on insulin from private insurance companies…. Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough — who serves as the chamber’s official adviser and rule keeper — deemed an insulin price cap for private insurers a violation of the Senate’s rules for the reconciliation process to pass the bill on a bare majority. Senate Democrats sought to overrule MacDonough’s decision in a vote that needed 60 supporting members.”
READ MORE: Economist Paul Krugman explains why Democrats’ climate bill could be a 'major step toward saving the planet'
Battaglia adds, “The New York Times reported that, despite the rule violation, Democrats ‘dared’ Republicans to vote against the cap by keeping the provision in the bill. Tillis and Burr rarely cave to such political pressure. Both voted against capping insulin costs along with 43 other Republicans, forcing the provision to fail.”
Senate Democrats forced Burr, Tilllis and other Republicans to go on the record about whether or not they believed a $35 insulin cap should be part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — and both of them are being lambasted for, critics say, throwing diabetics under the bus.
“Several people took to social media Sunday and Monday ridiculing the North Carolina Senators for their ostensible apathy toward insulin users,” Battaglia reports. “The posts and tweets were laced with profanity. North Carolina’s Democratic Party spokeswoman Ellie Dougherty capitalized on the social media climate.”
Battaglia quotes Dougherty as saying, “While President Biden and Democrats are working day in and day out to lower the cost of prescription drugs, reduce the deficit and fight rising costs without raising taxes a single penny on middle class families, Burr and Tillis’ vote underscores the GOP’s commitment to protecting Big Pharma and special interests over easing costs for North Carolina families.”
READ MORE: 'A Bernie Sanders acolyte': Why Republicans went from praising 'wildcard' Joe Manchin to hating him
Cheri Beasley, the Democratic nominee in North Carolina’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, was quick to lambast Burr and Tillis on Twitter. On August 7, Beasley tweeted, “Both NC senators just voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, which would lower costs at a time when millions of families are struggling. North Carolinians deserve more. As Senator, I will always fight for the people — not cower to corporate special interests…. Senator Burr and Tillis’ votes today were inexcusable.
READ MORE: What is the Inflation Reduction Act?
Researchers 'revive' organs in dead pigs, raising questions about life and death
Sharon Kirkey - Wednesday
© Provided by National PostYale University team restored blood circulation and other cellular functions in multiple porcine organs an hour after pigs (not this one) died from cardiac arrest.
Scientists have rebooted vital organs of dead pigs in an experiment bioethicists say may force a rethink of how the body dies, and that further blurs the boundaries between life and death.
Using a system dubbed “OrganEx” that uses special pumps and a cocktail of chemicals to restore oxygen and prevent cell death throughout the body, the Yale University team restored blood circulation and other cellular functions in multiple porcine organs an hour after the pigs’ deaths from cardiac arrest.
Electrical activity was restored in the heart, for instance. The muscle was contracting.
The study “reveals the underappreciated capacity for cellular recovery after prolonged whole-body warm ischemia (loss of blood circulation, and thus oxygen) in a large mammal,” the team r eports in the journal Nature .
The experiments also bolster findings from another Yale-led project three years ago that involved disembodied pigs’ brains. Using a similar perfusion system called BrainEx, researchers restored some functions in brains taken from pigs four hours after they were killed in a meatpacking plant.
That was an isolated organ. The team wondered, could they apply a similar approach on a whole-body scale?
Together, the research challenges old thinking that the body’s cells and organs begin to be irreversibly destroyed within minutes of the heart stopping. Instead, “cellular demise can be halted, and their state (can) be shifted towards recovery at molecular and cellular levels,” the Yale team writes in Nature.
The work has the potential to help reduce the amount of damage that is done to people’s brains after a stroke, or repair heart function after a heart attack.
© David Andrijevic, Zvonimir Vrselja, Taras Lysyy, Shupei Zhang; Sestan Laboratorydrawing showing the difference between pigs put on the OrganEx system versus those put on ECMO.
But the greatest benefit might come in expanding the supply of donor organs for transplant. And there’s where things get ethically complicated.
Donor organs can be retrieved from people who are declared brain-stem dead. They’re medically and legally dead, but their hearts are still beating. But seat belt and helmet laws and advances in treating brain injuries means fewer people are dying from brain death.
A trend now is to retrieve organs from “donation after circulatory death” donors, typically people on life support with such a bleak prognosis the decision to remove life support is made. Once the heart stops beating and doctors wait the obligatory five minutes before declaring death, the donor organs are retrieved. But surgeons must move quickly. The organs deteriorate once starved of a blood supply and oxygen.
OrganEx has the potential to give doctors more time to retrieve the organs after life support has been switched off.
But that approach would also require the “obligatory” clamping of the main arteries supplying blood to the brain to prevent any blood reaching the brain of the deceased organ donor, the Yale team notes.
In both the BrainEx and OrganEx experiments, the researchers, who did continuous EEG (electroencephalography) monitoring of the animals’ brains, found cellular activity in some areas of the brain had been restored. At no point did they see the kind of electrical activity that would indicate consciousness or awareness, they said.
However, the anesthetized pigs treated with OrganEx did jerk their heads and necks when injected with a contrast dye used for imaging. The EEG patterns were flat immediately before and after the movements. But the movements indicate some “preservation” of motor functions, the researchers said.
The OrganEx system works much like a heart-lung bypass machine. The perfusion device is connected to the pig’s circulatory system. A synthetic fluid that contains Hemopure, a blood-like product, and a dozen other chemicals that suppress cell death and inflammation is pumped throughout the pig’s body.
The researchers anesthetized the animals and then stopped their hearts. An hour after they were dead, the pigs were connected to the OrganEx system. The animals were compared to a group of pigs placed on ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a machine that pumps the pig’s own oxygenated blood throughout the body.
