Canada Post strike hits charity fundraising during crucial holiday donation push

The Canada Post strike is expected to continue as parties remain “too far apart on critical issues” to reach a deal, according to Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon. In a post on X Wednesday, he said the special federal mediator has temporarily suspended his mediation. “This pause in mediation activities will hopefully permit the parties to reassess their positions and return to the bargaining table with renewed resolve,” reads the minister’s post. He wrote that he has asked the parties to meet at his office, where he will tell them that “they alone” are responsible to find a solution to the deadlock. “As soon as productive bargaining can begin anew, the special mediator will re-engage the parties. Canadians are counting on them to create these conditions quickly.” Speaking to reporters later in the day, MacKinnon said the government does not plan to force a result through binding arbitration, as it did when port workers went on strike earlier in November, and when rail workers went on strike in August. Still, he voiced his frustration that Canadians are still waiting on the Crown corporation to get back to business. “These parties have had access to the best mediation services that it is possible to have. They have had time. And it is like both parties don’t realize that the business plan, and business proposition, of Canada post hasn’t changed,” he said. “They need to reach a ratifiable agreement.” The strike began nearly two weeks ago. The postal workers’ union, CUPW, says it wants salaries brought in line with inflation, an increase in paid medical days, better benefits, and to prevent the company from using private contractors. In a recent progress update, the union said that a labour relations manager suggested Canada Post could contract out parcel delivery on weekends. “The comment was taken as a threat by CUPW Negotiators,” reads the summary. The union also wants Canada Post to hire more full-time staff, arguing that the company has steadily increased the number of temporary hours at most of its locations “despite retention problems and training costs during bargaining.” In its own update, Canada Post says it has maintained a robust full-time workforce despite falling revenue and serious market competition. “Approximately 95 per cent of delivery teams are full-time,” reads the emailed update, provided to CTV News on Tuesday evening. “Throughout these negotiations, Canada Post has put forward detailed proposals to bring more flexibility to its outdated, mail-based delivery model. These changes are necessary to better compete in the parcel business, better serve Canadians, and drive much-needed revenue growth.” The company evaluated its losses at more than $3 billion since 2018, adding that it incurred a $315 million pre-tax loss in the third quarter of 2024. Canada Post also said it has delivered an estimated 10 million fewer parcels since the strike began, based on last-year’s data.

Baby and adult brains 'sync up' during play

Woman and baby playing (stock image).

Have you ever played with a baby and felt a sense of connection, even though they couldn't yet talk to you? New research suggests that you might quite literally be "on the same wavelength," experiencing similar brain activity in the same brain regions.

A team of Princeton researchers has conducted the first study of how baby and adult brains interact during natural play, and they found measurable similarities in their neural activity. In other words, baby and adult brain activity rose and fell together as they shared toys and eye contact. The research was conducted at the Princeton Baby Lab, where University researchers study how babies learn to see, talk and understand the world.

"Previous research has shown that adults' brains sync up when they watch movies and listen to stories, but little is known about how this 'neural synchrony' develops in the first years of life," said Elise Piazza, an associate research scholar in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) and the first author on a paper published Dec. 17, 2019, in Psychological Science.

Piazza and her co-authors -- Liat Hasenfratz, an associate research scholar in PNI; Uri Hasson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience; and Casey Lew-Williams, an associate professor of psychology -- posited that neural synchrony has important implications for social development and language learning.

Studying real-life, face-to-face communication between babies and adults is quite difficult. Most past studies of neural coupling, many of which were conducted in Hasson's lab, involved scanning adults' brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in separate sessions, while the adults lay down and watched movies or listened to stories.

But to study real-time communication, the researchers needed to create a child-friendly method of recording brain activity simultaneously from baby and adult brains. With funding from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Grant, the researchers developed a new dual-brain neuroimaging system that uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is highly safe and records oxygenation in the blood as a proxy for neural activity. The setup allowed the researchers to record the neural coordination between babies and an adult while they played with toys, sang songs and read a book.

The same adult interacted with all 42 infants and toddlers who participated in the study. Of those, 21 had to be excluded because they "squirmed excessively," and three others flat-out refused to wear the cap, leaving 18 children, ranging in age from 9 months to 15 months.

The experiment had two portions. In one, the adult experimenter spent five minutes interacting directly with a child -- playing with toys, singing nursery rhymes or reading Goodnight Moon -- while the child sat on their parent's lap. In the other, the experimenter turned to the side and told a story to another adult while the child played quietly with their parent.

The caps collected data from 57 channels of the brain known to be involved in prediction, language processing and understanding other people's perspectives.

When they looked at the data, the researchers found that during the face-to-face sessions, the babies' brains were synchronized with the adult's brain in several areas known to be involved in high-level understanding of the world -- perhaps helping the children decode the overall meaning of a story or analyze the motives of the adult reading to them.

