‘Our goal is to provide full flexibility, 24/7,’ one resident said. ‘If you want to cut the lawn at 4 a.m., then you do it.’

On this day in 1912, a team found the remains of Robert Falcon Scott and the crew of the "Terra Nova" expedition. A would-be rescuer said he was forever haunted by the "horrible nightmare"

Sławomir and Szymon Milewski were searching for a Roman road when they stumbled upon the cache of coins, which is worth more than $120,000

Cenotes in the Yucatán Peninsula are time capsules preserving remnants of Maya culture and fossils of extinct megafauna

Getting the perfect shot requires great timing, the right equipment and nerves of steel

These grounded planes in the Congo have captured the imagination of these children

See images of the American flag captured by our readers.

From swirling aurora borealis to bioluminescent beaches, these award-winning photographs capture rare views of our world at night

See the finalists of our 2014 photo contest and vote for the Readers' Choice winner

The tongues of bird-like dinosaurs and pterosaurs, however, may have been more mobile

"Fascinating, Captain"

In one reef, three million sea cucumbers released 64,000 metric tons of nutrient-packed poo back into the ecosystem

It fell to Belle da Costa Greene, a Black woman whose racial identity was kept secret for decades, to catalog J.P. Morgan's immense collection of books and art

On the island of Laeso in Denmark, one man is reviving the lost art of eelgrass thatching and, in doing so, bringing attention to a plant that has great potential

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

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.

CBC Newfoundland and Labrador would love to hear your suggestions of folks and organizations who are there when you need them — and all the other times, too.

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.

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

The only daily TV news package to focus on Nova Scotians and their stories

As Nova Scotia politicians make their fall election promises, Julie Leggett is urging them to commit to helping people on income assistance stay cool during heat waves.

The only daily TV news package to focus on Nova Scotians and their stories

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

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.

Facing soaring food prices and an escalating housing crisis, Quebec student associations are urgently calling on the provincial government to fund internships required for post-secondary training.

To understand the circuitry of the brain, it is often advantageous to visualize the processes of a single neuron or population of neurons. Identifying sites where a neuron, or neurons, originates and where it projects can allow a researcher to begin to map the circuitry underlying various processes, including sensory-guided behaviors. Furthermore, neural tracing allows one to map locations where processes terminate onto regions of the brain that may have known functions and sometimes to identify candidate upstream or downstream connections, based on proximity. Many methods of neural tracing are available; here, we focus on loading fluorescent dyes into a neuron (fluorescent dye filling). Different options for dyes exist to label neurites. Among the most versatile and easy to use are dextran amine–conjugated dyes. They fill neurons bidirectionally, not discriminating between anterograde or retrograde loading direction. Dye filling must be done in unfixed tissue, as the dye needs to move through the neurons; however, dextran amine conjugates are aldehyde-fixable and once cells have been fully loaded with dye the tissue can be fixed and subjected to immunostaining. Coupling neural tracing with immunofluorescence is a useful way to determine specific brain or ventral nerve cord (VNC) regions where a neuron projects. This protocol describes methods for loading dextran amine conjugated dyes into a sensory tissue in the mosquito to visualize sites of sensory neuron innervation in the central nervous system, as well as efferent projections to these structures. This protocol is described for Aedes aegypti, for which it was optimized, but it also works across a variety of insects.

Laboratory study of natural populations of mosquitoes can play a key role in determining the underlying causes of variation in burdens of mosquito-borne disease. Aedes aegypti is the main vector of the viruses that cause dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever, making it a high priority for laboratory study. Ae. aegypti eggs provide an ideal starting point for new laboratory colonies. Eggs can be collected using ovicups, which are small plastic cups lined with seed-germination paper and partially filled with leaf-infused H₂O. Once collected, dry eggs will remain viable for months and can be safely transported long distances back to the laboratory as long as they are properly stored. This protocol provides step-by-step instructions for preparing for collecting, storing, and hatching Ae. aegypti eggs and has successfully yielded laboratory colonies from locations across both the native and invasive range of this species.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Whitehorse homeowner has been charged in connection with an explosion last year that destroyed his home and killed a man in a neighbouring house. 

In Fort Good Hope, N.W.T., work is underway on a modular home construction centre that local leaders say will help the community meet housing and employment goals.

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

Fifty years ago, on October 5, 1974, David Kunst completed the first verified circumnavigation of the globe on foot. Along the way, he met Princess Grace of Monaco, raised money for UNICEF and lost a brother to bandits

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

The British explorer named dozens of geographical features and sites in the region, ignoring the traditions of the Indigenous peoples who’d lived there for millennia

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