After six hours of treatment, the scientists saw decreased cell death, less swelling and restored activity in the heart, liver, kidneys and pancreas in the OrganEx group. The chemical solution seemed to trigger genes involved in cell repair. Unlike the ECMO pigs, “we could see the heart was beating,” said first author David Andrijevic, an associate research scientist in neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine. It doesn’t mean the organs were functionally normally. There were no details on what the electrical activity might mean. “It was beating,” Andrijevic said. “The quality of this beating is debatable.”
“The next step is that we’re hoping to see complete tissue and organ recovery and, of course, eventually, to transplant these organs,” he said.
But the team was surprised by how much they were able to restore blood flow and deliver adequate levels of oxygen to the whole body throughout the entire experiment. This wasn’t a 200-gram pig brain but 30-35-kg swine, Andrijevic said. Six hours later, there were no signs of rigor mortis in the OrganEx-perfused pigs.
“The implications are just so phenomenal as I see it,” said University of Toronto bioethicist Kerry Bowman.
“With heart attack and stroke, I say, hallelujah, because so much harm is done so quickly and if something like that is going to help, that would be wonderful.”
He’s also pro-transplant — “I’m not anti-transplant in any way, shape or form.” However, “what hits me like a tonne of bricks is that you are really manipulating the boundary between life and death.”
It’s like throwing a switch, he said. Living, dead, living, dead. “If you can restore a lot of these organs, how dead is the person?”
“What they are proposing here is that a person would be taken off life support, declared dead, perfuse them with OrganEx and then insert a balloon to block access to the brain,” Bowman said. “And the reason for that is you would not want any brain activity, because that would raise questions as to whether this person was truly dead or not.”
“Once you’ve been declared dead you would kind of reanimate aspects of this person to use their organs, while blocking their brain,” Bowman said.
“There is no indication that if you didn’t do that, that this person would recover or have any level of consciousness. (But) we simply don’t know those things…. I think we need a lot more clarity as to where this is going.”
Restoring cellular activity isn’t the same as coming back into human existence, said Arthur Caplan, a medical ethics expert at NYU. The experiment is important for “trying to figure out what can be restored, what can be resuscitated, what can be partially restored after death.”
However, “if you can get biological activity in cells, in muscles, and they’re moving and you seem to see signs of what I’ll call ‘life’ in a body, in an animal that’s been dead for an hour, do we need to rethink how we understand cardiac death, not brain death.”
“If you could get some function back by putting in this OrganEx solution, would that mean that should be tried on people whose hearts have stopped before we pronounce them dead?”
It may be possible to use the technique to put people who have suffered a catastrophic injury into a “suspended animation kind of situation” long enough to perform emergency surgery, he added.
Life — after life: Does consciousness continue after our brain dies?
The experiment is further reminder that death is a process, rather than an abrupt event, Caplan said. “Yes, your brain my stop, your heart may stop but other parts of the body may peter out as opposed to all shutting down” within minutes or seconds.
“I think a lot of people are likely to assume that when you’re dead, everything is dead all at once. This experiment suggests to me that isn’t true.”
A lot more animal work would be needed to be absolutely certain “that you couldn’t get meaningful brain activity back,” Caplan said. “What I personally believe to be true, watching a lot of organ procurement over the years, and a lot of dying, is that the brain is much more vulnerable.”
“When we see someone whose heart hasn’t worked for five minutes, we know their brain is gone,” even if it means getting something in their liver to work, Caplan said. “Tying off flow to the brain would not be trying to fudge the definition of death.”
National Post
Sharon Kirkey - Wednesday
© Provided by National PostYale University team restored blood circulation and other cellular functions in multiple porcine organs an hour after pigs (not this one) died from cardiac arrest.
Scientists have rebooted vital organs of dead pigs in an experiment bioethicists say may force a rethink of how the body dies, and that further blurs the boundaries between life and death.
Using a system dubbed “OrganEx” that uses special pumps and a cocktail of chemicals to restore oxygen and prevent cell death throughout the body, the Yale University team restored blood circulation and other cellular functions in multiple porcine organs an hour after the pigs’ deaths from cardiac arrest.
Electrical activity was restored in the heart, for instance. The muscle was contracting.
The study “reveals the underappreciated capacity for cellular recovery after prolonged whole-body warm ischemia (loss of blood circulation, and thus oxygen) in a large mammal,” the team r eports in the journal Nature .
The experiments also bolster findings from another Yale-led project three years ago that involved disembodied pigs’ brains. Using a similar perfusion system called BrainEx, researchers restored some functions in brains taken from pigs four hours after they were killed in a meatpacking plant.
That was an isolated organ. The team wondered, could they apply a similar approach on a whole-body scale?
Together, the research challenges old thinking that the body’s cells and organs begin to be irreversibly destroyed within minutes of the heart stopping. Instead, “cellular demise can be halted, and their state (can) be shifted towards recovery at molecular and cellular levels,” the Yale team writes in Nature.
The work has the potential to help reduce the amount of damage that is done to people’s brains after a stroke, or repair heart function after a heart attack.
© David Andrijevic, Zvonimir Vrselja, Taras Lysyy, Shupei Zhang; Sestan Laboratorydrawing showing the difference between pigs put on the OrganEx system versus those put on ECMO.
But the greatest benefit might come in expanding the supply of donor organs for transplant. And there’s where things get ethically complicated.
Donor organs can be retrieved from people who are declared brain-stem dead. They’re medically and legally dead, but their hearts are still beating. But seat belt and helmet laws and advances in treating brain injuries means fewer people are dying from brain death.
A trend now is to retrieve organs from “donation after circulatory death” donors, typically people on life support with such a bleak prognosis the decision to remove life support is made. Once the heart stops beating and doctors wait the obligatory five minutes before declaring death, the donor organs are retrieved. But surgeons must move quickly. The organs deteriorate once starved of a blood supply and oxygen.
OrganEx has the potential to give doctors more time to retrieve the organs after life support has been switched off.
But that approach would also require the “obligatory” clamping of the main arteries supplying blood to the brain to prevent any blood reaching the brain of the deceased organ donor, the Yale team notes.
