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Canada could play key role in new space race to the moon


Canada could play a key role in a new space race to the moon -- one that might be described as an extra-terrestrial gold rush.

Industry insiders will be watching closely this week as the heads of the world's five biggest space agencies meet in Quebec City.

The five partners on the International Space Station will discuss the future of the orbiting space lab.

But they'll also address what's becoming a hot topic -- mining on the moon.

Medical isotopes possible without a nuclear reactor

VANCOUVER—Canadian scientists say they have developed a technique to produce medical isotopes in hospitals and clinics without the need for a nuclear reactor.

The announcement, on the final day of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Vancouver, could signal the end to a crisis that has shaken up the medical community, politicians in Ottawa, and patients throughout Canada.

Two ageing nuclear reactors produce about 75 per cent of the global supply of medical isotopes. One of them, the reactor in Chalk River, Ont., about 180 kilometres north of Ottawa, produces 40 per cent of the supply of the raw materials needed to produce the isotopes.

But the era of dependency on nuclear reactors in the production of isotopes is over, said Tom Ruth, senior scientist at TRIUMF, the national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics based in Vancouver.

“It’s clearly a financial issue with the government as they don’t want to invest more money into the existing reactor (at Chalk River),” he said Monday.

By upgrading equipment already stored in a dozen hospital basements across Canada, the scientists say they can manufacture the isotopes with out the nuclear component.

Michael Moore’s $2M hypocrite house: film director lives like the 1% he condemns.



It’s no secret that Moore has made millions from his muckraking documentaries, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t have. As one of the most successful documentary film-makers ever, he’s successfully tapped a rich vein of anti-capitalist rhetoric that sells well among U.S. liberals.

TORONTO - Hospital emergency rooms can cure what ails an elderly person, but they can also send them home with an unwanted souvenir of their visit.

A new study suggests emergency departments may be a source of infections for seniors who turn to them for care, and a potential starting point for some of the infectious outbreaks that make their way through long-term care facilities.

Researchers from Montreal and Riviere-du-loup, Que., and from Toronto looked at seniors living in long-term care, comparing infection rates among those who had been recently treated in an emergency department and those who had not.

They found those who had been to Emerg were nearly four times more likely to have a respiratory or gastrointestinal infection in the week after the hospital visit than seniors who had not been to the hospital.

Lead author Dr. Caroline Quach put it another way: There were 8.3 infections per 1,000 patient days in seniors upon their return from the emergency department compared to 3.4 infections per 1,000 patient days in those who didn't go to Emerg.