When the adult and infant were turned away from each other and engaging with other people, the coupling between them disappeared.

That fit with researchers' expectations, but the data also had surprises in store. For example, the strongest coupling occurred in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in learning, planning and executive functioning and was previously thought to be quite underdeveloped during infancy.

"We were also surprised to find that the infant brain was often 'leading' the adult brain by a few seconds, suggesting that babies do not just passively receive input but may guide adults toward the next thing they're going to focus on: which toy to pick up, which words to say," said Lew-Williams, who is a co-director of the Princeton Baby Lab.

"While communicating, the adult and child seem to form a feedback loop," Piazza added. "That is, the adult's brain seemed to predict when the infants would smile, the infants' brains anticipated when the adult would use more 'baby talk,' and both brains tracked joint eye contact and joint attention to toys. So, when a baby and adult play together, their brains influence each other in dynamic ways."

This two-brain approach to neuroscience could open doors to understanding how coupling with caregivers breaks down in atypical development -- such as in children diagnosed with autism -- as well as how educators can optimize their teaching approaches to accommodate children's diverse brains.

The researchers are continuing to investigate how this neural coupling relates to preschoolers' early language learning.

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Materials provided by Princeton University. Original written by Liz Fuller-Wright. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Research identifies changes in neural circuits underlying self-control during adolescence

Self control concept (stock image).

The human brain is organized into circuits that develop from childhood through adulthood to support executive function -- critical behaviors like self-control, decision making, and complex thought. These circuits are anchored by white matter pathways which coordinate the brain activity necessary for cognition. However, little research exists to explain how white matter matures to support activity that allows for improved executive function during adolescence -- a period of rapid brain development.

Researchers from the Lifespan Brain Institute of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia applied tools from network science to identify how anatomical connections in the brain develop to support neural activity underlying these key areas. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"By charting brain development across childhood and adolescence, we can better understand how the brain supports executive function and self-control in both healthy kids and those with different mental health experiences," said the study's senior author Theodore Satterthwaite, MD, an assistant professor of Psychiatry at Penn. "Since abnormalities in developing brain connectivity and deficits in executive function are often linked to the emergence of mental illness during youth, our findings may help identify biomarkers of brain development that predict cognitive and clinical outcomes later in life."

In this study, the researchers mapped structure-function coupling -- the degree to which a brain region's pattern of anatomical connections supports synchronized neural activity. This could be thought of like a highway, where the anatomical connections are the road and the functional connections are the traffic flowing along those roads. Researchers mapped and analyzed multi-modal neuroimaging data from 727 participants ages 8 to 23 years, and three major findings emerged.

First, the team found that regional variability in structure-function coupling was inversely related to the complexity of the function a given brain area is responsible for. Higher structure-function coupling was found in parts of the brain that are specialized for processing simple sensory information, like the visual system. In contrast, there was lower structure-function coupling in complex parts of the brain that are responsible for executive function and self-control, which require more abstract and flexible processing.

Results showed that structure-function coupling also aligned with known patterns of brain expansion over the course of primate evolution. Previous work comparing human, ape, and monkey brains has showed that sensory areas like the visual system are highly conserved across primate species and have not expanded much during recent evolution. In contrast, association areas of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, have expanded dramatically over the course of primate evolution. This expansion may have allowed for the emergence of uniquely complex human cognitive abilities. The team found that the brain areas which expanded rapidly during evolution had lower structure-function coupling, while simple sensory areas that have been conserved in recent evolution had higher structure-function coupling.

Researchers also found that structure-function coupling increased throughout childhood and adolescence in complex frontal brain regions. These are the same regions that tend to have lower baseline structure-function coupling, are expanded compared to monkeys, and are responsible for self-control. The prolonged development of structure-function coupling in these regions may allow for improved executive function and self-control that develops into adulthood. Indeed, the team found that higher structure-function coupling in the lateral prefrontal cortex -- a complex brain area which plays important roles in self-control -- was associated with better executive function.

"These results suggest that executive functions like impulse control -- which can be particularly challenging for children and adolescents -- rely in part on the prolonged development of structure-function coupling in complex brain areas like the prefrontal cortex," explained lead author Graham Baum, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, who was a Penn neuroscience PhD student during the time of the research. "This has important implications for understanding how brain circuits become specialized during development to support flexible and appropriate goal-oriented behavior."

Additional Penn co-authors include Zaixu Cui, David R. Roalf, Bart Larsen, Matthew Cieslak, Philip A. Cook, Cedric H. Xia, Tyler M. Moore, Kosha Ruparel. Desmond Oathes, Russell T. Shinohara, Raquel E. Gur, Ruben C. Gur, and Danielle S. Bassett.