In both the BrainEx and OrganEx experiments, the researchers, who did continuous EEG (electroencephalography) monitoring of the animals’ brains, found cellular activity in some areas of the brain had been restored. At no point did they see the kind of electrical activity that would indicate consciousness or awareness, they said.
However, the anesthetized pigs treated with OrganEx did jerk their heads and necks when injected with a contrast dye used for imaging. The EEG patterns were flat immediately before and after the movements. But the movements indicate some “preservation” of motor functions, the researchers said.
The OrganEx system works much like a heart-lung bypass machine. The perfusion device is connected to the pig’s circulatory system. A synthetic fluid that contains Hemopure, a blood-like product, and a dozen other chemicals that suppress cell death and inflammation is pumped throughout the pig’s body.
The researchers anesthetized the animals and then stopped their hearts. An hour after they were dead, the pigs were connected to the OrganEx system. The animals were compared to a group of pigs placed on ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a machine that pumps the pig’s own oxygenated blood throughout the body.
After six hours of treatment, the scientists saw decreased cell death, less swelling and restored activity in the heart, liver, kidneys and pancreas in the OrganEx group. The chemical solution seemed to trigger genes involved in cell repair. Unlike the ECMO pigs, “we could see the heart was beating,” said first author David Andrijevic, an associate research scientist in neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine. It doesn’t mean the organs were functionally normally. There were no details on what the electrical activity might mean. “It was beating,” Andrijevic said. “The quality of this beating is debatable.”
“The next step is that we’re hoping to see complete tissue and organ recovery and, of course, eventually, to transplant these organs,” he said.
But the team was surprised by how much they were able to restore blood flow and deliver adequate levels of oxygen to the whole body throughout the entire experiment. This wasn’t a 200-gram pig brain but 30-35-kg swine, Andrijevic said. Six hours later, there were no signs of rigor mortis in the OrganEx-perfused pigs.
“The implications are just so phenomenal as I see it,” said University of Toronto bioethicist Kerry Bowman.
“With heart attack and stroke, I say, hallelujah, because so much harm is done so quickly and if something like that is going to help, that would be wonderful.”
He’s also pro-transplant — “I’m not anti-transplant in any way, shape or form.” However, “what hits me like a tonne of bricks is that you are really manipulating the boundary between life and death.”
It’s like throwing a switch, he said. Living, dead, living, dead. “If you can restore a lot of these organs, how dead is the person?”
“What they are proposing here is that a person would be taken off life support, declared dead, perfuse them with OrganEx and then insert a balloon to block access to the brain,” Bowman said. “And the reason for that is you would not want any brain activity, because that would raise questions as to whether this person was truly dead or not.”
“Once you’ve been declared dead you would kind of reanimate aspects of this person to use their organs, while blocking their brain,” Bowman said.
“There is no indication that if you didn’t do that, that this person would recover or have any level of consciousness. (But) we simply don’t know those things…. I think we need a lot more clarity as to where this is going.”
Restoring cellular activity isn’t the same as coming back into human existence, said Arthur Caplan, a medical ethics expert at NYU. The experiment is important for “trying to figure out what can be restored, what can be resuscitated, what can be partially restored after death.”
However, “if you can get biological activity in cells, in muscles, and they’re moving and you seem to see signs of what I’ll call ‘life’ in a body, in an animal that’s been dead for an hour, do we need to rethink how we understand cardiac death, not brain death.”
“If you could get some function back by putting in this OrganEx solution, would that mean that should be tried on people whose hearts have stopped before we pronounce them dead?”
It may be possible to use the technique to put people who have suffered a catastrophic injury into a “suspended animation kind of situation” long enough to perform emergency surgery, he added.
Life — after life: Does consciousness continue after our brain dies?
The experiment is further reminder that death is a process, rather than an abrupt event, Caplan said. “Yes, your brain my stop, your heart may stop but other parts of the body may peter out as opposed to all shutting down” within minutes or seconds.
“I think a lot of people are likely to assume that when you’re dead, everything is dead all at once. This experiment suggests to me that isn’t true.”
A lot more animal work would be needed to be absolutely certain “that you couldn’t get meaningful brain activity back,” Caplan said. “What I personally believe to be true, watching a lot of organ procurement over the years, and a lot of dying, is that the brain is much more vulnerable.”
“When we see someone whose heart hasn’t worked for five minutes, we know their brain is gone,” even if it means getting something in their liver to work, Caplan said. “Tying off flow to the brain would not be trying to fudge the definition of death.”
National Post
Oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster are STILL present, study says
Jonathan Chadwick For Mailonline - Yesterday
Traces of oil from BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster are still present more than 10 years after the devastating spill, a new study reveals.
Researchers have looked at the long-lasting effects of the explosion in April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect.
They say small amounts of 'highly weathered oil residues' from the disaster were still present in the surroundings as recently as 2020.
Oily layers coated grasses along the shorelines and some particles even sank to the seafloor, staying there for a decade.
After the Deepwater Horizon spill on April 20 2010, 210 million gallons (795 million litres) of live oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of 87 days.
Small amounts of highly weathered oil residues from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster were still present in the surroundings ten years later, a study shows.
THE DEEPWATER HORIZON DISASTER: WHAT HAPPENED?
On the night of April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a rig owned by Transocean Ltd., burst into flames after drilling a well for BP PLC, killing 11 workers on or near the drilling floor.
The rest of the crew evacuated, but two days later the rig toppled into the Gulf and sank to the sea floor. The bodies were never recovered.
Over the next 85 days, 206 million gallons of oil - 19 times more than the Exxon Valdez spilled - spewed from the well.
In response, the nation commandeered the largest offshore fleet of vessels since D-Day, and BP spent billions of dollars to clean up the mess, saving itself from collapse.
BP was suspended from performing any new government work in America in November 2012, after it agreed to plead guilty and pay a $4.5billion fine (£2.8billion) for criminal charges over the disaster.
