A century on, the country’s most beloved Thursday spectacle reaches new heights

These images from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest show how communities in Mexico and beyond mark Día de los Muertos.

A clinical social worker explains the vital role of the old-fashioned rotary phone for those dealing with death and loss

It’s easy to write bugs off as pests, but consider the ways in which they have positively impacted our lives

The terms “snake oil” and “snake-oil salesperson” are part of the vernacular thanks to Clark Stanley, a quack doctor who marketed a product for joint pain in the late 19th century

In the international competition, people with physical disabilities put state-of-the-art devices to the test as they race to complete the tasks of everyday life

The artificial waste could fertilize the ocean and sequester carbon

Manufacturing a Bentley in the traditional way is a time-consuming nod to their brand heritage. Each hand-crafted wheel can take 4.5 hours to finish

Adverse weather has cancelled ferry crossings between Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia heading into the long weekend.

Newfoundland filmmaker Justin Simms is releasing his latest film called Sons. It was prompted by the birth of his son and left him wondering how traditional masculine behaviour is learned.

Nellie Winters is 87. From the time she was a child, her hands and mind have been busy pursuing her love of Inuit art and craft.

Police have reported that a man was fatally electrocuted in Torbay on Saturday evening. Two others are being treated for injuries.

Bombardier control box recovered during second dive to a World War 2 bomber at the bottom of Gander Lake.

Monday marks the first Remembrance Day ceremony at the National War Memorial in St. John's to include the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We're proud to present again two documentaries that tell a remarkable story.

Large crowds came together at city hall in Corner Brook to lay wreaths and honour veterans on Monday. The ceremony portion was completed with a playing of the Last Post.

The A.C. Hunter Public Library wants people in St. John’s to know that it’s open and accessible, despite how the entrance looks. The main staircase is under repair but there’s plenty of signs directing folks to other entrances. Still, librarians say people are judging this book by its cover and assuming the library is closed.

A Labrador foster parent and head of a group working to better the Labrador foster care system is stressing the importance of keeping Indigenous children with Indigenous parents in their Indigenous communities.

Hundreds congregated in downtown St. John's Monday morning to pay tribute to Newfoundland and Labrador's fallen soldiers, and honoured the dead for the first time at the newly refurbished National War Memorial and tomb of the Unknown Solider. 

Have a photo you'd like us to see? Email us! Our address is nlphotos@cbc.ca.

The 50th Christmas Craft Fair gathered over a hundred vendors and thousands of customers in Torbay over the weekend. One family business was inspired by the early years of the fair and a passion to keep traditional crafts in style.

Nurses' union president Yvette Coffey says more must be done to ensure young nurses stay in the province. Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services says work is underway to match students with job openings.

People using the library in the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John's are being forced to use alternate entrances due to an unsafe staircase in front of the building.

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.

A candidate for the Nova Scotia NDP has apologized and is no longer running for the party in the provincial election after her comments on Israel and the Holocaust drew concern from the Jewish organizations. 

The L'nu Sipuk Kina'muokuom school observed Indigenous Veterans Day with an event on Friday. Students, faculty and staff got together to honour Mi’kmaw military veterans and RCMP members.

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.

Independent Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin is back on the campaign trail in Cumberland North, but opponents say the riding would be better represented by an MLA from an official party. 

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.

Kate MacEachern is a Canadian veteran from Ballantynes Cove, N.S., but her service years are far from over. She has spent about two years living in Ukraine, delivering humanitarian aid to communities across the country.

RCMP are investigating after officers discovered human remains in an abandoned, burned vehicle in Greenhill, N.S.

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.

Some Nova Scotia municipal leaders are defending a funding stream the federal Conservatives say they will cut if elected, calling it a "game changer."

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.

Elections Nova Scotia is investigating PC candidate Susan Corkum-Greek's campaign to determine whether it broke the law by handing out gift cards on Saturday outside a Tim Hortons in Lunenburg, N.S. 

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.

The union representing dockworkers in Montreal says Canada's labour minister forcing its members back to work at ports in Montreal and Quebec City marks a "dark day for workers' rights."

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.

Amid rapid global advances and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies, the federal government has invested millions to combine the minds of three existing institutes into one that can keep an eye on potential dangers ahead.

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.

Laboratory study of field-collected mosquitoes can allow researchers to better understand the ways variation within and among mosquito populations shapes burdens of mosquito-borne disease. The Anopheles gambiae complex comprises the most important vectors of malaria, but it can be challenging to keep in the laboratory. For some species of mosquitoes, especially An. gambiae, it is very difficult to bring viable eggs into the laboratory. Instead, it is preferable to collect larvae or pupae and then transport them as carefully as possible back to the laboratory. This simple protocol allows a researcher to start new laboratory colonies from larvae or pupae collected from natural breeding sites or proceed directly to their planned experiments. The use of natural breeding sites provides additional reassurance that the resulting colonies are representative of natural populations.

Creating transgenic mosquitoes allows for mechanistic studies of basic mosquito biology and the development of novel vector control strategies. CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing has revolutionized gene editing, including in mosquitoes. This protocol details part of the gene editing process of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes via CRISPR–Cas9, through testing and validating single-guide RNAs (sgRNAs). Gene editing activity varies depending on the sequence of sgRNAs used, so validation of sgRNA activity should be done before large-scale generation of mutants or transgenics. sgRNA is designed using online tools and synthesized in <1 h. Once mutants or transgenics are generated via embryo microinjection, sgRNA activity is validated by quick genotyping polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and DNA sequencing.

The technique of visualizing axon pathways in the embryonic ventral nerve cord using antibody labeling has been fundamental to our understanding of the genetic and developmental mechanisms underlying nervous system wiring in Drosophila. High-resolution microscopic examination of the ventral nerve cord remains an essential component of many experiments in Drosophila developmental neuroscience. Although it is possible to examine the ventral nerve cord in intact whole-mount embryos, to collect the highest-quality images it is often useful to isolate the nervous system away from the other embryonic tissues through embryo dissection. This protocol describes methods for dissecting ventral nerve cords from Drosophila embryos that have been fixed and stained via immunofluorescence or horseradish peroxidase (HRP) immunohistochemistry. The process of making fine dissection needles for this purpose from electrolytically sharpened tungsten wire is also described. Dissected and mounted ventral nerve cords can be examined and imaged using a variety of microscopy techniques including differential interference contrast (DIC) optics, epifluorescence, or confocal microscopy.

The Drosophila embryonic central nervous system has been used for decades as a model for understanding the genetic regulation of axon guidance and other aspects of neural development. Foundational studies using antibody staining to examine the embryonic ventral nerve cord in wild-type and mutant animals led to the discovery of evolutionarily conserved genes that regulate fundamental aspects of axon guidance, including midline crossing of axons. The development of the regular, segmentally repeating structure of axon pathways in the ventral nerve cord can illustrate basic principles of axon guidance to beginning students and can also be used by expert researchers to characterize new mutants, detect genetic interactions between known genes, and precisely quantify variations in gene function in engineered mutant lines. Here, we describe a protocol for collecting and fixing Drosophila embryos and visualizing axon pathways in the embryonic ventral nerve cord using immunofluorescence or immunohistochemical staining methods. As embryogenesis in Drosophila takes ~24 h to complete, a 1-d collection yields embryos representing all stages of development from newly fertilized through ready-to-hatch larvae, allowing investigation of multiple developmental events within a single batch of collected embryos. The methods described in this protocol should be accessible to introductory laboratory courses as well as seasoned investigators in established research laboratories.

Mosquitoes take blood meals from a diverse range of host animals and their host associations vary by species. Characterizing these associations is an important element of the transmission dynamics of mosquito-vectored pathogens. To characterize mosquito host associations, various molecular techniques have been developed, which are collectively referred to as blood meal analysis. DNA barcoding has diverse biological applications and is well-suited to mosquito blood meal analysis. The standard DNA barcoding marker for animals is a 5' fragment of the cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene. A major advantage of this marker is its taxonomic coverage in DNA sequence reference databases, making it feasible to identify a wider range of mosquito host species than with any other gene. However, the COI gene contains high sequence variation at potential priming sites between vertebrate orders. Coupled with the need for primer sequences to be mismatched with mosquito priming sites so that annealing to mosquito DNA is inhibited, it can be difficult to design primers suitable for blood meal analysis applications. Several primers are available that perform well in mosquito blood meal analysis, annealing to priming sites for most vertebrate host taxa, but not to those of mosquitoes. Because priming site sequence variation among vertebrate taxa can cause amplification to fail, a hierarchical approach to DNA barcoding-based blood meal analysis can be applied. In such an approach, no single primer set is expected to be effective for 100% of potential host species. If amplification fails in the initial reaction, a subsequent reaction is attempted with primers that anneal to different priming sites, and so on, until amplification is successful.