This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (F31MH115709, R01MH113550, MH089983, MH089924, R01MH107703, R01MH112847, R01MH107235, P50MH096891, K01MH102609, R01NS085211, RF1MH116920). Additional support was provided by the Lifespan Brain Institute.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Research identifies changes in neural circuits underlying self-control during adolescence

Self control concept (stock image).

Credit: © tashatuvango / Adobe Stock

The human brain is organized into circuits that develop from childhood through adulthood to support executive function -- critical behaviors like self-control, decision making, and complex thought. These circuits are anchored by white matter pathways which coordinate the brain activity necessary for cognition. However, little research exists to explain how white matter matures to support activity that allows for improved executive function during adolescence -- a period of rapid brain development.

Researchers from the Lifespan Brain Institute of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia applied tools from network science to identify how anatomical connections in the brain develop to support neural activity underlying these key areas. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"By charting brain development across childhood and adolescence, we can better understand how the brain supports executive function and self-control in both healthy kids and those with different mental health experiences," said the study's senior author Theodore Satterthwaite, MD, an assistant professor of Psychiatry at Penn. "Since abnormalities in developing brain connectivity and deficits in executive function are often linked to the emergence of mental illness during youth, our findings may help identify biomarkers of brain development that predict cognitive and clinical outcomes later in life."

In this study, the researchers mapped structure-function coupling -- the degree to which a brain region's pattern of anatomical connections supports synchronized neural activity. This could be thought of like a highway, where the anatomical connections are the road and the functional connections are the traffic flowing along those roads. Researchers mapped and analyzed multi-modal neuroimaging data from 727 participants ages 8 to 23 years, and three major findings emerged.

First, the team found that regional variability in structure-function coupling was inversely related to the complexity of the function a given brain area is responsible for. Higher structure-function coupling was found in parts of the brain that are specialized for processing simple sensory information, like the visual system. In contrast, there was lower structure-function coupling in complex parts of the brain that are responsible for executive function and self-control, which require more abstract and flexible processing.

Results showed that structure-function coupling also aligned with known patterns of brain expansion over the course of primate evolution. Previous work comparing human, ape, and monkey brains has showed that sensory areas like the visual system are highly conserved across primate species and have not expanded much during recent evolution. In contrast, association areas of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, have expanded dramatically over the course of primate evolution. This expansion may have allowed for the emergence of uniquely complex human cognitive abilities. The team found that the brain areas which expanded rapidly during evolution had lower structure-function coupling, while simple sensory areas that have been conserved in recent evolution had higher structure-function coupling.

Researchers also found that structure-function coupling increased throughout childhood and adolescence in complex frontal brain regions. These are the same regions that tend to have lower baseline structure-function coupling, are expanded compared to monkeys, and are responsible for self-control. The prolonged development of structure-function coupling in these regions may allow for improved executive function and self-control that develops into adulthood. Indeed, the team found that higher structure-function coupling in the lateral prefrontal cortex -- a complex brain area which plays important roles in self-control -- was associated with better executive function.

"These results suggest that executive functions like impulse control -- which can be particularly challenging for children and adolescents -- rely in part on the prolonged development of structure-function coupling in complex brain areas like the prefrontal cortex," explained lead author Graham Baum, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, who was a Penn neuroscience PhD student during the time of the research. "This has important implications for understanding how brain circuits become specialized during development to support flexible and appropriate goal-oriented behavior."

Additional Penn co-authors include Zaixu Cui, David R. Roalf, Bart Larsen, Matthew Cieslak, Philip A. Cook, Cedric H. Xia, Tyler M. Moore, Kosha Ruparel. Desmond Oathes, Russell T. Shinohara, Raquel E. Gur, Ruben C. Gur, and Danielle S. Bassett.

This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (F31MH115709, R01MH113550, MH089983, MH089924, R01MH107703, R01MH112847, R01MH107235, P50MH096891, K01MH102609, R01NS085211, RF1MH116920). Additional support was provided by the Lifespan Brain Institute.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Earth's magnetic song recorded for the first time during a solar storm

Solar winds

The song comes from waves that are generated in the Earth's magnetic field by the collision of the storm. The storm itself is the eruption of electrically charged particles from the sun's atmosphere.

A team led by Lucile Turc, a former ESA research fellow who is now based at the University of Helsinki, Finland, made the discovery after analyzing data from the Cluster Science Archive. The archive provides access to all data obtained during Cluster's ongoing mission over almost two decades.

Cluster consists of four spacecraft that orbit Earth in formation, investigating our planet's magnetic environment and its interaction with the solar wind—a constant flow of particles released by the sun into the Solar System.