But it left lingering oil residues which have altered life in the ocean by reducing biodiversity in sites closest to the spill.
'Our paper describes the most abundant chemicals that make up typical crude oil and their potential fates in the environment.'
Overton and his collaborators focused on the components that were present at the highest concentrations in spilled oil and those that are the most toxic, as listed on the US Environmental Protection Agency's priority list.
By collecting and analysing samples from the water, seafloor and surrounding shorelines in numerous response studies, they followed 'chemical transformations' that occurred in the following months and years.
Once released into the environment, significant portions of the oil evaporated into the air (between 30 per cent and 40 per cent), they found.
Jonathan Chadwick For Mailonline - Yesterday
Traces of oil from BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster are still present more than 10 years after the devastating spill, a new study reveals.
Researchers have looked at the long-lasting effects of the explosion in April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect.
They say small amounts of 'highly weathered oil residues' from the disaster were still present in the surroundings as recently as 2020.
Oily layers coated grasses along the shorelines and some particles even sank to the seafloor, staying there for a decade.
After the Deepwater Horizon spill on April 20 2010, 210 million gallons (795 million litres) of live oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of 87 days.
Small amounts of highly weathered oil residues from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster were still present in the surroundings ten years later, a study shows.
This photo taken on April 21, 2010 by the US Coast Guard shows fire boat response crews as they battle the blazing remnants of the BP Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico
Tendrils of crude oil cover the waters of the Gulf of Mexico following the explosive sinking of the BP operated Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig on April 26, 2010
Tendrils of crude oil cover the waters of the Gulf of Mexico following the explosive sinking of the BP operated Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig on April 26, 2010
The glove-covered hands of Dan Howells, deputy campaign director with Greenpeace, are coated with a layer of oil after he dipped them in oil floating on the surface in the Gulf of Mexico following the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill near Grand Isle, Louisiana, June 10, 2010
Oil slicks covered an estimated area of 57,500 square miles (149,000 square km) – an area the same size as England and Wales combined.
Staring on April 20, 2010 and lasting 84 days, it was the largest, longest lasting and deepest oil spill accident in US waters.
The new study has been led by Edward Overton, a professor at Louisiana State University's Department of Environmental Sciences in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
'The better we understand the chemicals and their chemical reactive properties as well as their physical properties, the better we will be able to mitigate oil spills and understand and detect environmental damages from oil spills,' he said.
Oil slicks covered an estimated area of 57,500 square miles (149,000 square km) – an area the same size as England and Wales combined.
Staring on April 20, 2010 and lasting 84 days, it was the largest, longest lasting and deepest oil spill accident in US waters.
The new study has been led by Edward Overton, a professor at Louisiana State University's Department of Environmental Sciences in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
'The better we understand the chemicals and their chemical reactive properties as well as their physical properties, the better we will be able to mitigate oil spills and understand and detect environmental damages from oil spills,' he said.
Related video: How to clean the world's most polluted rivers (CNBC)Duration 13:59 View on Watch
THE DEEPWATER HORIZON DISASTER: WHAT HAPPENED?
On the night of April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a rig owned by Transocean Ltd., burst into flames after drilling a well for BP PLC, killing 11 workers on or near the drilling floor.
The rest of the crew evacuated, but two days later the rig toppled into the Gulf and sank to the sea floor. The bodies were never recovered.
Over the next 85 days, 206 million gallons of oil - 19 times more than the Exxon Valdez spilled - spewed from the well.
In response, the nation commandeered the largest offshore fleet of vessels since D-Day, and BP spent billions of dollars to clean up the mess, saving itself from collapse.
BP was suspended from performing any new government work in America in November 2012, after it agreed to plead guilty and pay a $4.5billion fine (£2.8billion) for criminal charges over the disaster.
But it left lingering oil residues which have altered life in the ocean by reducing biodiversity in sites closest to the spill.
'Our paper describes the most abundant chemicals that make up typical crude oil and their potential fates in the environment.'
Overton and his collaborators focused on the components that were present at the highest concentrations in spilled oil and those that are the most toxic, as listed on the US Environmental Protection Agency's priority list.
By collecting and analysing samples from the water, seafloor and surrounding shorelines in numerous response studies, they followed 'chemical transformations' that occurred in the following months and years.
Once released into the environment, significant portions of the oil evaporated into the air (between 30 per cent and 40 per cent), they found.
Oil covered brown pelicans found off the Louisiana coast and affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico wait in a holding pen for cleaning at the Fort Jackson Oiled Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Buras, Louisiana, June 11, 2010
Water-soluble chemicals dissolved relatively quickly into the sea and were biodegraded by marine organisms.
However, this was not true for all of the spilled oil's components, as oily layers coated the shorelines grasses and some particles even sank to the seafloor.
Large portions of the spill also underwent sun-dependent chemical transformations or were degraded by microbes.
Water-soluble chemicals dissolved relatively quickly into the sea and were biodegraded by marine organisms.
However, this was not true for all of the spilled oil's components, as oily layers coated the shorelines grasses and some particles even sank to the seafloor.
Large portions of the spill also underwent sun-dependent chemical transformations or were degraded by microbes.
Workers are seen as they use a vacuum hose to capture some of the oil washing on to Fourchon Beach from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on June 28, 2010 in Port Fourchon, Louisiana
'Oil's compounds are a type of material that can be degraded by sunlight and marine bacteria (biodegradation), in contrast to other types of pollutants such as the chlorinated pesticides like DDT,' said Professor Overton.
'Oil spills release lots of chemicals quickly and most damage from oil spills occurs fairly soon after the spill.'
The team also said oil goes through transformations that are dependent on the local conditions and weather, which makes them difficult to predict for future spills.
'Environmental circumstances surrounding specific spills greatly affect how quickly the compounds can react, what they cover or coat and how much oxygen can be taken up in critical habitats,' said Professor Overton.
The study has been published today in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. Read more
'Oil's compounds are a type of material that can be degraded by sunlight and marine bacteria (biodegradation), in contrast to other types of pollutants such as the chlorinated pesticides like DDT,' said Professor Overton.
'Oil spills release lots of chemicals quickly and most damage from oil spills occurs fairly soon after the spill.'
The team also said oil goes through transformations that are dependent on the local conditions and weather, which makes them difficult to predict for future spills.
'Environmental circumstances surrounding specific spills greatly affect how quickly the compounds can react, what they cover or coat and how much oxygen can be taken up in critical habitats,' said Professor Overton.
The study has been published today in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. Read more
LayV: New virus found in humans in China - study
By TZVI JOFFRE -
A new virus known as Langya henipavirus (LayV) has been found in 35 patients in China, a new correspondence from Chinese and Singaporean scientists published in The New England Journal of Medicine revealed on Thursday.
© (photo credit: Electron Microscopy Unit AAHL, CSIRO)
By TZVI JOFFRE -
A new virus known as Langya henipavirus (LayV) has been found in 35 patients in China, a new correspondence from Chinese and Singaporean scientists published in The New England Journal of Medicine revealed on Thursday.
© (photo credit: Electron Microscopy Unit AAHL, CSIRO)
Hendra virus
The virus is a henipavirus and is a relative of the Hendra and Nipah viruses, which are already known to infect humans and cause fatal disease. The virus is most closely related to the Mojiang henipavirus.
26 of the patients were infected only with LayV and suffered from fever, fatigue, coughing, anorexia, muscle aches and pain, nausea, headache and vomiting, as well as thrombocytopenia (low blood platelet count), leukopenia (low white blood cell count) and impaired liver and kidney function.
No deaths have been reported due to the virus, although its relatives the Hendra and Nipah viruses have an estimated mortality rate of between about 40-70%.
The scientists also found the virus in goats and dogs and in shrews in the wild, with the correspondence suggesting that the shrew may be a natural reservoir of LayV.
Health care worker takes swab samples from Israelis at a covid-19 drive through testing complex in Modi'in, February 1, 2022. (credit: YOSSI ALONI/FLASH90)
The scientists stressed that while they are still unable to confirm that the symptoms were caused by LayV infection, a number of factors indicated that the virus was the cause of the symptoms.
For one, in 26 out of the 35 patients, LayV was the only potential pathogen detected. Additionally, patients with pneumonia had higher viral loads than those without pneumonia.
Unclear if the virus can pass from human to human
The scientists added that they were unable to find evidence for human-to-human transmission of the virus, although such transmission has been reported for the Nipah virus and the sample size collected by the scientists was too small to determine the status of human-to-human transmission. There was no close contact or common exposure history among the patients.
After the correspondence was published, Tawain's Centers for Disease Control announced that it was monitoring the development of LayV and would establish a standardized procedure for domestic laboratories to conduct genome sequencing and strengthen surveillance.
The virus is a henipavirus and is a relative of the Hendra and Nipah viruses, which are already known to infect humans and cause fatal disease. The virus is most closely related to the Mojiang henipavirus.
26 of the patients were infected only with LayV and suffered from fever, fatigue, coughing, anorexia, muscle aches and pain, nausea, headache and vomiting, as well as thrombocytopenia (low blood platelet count), leukopenia (low white blood cell count) and impaired liver and kidney function.
No deaths have been reported due to the virus, although its relatives the Hendra and Nipah viruses have an estimated mortality rate of between about 40-70%.
The scientists also found the virus in goats and dogs and in shrews in the wild, with the correspondence suggesting that the shrew may be a natural reservoir of LayV.
Health care worker takes swab samples from Israelis at a covid-19 drive through testing complex in Modi'in, February 1, 2022. (credit: YOSSI ALONI/FLASH90)
The scientists stressed that while they are still unable to confirm that the symptoms were caused by LayV infection, a number of factors indicated that the virus was the cause of the symptoms.
For one, in 26 out of the 35 patients, LayV was the only potential pathogen detected. Additionally, patients with pneumonia had higher viral loads than those without pneumonia.
Unclear if the virus can pass from human to human
The scientists added that they were unable to find evidence for human-to-human transmission of the virus, although such transmission has been reported for the Nipah virus and the sample size collected by the scientists was too small to determine the status of human-to-human transmission. There was no close contact or common exposure history among the patients.
After the correspondence was published, Tawain's Centers for Disease Control announced that it was monitoring the development of LayV and would establish a standardized procedure for domestic laboratories to conduct genome sequencing and strengthen surveillance.
Solving the Hawking Paradox: What Happens When Black Holes Die?
Robert Lea -POPMECH
In what is arguably his most significant contribution to science, Stephen Hawking suggested that black holes can leak a form of radiation that causes them to gradually ebb away, and eventually end their lives in a massive explosive event.
This radiation, later called “Hawking radiation,” inadvertently causes a problem at the intersection of general relativity and quantum physics— the former being the best description we have of gravity and the universe on cosmically massive scales, while the latter is the most robust model of the physics that governs the very small.
The two theories have been confirmed repeatedly since their distinct inceptions at the start of the 20th century. Yet, they remain frustratingly incompatible.
This incompatibility, which mainly arises from the lack of a theory of “quantum gravity,” was compounded in the mid-1970s when Hawking took the principles of quantum physics and applied them to the edge of black holes. A paradox was born that physicists have been working for 50 years to solve.
We may finally be on the verge of a solution thanks to review published in the journal Europhysics Letters last month. In it, University of Sussex physics researchers Xavier Calmet and Stephen D. H. Hsu detail the problem of the Hawking paradox and potential solutions to this cosmological problem.
What’s the Problem With Hawking Radiation?
In a 1974 letter entitled Black hole explosions? published in the journal Nature, a young Hawking proposed that quantum effects, usually ignored in black hole physics, could become significant in the deterioration of mass of a black hole over a period of approximately 10¹⁷ (10 followed by 16 zeroes) seconds.
