Ashley Hickey, a parent of a kid with celiac disease, is concerned that Nova Scotia's new school program does not offer any 100 per cent guaranteed gluten-free options.

A researcher studying the rise of extremism in Atlantic Canada warns Ku Klux Klan Halloween costumes are just one example of an insidious effort by far-right groups to normalize hateful attitudes.

Volunteers will be cutting hair at a salon based inside a Cape Breton food bank. The goal is to provide clients with the same salon experience paying customers would receive.

A Port Hawkesbury woman has long imagined a Remembrance Day with her great-uncle's war medals. It will happen this year for the first time thanks to some sleuthing and the kindness of her great-uncle's foster family.

About a thousand people stood solemnly in the rain at a cenotaph in downtown Halifax on Monday morning to pay tribute to veterans on Remembrance Day.

Building highways isn't the only solution to the growing problem of traffic congestion in and around the Halifax Regional Municipality, says the head of an organization that advocates for rail-based public transit.

The new mayor and council are planning big changes for the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, and one of those is at the top of the staff organizational chart now that chief administrative officer Marie Walsh is set to retire.

The Montreal English Theatre Awards ceremony is being held this evening at Le Gesù theatre. For the community, it's a time to celebrate their achievements and resilience coming out of the pandemic, together.

The Société de transport de Montréal (STM) has established a non-urgent text line for transit users to signal security issues in the Metro network.

Shilei Du, 36, was charged Monday morning with the premeditated murder of his partner, Guangmei Ye, whose body was found Sunday in a residence on Fontenelle Street in Candiac, Que.

Loved ones, friends, and people from across the city have all come together to support each other at Pastel Rita, the café Jocelyn Després helped so many call home.

The City of Montreal wants to sell more land to community organizations, housing co-ops and other groups to build off-market housing. 

Ten years after their formation, the members of The Brooks discuss how they’ve evolved and how they view their collaboration.

Quebec provincial police have confirmed that the body found in a Montreal nature park on Oct. 30 was that of kidnapping victim and cryptocurrency influencer Kevin Mirshahi.

Mosquito-borne disease is a major global public health issue. One path toward the development of evidence-based strategies to limit mosquito biting is the study of the mosquito nervous system—in particular, the sensory systems that drive biting behavior. The central nervous system of insects consists of the brain and the ventral nerve cord. Here, we describe a protocol for dissecting, immunofluorescent labeling, and imaging both of these structures in the mosquito. This protocol was optimized for Aedes aegypti and works well on Anopheles gambiae tissue. It has not been tested in other mosquito species, but we anticipate that it would work on a range of mosquitoes, and, if not, our protocol will provide a starting point from which to optimize. Notably, a limited number of antibodies cross-react with Ae. aegypti proteins. This protocol is intended for use with validated antibodies and can also be used to test new antibodies as they are generated. It has been successfully used to visualize protein tags, such as green fluorescent protein, that have been introduced into the mosquito to amplify or detect their presence.

In insects, gustatory neurons sense chemicals upon contact and directly inform many behaviors critical for survival and reproduction, including biting, feeding, mating, and egg laying. However, the taste sensory system is underexplored in many anthropophilic disease vectors such as mosquitoes, which acquire and transmit human pathogens during blood feeding from human hosts. This results in a big gap in vector biology—the study of organisms that spread disease by transmitting pathogens—because insect vectors closely interact with humans while selecting suitable individuals and appropriate bite sites for blood meals. Human sweat and skin-associated chemistries are rich in nonvolatile compounds that can be sensed by the mosquito's taste system when she lands on the skin. Taste sensory units, called sensilla, are distributed in many organs across the mosquito body, including the mouthparts, legs, and ovipositors (female-specific structures used to lay eggs). Each sensillum is innervated by as many as five taste neurons, which allow detection and discrimination between various tastants such as water, sugars, salts, amino acids, and plant-derived compounds that taste bitter to humans. Single-sensillum recordings provide a robust way to survey taste responsiveness of individual sensilla to various diagnostic and ecologically relevant chemicals. Such analyses are of immense value for understanding links between mosquito taste responses and behaviors to specific chemical cues and can provide insights into why mosquitoes prefer certain hosts. The results can also aid development of strategies to disrupt close-range mosquito–human interactions to control disease transmission. Here we describe a protocol that is curated for electrophysiological recordings from taste sensilla in mosquitoes and sure to yield exciting results for the field.

Mosquito species vary in their host associations. Although some species are relative generalists, most specialize, to varying extents, on particular types of host animals. Mosquito host associations are among the most important factors that influence the transmission dynamics of mosquito-vectored pathogens, and understanding these associations can provide insight on how such pathogens move within ecosystems. Characterization of the host associations of mosquito species requires applying blood meal analysis to the largest possible sample size of mosquito blood meals. Processing large samples of mosquito blood meals can be time-consuming, especially when chain-termination sequencing is used, necessitating individual processing of each specimen. Various methods and commercially available kits and products are available for extracting DNA from mosquito blood meals. The hot sodium hydroxide and Tris (HotSHOT) method is a rapid and inexpensive method of DNA extraction that is compatible with the recovery of DNA from mosquito blood meals preserved on QIAcard Flinders Technology Associates (FTA) Classic Cards (FTA cards). FTA cards allow nucleic acids found in blood meals to be preserved easily, even in field conditions. DNA prepared using this method is suitable for polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based blood meal analysis.

All PCR- and DNA-based blood meal analyses require host DNA from a mosquito blood meal to be effectively preserved between the time when the specimen is collected and the extraction of DNA. As soon as a mosquito ingests blood from a host animal, digestion of host cells and cellular components within the blood meal by enzymes in the mosquito midgut begins to degrade the host DNA templates that are the targets of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. Without effective preservation, host DNA is typically undetectable by PCR 48 h after feeding, because of digestion. Preservation methods for mosquito blood meals vary in their efficacy, and the logistics of fieldwork can limit the options for preservation of blood meals and maintenance of the integrity of host DNA. This protocol describes a method of blood meal preservation that is effective, convenient, and amenable to fieldwork in remote locations where cryopreservation at –20°C or –80°C may not be feasible. It uses a Flinders Technology Associates (FTA) card, which is a chemically treated card that lyses cells and allows nucleic acids to be preserved. This method is also expected to preserve the DNA or RNA of pathogens present within the engorged mosquito abdomen, including RNA viruses.

In insects, oocyte resorption (oosorption) or follicular atresia is one of the key physiological processes and evolutionary strategies used to optimize reproductive fitness. Mosquitoes are ideal model organisms for studying egg maturation in arthropods, as their follicle development is initiated only following the ingestion of a blood meal, followed by a carefully orchestrated series of hormonally regulated events leading to egg maturation. A cohort of approximately 100 follicles per mosquito ovary begin developing synchronously. However, a significant fraction of follicles ultimately undergo apoptosis and oosorption, especially when available resources from the blood meal are limited. Therefore, simple, rapid, and reliable techniques to accurately evaluate follicular atresia are necessary to understand mechanisms underlying follicle development in insects. This protocol describes how to detect apoptotic follicle cells within the Aedes aegypti mosquito ovaries using a commercially available fluorescent-labeled inhibitor of caspases (FLICA). Caspases are key players in animal apoptosis. In this assay, the FLICA reagent enters the intracellular compartment of follicles in dissected mosquito ovaries and covalently binds to active caspases. The bound reagent remains within the cell and its fluorescent signal can be observed by confocal microscopy. Although this method was specifically developed for visualizing apoptotic ovarian follicles during Ae. aegypti mosquito egg development, it should be applicable to other mosquito tissues that undergo caspase-mediated program cell death in a time-dependent manner.

As The Meg hits theaters, dive into what we really know about this chompy predator

The ancient burial structures, strikingly similar all across Europe and the mediterranean, have puzzled scientists and historians for centuries

By raising her son to be curious about the natural world, this mother helped shape the trajectory of the National Museum of Natural History

The Northwest Territories Power Corporation expects that by the end of March it will have generated 72 per cent of power for the North Slave region using hydro, and 28 per cent from diesel. Last year, about half the region's power was from diesel because of low water levels.

More than 50 Norman Wells residents gathered at the Royal Canadian Legion on Thursday night to voice frustrations over high heating fuel prices.

Tammy Roberts, Home Base's executive director, said before these services launched, there was "no place for youth to go" other than the emergency room or to RCMP cells. 

With president-elect Donald Trump promising to drill in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Gwich'in are preparing to fight for the Porcupine caribou herd.

Water quality guidelines for mercury are 0.02 micrograms per litre of water. Several results show that levels at four sites are far above that threshold. During the second week of October, one value close to the mine was more than seven times the acceptable level.

Paraglider Ben Lewis remembers spinning around wildly as he got pulled up higher and higher into the violent storm. That was when he realized, about 6,700 metres up in the sky and still rising, that he was not likely to see his family again.

Stephanie Yuill spent five weeks visiting First World War sites across Europe on a bike she bought from the grocery store. 

As people across the country mourn the Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair, some in the Northwest Territories justice system are reflecting on his contributions to the country — one of those being Gladue principles. 

Hay River RCMP say they believe two weekend incidents, including one in which a person was shot, are linked to drugs and organized crime.

A group of volunteers have been providing emergency services to West Dawson residents during the periods of freeze up and break up, when there is no reliable access across the Yukon River to town.

John Quirke stayed in the job for 25 years — with a front row seat to Nunavut's politics as he managed the operations of the assembly and acted as the principal adviser for MLAs on parliamentary procedure among other things. 

A man who fled from police, drove onto a walking trail, triggered a shelter-in-place advisory for the Chateau Nova hotel in Yellowknife and subsequently broke into a home was on bail at the time and under house arrest, police say.

Newspaper editor Horace Greeley unsuccessfully ran against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant in November 1872. Twenty-four days later, he died of unknown causes at a private mental health facility

In a new biopic starring Kate Winslet, Miller's many lives—as an artist, model, muse, cook and war correspondent—need little embellishment

In the early 1990s, historians and the public alike questioned how Disney's America would accurately and sensitively document the nation's thorny past

The bronze wreath immortalized the moment when the members of the Honor Guard removed their hats and placed them on the president's grave during his burial

A new film revisits the 90 minutes before the first episode of "Saturday Night Live" premiered on NBC on October 11, 1975

As a child, the future president acquired a marine animal's skull, which became the first specimen in his natural history collection

When the U.S. Army massacred a Lakota village at Blue Water, dozens of plundered artifacts ended up in the Smithsonian. The unraveling of this long-buried atrocity is forging a path toward reconciliation

With flinty perseverance and a golden touch, Belinda Mulrooney earned an unlikely fortune in the frozen north and reshaped the Canadian frontier

A new exhibition at the British Library explores the public, private and spiritual lives of such figures as Joan of Arc, Christine de Pizan and Hildegard of Bingen

The Sacro Bosco's meaning is the subject of debate, with scholars alternatively describing the sprawling complex as a memorial, an allegorical site or a tribute to ancient civilizations

"Spectropia" demystified the techniques used by mediums who claimed they could speak to the dead, revealing the "absurd follies of Spiritualism"

Texts like the "Sortes Astrampsychi" promised insights on clients' love lives, career prospects, financial woes and families

In the Jim Crow South, activists became martyrs at the hands of white racists, all for the just cause of using the vote to fight for equality and freedom

The 1898 Wilmington massacre left dozens of Black North Carolinians dead. Conspirators also forced the city's multiracial government to resign at gunpoint

A Romare Bearden print served as a starting point for the American playwright's 1987 drama, which follows a Black family's struggle to decide the fate of an ancestral heirloom