As part of their orbits, the Cluster spacecraft repeatedly fly through the foreshock, which is the first region that particles encounter when a solar storm hits our planet. The team found that in the early part of the mission, from 2001 to 2005, the spacecraft flew through six such collisions, recording the waves that were generated.

The new analysis shows that, during the collision, the foreshock is driven to release magnetic waves that are much more complex than first thought.The magnetic waves measured by ESA’s Cluster mission in the magnetic foreshock above Earth – the first region of our planet’s magnetic environment that solar wind particles encounter – during calm space weather conditions. The video contains a ‘sonification’ of the magnetic waves in the undisturbed foreshock, obtained by transforming the frequencies of these magnetic waves into audible signals. In the undisturbed foreshock, the sounds are very low pitch and monotonous. Credit: ESA/Cluster; L. Turc et al. (2019); Audio: Martin Archer, Queen Mary University of London, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

"Our study reveals that solar storms profoundly modify the foreshock region," says Lucile.

When the frequencies of these magnetic waves are transformed into audible signals, they give rise to an uncanny song that might recall more the sound effects of a science fiction movie than a natural phenomenon.

In quiet times, when no solar storm is striking the Earth, the song is lower in pitch and less complex, with one single frequency dominating the oscillation. When a solar storm hits, the frequency of the wave is roughly doubled, with the precise frequency of the resulting waves being dependent on the strength of the magnetic field in the storm.

"It's like the storm is changing the tuning of the foreshock," explains Lucile.

And it doesn't stop there because not only does the frequency of the wave change but it also becomes much more complicated than the single frequency present in quiet times. Once the storm hits the foreshock, the wave breaks into a complex network of different, higher frequencies.

Computer simulations of the foreshock, performed using a model called Vlasiator, which is being developed at the University of Helsinki, demonstrate the intricate wave pattern that appears during solar storms.The magnetic waves measured by ESA’s Cluster mission in the magnetic foreshock above Earth – the first region of our planet’s magnetic environment that solar wind particles encounter – during a solar storm. The video contains a ‘sonification’ of the magnetic waves obtained by transforming the frequencies of these magnetic waves into audible signals. During the storm, the magnetic waves in the foreshock roughly double their frequency and become more complicated than during calm space weather conditions, resulting in audible sounds that are around an octave higher and much more variable. Credit: ESA/Cluster; L. Turc et al. (2019); Audio: Martin Archer, Queen Mary University of London, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The changes in the foreshock have the power to affect the way the solar storm is propagated down to the Earth's surface. Although it is still an open question exactly how this process works, it is clear that the energy generated by waves in the foreshock cannot escape back into space, as the waves are pushed towards Earth by the incoming solar storm.

Before they reach our atmosphere, however, the waves encounter another barrier, the bow shock, which is the magnetic region of space that slows down solar wind particles before they collide with Earth's magnetic field. The collision of the magnetic waves modifies the behaviour of the bow shock, possibly changing the way it processes the energy of the incoming solar storm.

Behind the bow shock, the magnetic fields of Earth start to resonate at the frequency of the waves and this contributes to transmit the magnetic disturbance all the way to the ground. It is a fast process, taking around ten minutes from the wave being generated at the foreshock to its energy reaching the ground.

Lucile and colleagues are now working to understand exactly how these complex waves are generated.

"We always expected a change in frequency but not the level of complexity in the wave," she adds.

Solar storms are a part of space weather. While the solar wind is always blowing, explosive releases of energy close to the sun's surface generate turbulence and gusts that eventually give rise to solar storms.

Understanding space weather has become increasingly important to society because of the damaging effects solar storms can have on sensitive electronics and technology on ground and in space. It is now more important than ever that we understand how space weather disturbances such as solar storms propagate through the Solar System and down to Earth, and ESA's upcoming Solar Orbiter mission, scheduled for launch in February 2020, will greatly contribute to these investigations.

This new scientific study based on the long-lived Cluster mission provides another detail in that knowledge but it also has a larger role to play in our understanding of the universe. Magnetic fields are ubiquitous and so the kind of complex interaction seen in Earth's foreshock may take place in a variety of cosmic environments, including exoplanets orbiting close to their parent star, as they would be immersed in intense magnetic fields.

"This is an excellent example of how Cluster continues to extend our knowledge of the sun-Earth connection, even years after the original data was obtained," says Philippe Escoubet, ESA Project Scientist for Cluster.

"The results take us deeper into the details of fundamental magnetic interactions that take place across the universe."

More information: L. Turc et al. First observations of the disruption of the Earth's foreshock wave field during magnetic clouds, Geophysical Research Letters. DOI: 10.1029/2019GL084437

The audio files with the sonification of the Cluster measurements are available on ESA's Soundcloud page: soundcloud.com/esa

Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters