Canada needs more “missing middle” – housing options that aren’t towering condo buildings or single-family homes.
Luckily, everyday homeowners across the country are stepping up and filling in these gaps by designing unique multi-family homes, adding laneway houses and building multiplexes that will add some much-needed gentle density to Canada’s cities. #housing @lga_ap@novakovicto
Montreal is installing green roofs on their bus shelters, lowering internal temps and keeping commuters cool. This one tiny change has a massive impact on greening urban landscapes and impacts more than just sweaty commuters. #publictransit #transit #urbandesign
Did you know?: A Canadian hardware store owner is to thank for the paint roller, which allows people from around the world to seamlessly coat their walls. #canada #canadianinvention
🎥: by @katherineesingh
Meet Oscar, the cute trash-talking AI helping us recycle better.
If a trash bin gets contaminated, the whole thing gets sent to landfill. Ontario’s landfills are going to be full in the next decade. The hope is that Oscar can reduce contamination rates, divert waste from landfills and help municipalities save money on waste management. #Sustainability #sustainabletech
Just as it has learned to live with its famous high tides, Port Saint John has also weathered economic lows. But now, thanks to a recently completed $247-million modernization effort and a splash of good fortune courtesy of American tariff policy, Saint John’s port is ready to rise again.
Of course, for Saint John, American tariffs are a good news/bad news story. While they are helping to drive business growth at the port, the city’s economy has been hit hard. New Brunswick’s economy is deeply tied to the United States, where about 90 per cent of its international trade goes, leaving it heavily reliant on what is now an unpredictable market.
“We’re trying to put this port on the national scale,” says Craig Bell Estabrooks, Port Saint John’s president and CEO. “We’ve got to make sure the country, North America and the world know we’re a gateway that could matter to them.”
Ontario shippers have been the first to respond, with a 153 per cent increase in trade traffic through Port Saint John between 2024 and 2025 as the Toronto-centred Golden Horseshoe, which generates about two-thirds of Ontario’s and one-fifth of Canada’s GDP, begins to shift some of its trade east, toward Europe, and south into the Americas.
A combination of geography and logistics helps place Saint John in the mix with the larger Eastern Canadian ports in Montreal and Halifax. Saint John is a deep ocean port, so it can handle heavier vessels than Montreal, and it is closer to North American markets than its Maritimes neighbour. It’s also an hour’s drive from the land border with the United States.
Read @lisahrabluk ’s longread on all the ways an ambitious expansion, shifting trade patterns and U.S. tariff policy have resurrected a shipping powerhouse at the link in our bio
📸: @hawkaliciouspics
Gauze – typically made from cotton or synthetic fibres – is used to heal wounds and stave off infection. It’s one of the most essential, but also one of the most waste-generating categories of medical supplies.
But what if you could make an environmentally friendly gauze made by harvesting material from mushrooms?
A group of undergraduate students in two departments at @westernuniversity wrote a research proposal on using mycelium, the root-like, fibrous structure of fungi that grows in the soil, as a substitute material for gauze.
The students wondered whether they could have a positive impact on the environment and climate change by using the unique properties of mycelium.
To read more from Tina Knezevic on their proposal for a biodegradable gauze made of mycelium head to the link in our bio.
📸: @chichi_photo , styling by @dstyle_inc , agency @westside_studio )
Canadian company @bombardier_jets is developing the EcoJet: a sci-fi looking jet that mimics squirrels and stingrays to be more aerodynamic in order to fly more efficiently and use less fuel. Would you fly on it?
A scientist at the @uoft has figured out how to grow human organs on microchips.
The truth is that it takes about 12 years and $1 billion to bring a new medicine to market.
Dr. Milica Radisic, one of the world’s leading tissue engineers, is trying to solve this very expensive problem with an idea that once lived on the fringes of academia: with the help of AI-powered robot arms, her lab is growing tiny organs – lungs, kidneys, hearts – on chips the size of an iPhone.
The hope is that, by testing new drugs on these organs-on-a-chip, we can better understand how they’ll affect humans, reducing the amount of time and money it takes to launch new medicines into the world.
#health #science #biology
Rutherford Farms in Grosse Isle, Man. is wired to the hilt with sensors in the ground.
It’s the site of Innovation Farms, run by EMILI, which stands for Enterprise Machine Intelligence Learning Initiative, a Winnipeg non-profit.
A $15,000 drone on the farm has software and AI that measures heat, even light on individual plant leaves, which can generate maps and more data for farmers.
The OZ 440 robot, meanwhile, is the size of a living room ottoman on knobby little tires and can sow and cultivate and weed specialty crops like artichokes on a small scale.
Could this be the future of farming? #farming #robotics #agtech #manitoba