Black holes are created when massive stars reach the end of their lives and the fuel they use for nuclear fusion is exhausted. The cessation of nuclear fusion ends the outward pressure that supports a star against the inward force of its own gravity.
This results in a core collapse that creates a point in which spacetime is infinitely curved — a central singularity that physics currently can’t explain. At the outer edge of this extreme curvature is the “event horizon” of the black hole, or the point at which not even light is fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of the black hole.
“Hawking investigated quantum effects close to the horizon of black holes realizing that pairs of particles would be spontaneously generated here,” Calmet tells Popular Mechanics. “Looking at a specific pair of particles, he could show that one of the two when produced at the event horizon would fall into the black hole never to be seen again. The other would escape and be in principle visible to an outside observer. This is the famous Hawking radiation.”
When these so-called virtual particles arise, they do so with equal and opposite charges to avoid violating the law of conservation of energy, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Like a bank, the vacuum of space has an overdraft facility, but this debt is usually quickly paid back by the particles annihilating each other.
If one particle escapes as Hawking radiation and avoids annihilation, the energy debt that remains has to be paid by the mass of the black hole. This causes it to gradually evaporate as more particles pop into existence and more Hawking radiation is emitted, sapping more mass.
“Hawking radiation is thermal, and thermal radiation is pretty much featureless. This means that it cannot carry information about the object that emitted it,” Calmet says. “This would be a serious issue for black holes.”
He points out that Hawking’s calculation implies that the information about what went into the black hole would be destroyed as the black hole evaporates.
“If true, this would be an issue for physics as one of the key properties of quantum mechanics called ‘unitarity’ implies that it is always possible to watch a movie backward. In other words, from the observation of the radiation emitted by a black hole, quantum mechanics tells us that we should be able to reconstruct all the history of the black hole, what went into it,” Calmet says. “If Hawking is right, we would need to accept that one of the well-established theories of physics is wrong. Either we need to modify quantum mechanics or maybe Einstein’s theory of general relativity.”
Fortunately, just this year, the physicists suggested an idea that could do away with the Hawking paradox by using existing mechanisms.
Black Holes May Have Hair After All
Despite being a powerful and mysterious spacetime phenomenon, black holes are fairly easy to describe. This is because they can only have three properties that we are sure of: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. Theoretical physicist John Wheeler summed this up with the phrase “black holes have no hair.”
Calmet and Hsu suggest that information carried by swallowed matter may be encoded in the gravitational field of a black hole. By calculating corrections to gravity on a quantum level, they showed the potential of the star is sensitive to its internal conditions. This means black holes possess, for lack of a better term, “quantum hair” grown by its progenitor star’s composition.
“When this star collapses to a black hole, the correction remains and black holes thus have a quantum hair,” Calmet explains. “In other words, black holes have some quantum memory of their progenitor star.”
The duo followed this by suggesting that Hawking radiation isn’t entirely thermal in nature. Instead, they believe it has informational quantum hair encoded into it.
“The very small departures from thermality are enough to explain how the information that is in the black hole remains accessible to an outside observer,” Calmet argues. “This is enough to preserve unitarity and thus, there is no paradox.”
The beauty of Calmet and Hsu’s theory is it requires no adjustments to quantum mechanics or general relativity, or extra mechanisms not already proposed by physics.
“In the end, all the ingredients to solve the problem have been around for quite a while, in a sense Hawking could have solved it himself if he had looked for a simple explanation,” Calmet says. “It is striking to me that solving the information paradox could be done without positing new physics despite what most people have believed for almost five decades.”
Other ideas to solve Hawking’s paradox aren’t nearly as conservative. Indeed, some could change our fundamental concept of the universe–or should that be “universes?”
Black Holes and Baby Universes
The concept of the “multiverse” is the idea that multiple universes exist in addition to our own, but are separated and unable to interact. One new iteration of this idea suggests that the singularity at the heart of a black hole — the infinitely curved point at which all laws of physics break down — is actually a separate and distinct infant universe.
“In my theory, every black hole is actually a wormhole or an ‘Einstein-Rosen bridge’ to a new universe on the other side of the black hole’s event horizon,” Nikodem Poplawski, a physics lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the University of New Haven, tells Popular Mechanics.
This would mean each universe, like our own, could host billions of black holes, each containing its own baby universe. Poplawski says that this proposition resolves Hawking’s paradox naturally.
“The information does not disappear but goes to the baby universe on the other side of the black hole’s event horizon,” Poplawski continues. “The matter and information that falls into a black hole and emerges from a white hole [the opposite of a black hole which allows exit but not entry] in the baby universe.”
While the theory doesn’t explicitly account for Hawking radiation, much like Einstein’s original theory of general relativity, it doesn’t disallow it. With regard to the eventual evaporation of the black hole, Poplawski says this event would just permanently seal off the infant universe from its parent.
Many other ideas have been put forward to solve Hawking’s paradox, including information remaining in the black hole’s interior and emerging at the end of black hole evaporation. While none have quite wrapped the problem up in a neat bow, Calmet says some of the finest minds in physics are hard at work on the issue.
Hawking was a titan in his field, and his most significant work showed that not even cosmic titans like black holes can last forever. Hawking’s successors are working to ensure this impermanence applies to the paradox that bears his name.
Robert Lea -POPMECH
In what is arguably his most significant contribution to science, Stephen Hawking suggested that black holes can leak a form of radiation that causes them to gradually ebb away, and eventually end their lives in a massive explosive event.
This radiation, later called “Hawking radiation,” inadvertently causes a problem at the intersection of general relativity and quantum physics— the former being the best description we have of gravity and the universe on cosmically massive scales, while the latter is the most robust model of the physics that governs the very small.
The two theories have been confirmed repeatedly since their distinct inceptions at the start of the 20th century. Yet, they remain frustratingly incompatible.
This incompatibility, which mainly arises from the lack of a theory of “quantum gravity,” was compounded in the mid-1970s when Hawking took the principles of quantum physics and applied them to the edge of black holes. A paradox was born that physicists have been working for 50 years to solve.
