new_otters_raft

excerpt:

It’s an endurance sport in which athletes ascend mountains on skis fitted with climbing skins, carry their skis over sections too steep to skin and then descend on alpine terrain. In total, 36 skimo athletes will compete at the Stelvio Ski Centre in Bormio.

The Olympic format features two events: the individual sprint and the mixed relay. Athletes alternate between uphill climbing with ski skins, boot-packing and downhill skiing. Sprint races last about three to four minutes, while the mixed relay features longer, more demanding courses.

Alongside skimo, the 2026 Games have introduced women’s doubles luge, women’s large hill individual ski jumping, a freestyle skiing dual moguls event and alpine skiing team combined.

Skimo stands out within the Olympic landscape as the first new sport to be introduced within the Winter Games since skeleton was introduced at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games.

Lots of cool changes, but I'm looking forward to trying this one in particular

Screenshot tools have also improved. The Spectacle app now supports text recognition, allowing users to pull text directly from screenshots.

Previously I was using Frog for this purpose, but it would be nice to do it all at once instead of across two tools.

One of the biggest barriers to diagnoses of brain disorders is that symptoms — particularly those of apathy — can be mistaken for depression, resulting in inappropriate treatment and poorer health.

An excerpt:

Understanding apathy is central in addressing current gaps treatment and prognosis. Research shows that symptoms traditionally associated with depression, such as reduced activity and social withdrawal, commonly manifest in people who have brain disorders but it does not always involve sadness or hopelessness, which are core features of depression.

Interestingly, in the linked paper, they mention:

The utility of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) for apathy in depression is unclear. The literature on the topic includes several case reports that described onset or worsening of apathy with SSRIs in depression

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-022-02292-3

New statistics suggest Canadian border officers are playing an increasing role in combating the gangs that have spread fear in cities with large South Asian populations.

The investigation into last week's shootings in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., that claimed nine lives has moved into a new phase after police cleared the two crime scenes.

Excerpt:

Disinformation experts say while it’s human nature to seek out more information after a tragedy, an online rush to identify suspects can have terrible consequences.

Their remarks come after RCMP highlighted a falsehood targeting an Ontario woman as the suspect in the recent shootings in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

RCMP released a confirmed photo of the actual shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar, on Friday as Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald called out false accusations against a person named Zylii Strang, with no connection to the case.

Excerpt:

The B.C. government is setting up temporary classroom space in trailers for the students of Tumbler Ridge, B.C., in the wake of the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School last week.

Five students, aged 12 to 13, were killed in the mass shooting last week. A 39-year-old education assistant, Shannda Aviugana-Durand, was also killed at the school.

In the wake of the tragedy, which is one of Canada's worst-ever mass shootings, B.C. Premier David Eby pledged that none of the students in the district of Tumbler Ridge would be forced to return to the school.

Now, the province has announced that trailers and temporary facilities are being set up on the grounds of Tumbler Ridge Elementary School, just under a kilometre north of the secondary school, though an exact return-to-school date hasn't been confirmed.

Excerpt:

It’s a cold night in a Canadian forest. Temperatures are below freezing, snow is on the ground and most animals remain hidden to avoid the harsh conditions. But one creature is braving the cold weather.

Blue-spotted salamanders (Ambystoma laterale) are on the move. These small amphibians have left their underground winter refuges and started migrating toward breeding pools, often risking freezing.

For animals whose body temperature closely follows the environment, like salamanders, freezing can be deadly, as the formation of ice inside the body can damage cells and disrupt vital functions. However, blue-spotted salamanders remain active and apparently unharmed under the freezing conditions.

As a group of biologists who study how temperature shapes animal behaviour and physiology, our team has been long fascinated by animals that keep active at low temperatures.

In a recent study, colleagues and I documented salamanders migrating with body temperatures below 0 C in the wild. Our findings highlight field-based evidence that these amphibians can function at sub-zero temperatures without freezing. In doing so, salamanders are possibly extending their breeding season.

Excerpt:

Candian VCs who rely on the Crown corporation have feedback on its “steady hand” approach. Who’s listening?

In 2022, the federal government commissioned a report asking Canada’s VCs what they thought about BDC, the Business Development Bank of Canada.

The report offers a candid evaluation of the Crown corporation and Canada’s largest direct and indirect venture capital investor, but here’s the thing: the report was effectively forgotten, and its recommendations were never actioned. Few people even know it exists!

But BetaKit obtained the report and revealed its contents to the world. Reporter Madison McLauchlan, who broke the story for BetaKit, joins to discuss the report and the questions surrounding it.

From the newsletter

Martijn van Exel has developed the osm-mapper-globe, a visualisation dashboard that enables users to watch OpenStreetMap edits in real time on an interactive globe. The code is available on Codeberg under an ISC licence.

MapToPoster is a free Python project that you can use to create maps that are worthy of being hung on your wall. It uses OpenStreetMap data to render the same style of striking minimalist maps you see advertised on social media, while giving you control over the exact map location, scale, and colors used.

Once the project has been installed, you can use a simple text command to create portrait PNG files of around 3630x4830 pixels in size (at a density of 300 dpi).

I tried this a few weeks ago, and my main complaint was that it wasn't caching the map files. Looks like that's fixed now: https://github.com/originalankur/maptoposter/issues/10

From the weekly newsletter:

Henry Wilkinson has mapped the Dundas West Station in Toronto, Canada, using the LiDAR sensor on an iPhone 17 Pro, in combination with the Niantic Scaniverse app, to capture 3D data. He then reconstructed the digital 3D scene with Meshroom and Blender before uploading the results to OpenStreetMap through JOSM (using the PicLayer plugin) to align imagery, and iD for streamlined indoor tagging. The completed work enabled detailed indoor mapping of the station, now viewable on OpenLevelUp.

First paragraph from the article:

Despite having a passion for technology, I generally upgrade my phone every 6 years or so. One of the features I have been most excited about this time around is the LIDAR sensor on the iPhone 17 Pro. After some initial success using Niantic’s free Scanniverse app to help make furniture decisions while apartment hunting, I decided to have a go at using it to capture some information to feed OpenStreetMap, my favourite open-data obsession.