We may finally be on the verge of a solution thanks to review published in the journal Europhysics Letters last month. In it, University of Sussex physics researchers Xavier Calmet and Stephen D. H. Hsu detail the problem of the Hawking paradox and potential solutions to this cosmological problem.
What’s the Problem With Hawking Radiation?
In a 1974 letter entitled Black hole explosions? published in the journal Nature, a young Hawking proposed that quantum effects, usually ignored in black hole physics, could become significant in the deterioration of mass of a black hole over a period of approximately 10¹⁷ (10 followed by 16 zeroes) seconds.
Black holes are created when massive stars reach the end of their lives and the fuel they use for nuclear fusion is exhausted. The cessation of nuclear fusion ends the outward pressure that supports a star against the inward force of its own gravity.
This results in a core collapse that creates a point in which spacetime is infinitely curved — a central singularity that physics currently can’t explain. At the outer edge of this extreme curvature is the “event horizon” of the black hole, or the point at which not even light is fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of the black hole.
“Hawking investigated quantum effects close to the horizon of black holes realizing that pairs of particles would be spontaneously generated here,” Calmet tells Popular Mechanics. “Looking at a specific pair of particles, he could show that one of the two when produced at the event horizon would fall into the black hole never to be seen again. The other would escape and be in principle visible to an outside observer. This is the famous Hawking radiation.”
When these so-called virtual particles arise, they do so with equal and opposite charges to avoid violating the law of conservation of energy, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Like a bank, the vacuum of space has an overdraft facility, but this debt is usually quickly paid back by the particles annihilating each other.
If one particle escapes as Hawking radiation and avoids annihilation, the energy debt that remains has to be paid by the mass of the black hole. This causes it to gradually evaporate as more particles pop into existence and more Hawking radiation is emitted, sapping more mass.
“Hawking radiation is thermal, and thermal radiation is pretty much featureless. This means that it cannot carry information about the object that emitted it,” Calmet says. “This would be a serious issue for black holes.”
He points out that Hawking’s calculation implies that the information about what went into the black hole would be destroyed as the black hole evaporates.
“If true, this would be an issue for physics as one of the key properties of quantum mechanics called ‘unitarity’ implies that it is always possible to watch a movie backward. In other words, from the observation of the radiation emitted by a black hole, quantum mechanics tells us that we should be able to reconstruct all the history of the black hole, what went into it,” Calmet says. “If Hawking is right, we would need to accept that one of the well-established theories of physics is wrong. Either we need to modify quantum mechanics or maybe Einstein’s theory of general relativity.”
Fortunately, just this year, the physicists suggested an idea that could do away with the Hawking paradox by using existing mechanisms.
Black Holes May Have Hair After All
Despite being a powerful and mysterious spacetime phenomenon, black holes are fairly easy to describe. This is because they can only have three properties that we are sure of: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. Theoretical physicist John Wheeler summed this up with the phrase “black holes have no hair.”
Calmet and Hsu suggest that information carried by swallowed matter may be encoded in the gravitational field of a black hole. By calculating corrections to gravity on a quantum level, they showed the potential of the star is sensitive to its internal conditions. This means black holes possess, for lack of a better term, “quantum hair” grown by its progenitor star’s composition.
“When this star collapses to a black hole, the correction remains and black holes thus have a quantum hair,” Calmet explains. “In other words, black holes have some quantum memory of their progenitor star.”
The duo followed this by suggesting that Hawking radiation isn’t entirely thermal in nature. Instead, they believe it has informational quantum hair encoded into it.
“The very small departures from thermality are enough to explain how the information that is in the black hole remains accessible to an outside observer,” Calmet argues. “This is enough to preserve unitarity and thus, there is no paradox.”
The beauty of Calmet and Hsu’s theory is it requires no adjustments to quantum mechanics or general relativity, or extra mechanisms not already proposed by physics.
“In the end, all the ingredients to solve the problem have been around for quite a while, in a sense Hawking could have solved it himself if he had looked for a simple explanation,” Calmet says. “It is striking to me that solving the information paradox could be done without positing new physics despite what most people have believed for almost five decades.”
Other ideas to solve Hawking’s paradox aren’t nearly as conservative. Indeed, some could change our fundamental concept of the universe–or should that be “universes?”
Black Holes and Baby Universes
The concept of the “multiverse” is the idea that multiple universes exist in addition to our own, but are separated and unable to interact. One new iteration of this idea suggests that the singularity at the heart of a black hole — the infinitely curved point at which all laws of physics break down — is actually a separate and distinct infant universe.
“In my theory, every black hole is actually a wormhole or an ‘Einstein-Rosen bridge’ to a new universe on the other side of the black hole’s event horizon,” Nikodem Poplawski, a physics lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the University of New Haven, tells Popular Mechanics.
This would mean each universe, like our own, could host billions of black holes, each containing its own baby universe. Poplawski says that this proposition resolves Hawking’s paradox naturally.
“The information does not disappear but goes to the baby universe on the other side of the black hole’s event horizon,” Poplawski continues. “The matter and information that falls into a black hole and emerges from a white hole [the opposite of a black hole which allows exit but not entry] in the baby universe.”
While the theory doesn’t explicitly account for Hawking radiation, much like Einstein’s original theory of general relativity, it doesn’t disallow it. With regard to the eventual evaporation of the black hole, Poplawski says this event would just permanently seal off the infant universe from its parent.
Many other ideas have been put forward to solve Hawking’s paradox, including information remaining in the black hole’s interior and emerging at the end of black hole evaporation. While none have quite wrapped the problem up in a neat bow, Calmet says some of the finest minds in physics are hard at work on the issue.
Hawking was a titan in his field, and his most significant work showed that not even cosmic titans like black holes can last forever. Hawking’s successors are working to ensure this impermanence applies to the paradox that bears his name.
✅ More Physics Stories We Love
Second Rare 'One-In-30-Million' Lobster Rescued From Red Lobster
Rare Orange Lobsters
The team from Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies saved the orange lobster, which has been dubbed "Biscuit."
In mid-July, an orange lobster, later named Cheddar, was discovered at a Red Lobster location in Florida. Employees called Ripley's Aquarium of Myrtle Beach and the organization took Cheddar in.
Like Cheddar, Biscuit was named after Red Lobster's popular menu item, the Cheddar Bay Biscuit.
A team from Ripley's Aquarium of Canada previously rescued an orange lobster, now named Pinchy, from a grocery store, per the release.
What Makes a Lobster's Color?
Ripley's Aquarium said in its press release that the color of a lobster may be affected by its diet and genetics.
While most lobsters are known to appear with a brownish color, the University of Maine's Lobster Institute reported that some lobsters can be different colors, like yellow or white.
With the exception of white lobsters, a lobster of any color will turn bright red when they are cooked.
A lobster's diet typically includes crabs, clams, starfish and occasionally other lobsters.
The press release issued by the aquarium said that Biscuit came from the same fishing area as Cheddar, which may further the theory that "unusual coloration" is contingent on a lobster's diet.
Jared Durrett, the director of husbandry at Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies, said they plan to study the reason behind the uptick in the rare color.
"Orange lobsters are uncommon but perhaps not as rare as we first thought," Durrett said. "Lobsters obtain their color through the pigments they ingest in their diet. If these orange lobsters are being harvested from the same region, perhaps their localized diet contains a pigment that, when paired with the lobster's genetics, creates the orange coloration we are seeing."
Nicole Bott, the senior director of communications at Red Lobster, said fishermen that work in the area where Cheddar and Biscuit were harvested have found other orange lobsters this time of year.
"This seems to indicate the coloring is coming from a different food source," she said.
What If I See A Rare Lobster?
Bott told Newsweek in an email that if an employee at a Red Lobster location believes they have a rare colored lobster, they send photos and notify her.
"We then work together along with our supply chain team to determine if the lobster is, in fact rare," she said. "If it is, we work on a rescue plan, which could include an aquarium or a release to the wild."
The release said that Biscuit will be exhibited later this year as she continues to get acclimated to her new home.
Newsweek reached out to Ripley's Aquarium for further comment.
A viral video showed a fisherman from Maine catching an orange lobster before releasing it back into the ocean.
Another rare lobster with "cotton candy" coloring was caught off the coast in Maine. Those who caught the lobster looked into local organizations and aquariums to see if one would adopt it.
Related Articles
Catherine Ferris -
For the second time in a matter of weeks, a rare orange lobster was rescued from a Red Lobster location. This time from a restaurant in Meridian, Mississippi.
A rare orange lobster was rescued from a Red Lobster restaurant location, making it the third orange lobster that the aquarium organization saved in about a year. Above, a stock image of a lobster haul and demonstration.
"With the statistic 'one-in-30 million' starting to raise eyebrows, Ripley's Aquariums is setting out to study these animals and better understand this anomaly," a press release by Ripley's Aquarium said.
For the second time in a matter of weeks, a rare orange lobster was rescued from a Red Lobster location. This time from a restaurant in Meridian, Mississippi.
A rare orange lobster was rescued from a Red Lobster restaurant location, making it the third orange lobster that the aquarium organization saved in about a year. Above, a stock image of a lobster haul and demonstration.
"With the statistic 'one-in-30 million' starting to raise eyebrows, Ripley's Aquariums is setting out to study these animals and better understand this anomaly," a press release by Ripley's Aquarium said.
Rare Orange Lobsters
The team from Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies saved the orange lobster, which has been dubbed "Biscuit."
In mid-July, an orange lobster, later named Cheddar, was discovered at a Red Lobster location in Florida. Employees called Ripley's Aquarium of Myrtle Beach and the organization took Cheddar in.
Like Cheddar, Biscuit was named after Red Lobster's popular menu item, the Cheddar Bay Biscuit.
A team from Ripley's Aquarium of Canada previously rescued an orange lobster, now named Pinchy, from a grocery store, per the release.
What Makes a Lobster's Color?
Ripley's Aquarium said in its press release that the color of a lobster may be affected by its diet and genetics.
While most lobsters are known to appear with a brownish color, the University of Maine's Lobster Institute reported that some lobsters can be different colors, like yellow or white.
With the exception of white lobsters, a lobster of any color will turn bright red when they are cooked.
A lobster's diet typically includes crabs, clams, starfish and occasionally other lobsters.
The press release issued by the aquarium said that Biscuit came from the same fishing area as Cheddar, which may further the theory that "unusual coloration" is contingent on a lobster's diet.
Jared Durrett, the director of husbandry at Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies, said they plan to study the reason behind the uptick in the rare color.
"Orange lobsters are uncommon but perhaps not as rare as we first thought," Durrett said. "Lobsters obtain their color through the pigments they ingest in their diet. If these orange lobsters are being harvested from the same region, perhaps their localized diet contains a pigment that, when paired with the lobster's genetics, creates the orange coloration we are seeing."
Nicole Bott, the senior director of communications at Red Lobster, said fishermen that work in the area where Cheddar and Biscuit were harvested have found other orange lobsters this time of year.
"This seems to indicate the coloring is coming from a different food source," she said.
What If I See A Rare Lobster?
Bott told Newsweek in an email that if an employee at a Red Lobster location believes they have a rare colored lobster, they send photos and notify her.
"We then work together along with our supply chain team to determine if the lobster is, in fact rare," she said. "If it is, we work on a rescue plan, which could include an aquarium or a release to the wild."
The release said that Biscuit will be exhibited later this year as she continues to get acclimated to her new home.
Newsweek reached out to Ripley's Aquarium for further comment.
A viral video showed a fisherman from Maine catching an orange lobster before releasing it back into the ocean.
Another rare lobster with "cotton candy" coloring was caught off the coast in Maine. Those who caught the lobster looked into local organizations and aquariums to see if one would adopt it.
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