'It could be catastrophic': Woman says natural supplement contained hidden painkiller drug
A Manitoba woman thought she found a miracle natural supplement, but said a hidden ingredient wreaked havoc on her health.
It's as if they were using a telescope not just to peer into space, but also into time.
Canadian scientists are already using spectacular data and images from the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope to look backward into some of the oldest stars ever studied and forward into how new stars and planets are born.
"One of the holy grails of astronomy is to find stars that are the first stars to have formed after the Big Bang," said Ghassan Sarrouh of York University, a co-author of a study on star clusters that's already been published using James Webb data. "That's what we think these are -- the earliest stars."
On the other end of time, Western University's Els Peeters is looking into the future by studying hot young stars in the constellation Orion and their influence on the interstellar material around them.
"In that material is where the next generation of stars will be born," she said.
Don't forget the planets. A group at University of Montreal is looking at exoplanets -- especially Earth-sized ones with water and other essential elements in their atmosphere that just might host life.
"We've already had a first result," said Nathalie Oullette. "About a month ago was the first detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet."
The James Webb is the result of $13 billion and more than two decades of work. The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb orbits much deeper in space and is anywhere from a hundred to a million times more sensitive.
Two of its major components -- one machine that aims the telescope with stunning precision and another that analyzes light far beyond the visible spectrum -- were designed and built in Canada. That has given Canadian researchers the right to claim five per cent of the telescope's observation time.
Scientists are almost giddy over the quality of what they're getting back.
"Astounding," said Erik Rosolowsky of the University of Alberta, who's using Webb's infrared capabilities to study how black holes create voids in interstellar dust, the spawning grounds for new stars. "It's like someone's given us a set of X-ray specs."
Oullette said before Webb, astronomers could spend days going through murky data, separating signal from noise.
"It is quite remarkable how clean (Webb's) data is." she said. "With Webb, there's no having to dig through the data to find the signal."
Sarrouh puts Webb images side-by-side with those from Hubble.
"You can just see one set of images is really blurred and fuzzy. The other is full of all these really sharp points that just sparkle."
The results are pouring in. Rosolowsky and his team already have 21 papers in the works.
And already, scientists are feeling their mental star maps shift.
It looks, for example, that things may have started up much sooner after the Big Bang than previously thought, said Oullette.
"Maybe structure started earlier than we had thought and galaxies started forming earlier than we thought."
Rosolowsky has confirmed the existence of black holes so large they leave great holes in the centre of galaxies where stars would normally be created.
"We can see straight through and say this black hole is ripping apart all these proto-stars before they get going."
Peeters calls it a new era in astronomy.
"It's only operational for three months and already we've learned so much."
Sarrouh said it's a good time to be a Canadian astronomer.
"It will allow us to see into a time we've never seen into before. You can almost think of the James Webb as a time machine."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 10, 2022.
A Manitoba woman thought she found a miracle natural supplement, but said a hidden ingredient wreaked havoc on her health.
Police have released video footage of a dramatic takedown of a group of teens wanted in connection with an attempted carjacking in Markham earlier this month.
Hospital chaplain J.S. Park opens up about death, grief and hearing thousands of last words, and shares his advice for the living.
Group of Seven foreign ministers warned of new sanctions against Iran on Friday for its drone and missile attack on Israel, and urged both sides to avoid an escalation of the conflict.
The World Health Organization is likely to issue a wider warning about contaminated Johnson and Johnson-made children's cough syrup found in Nigeria last week, it said in an email.
Several Nova Scotia groups that assist women are speaking out against comments on domestic violence by Justice Minister Brad Johns, and at least one is calling for his dismissal.
Every good wedding has to have one teensy, tiny crisis.
A woman who recently moved to Canada from India was searching for a job when she got caught in an online job scam and lost $15,000.
More money will land in the pockets of some Canadian families on Friday for the latest Canada Child Benefit installment.
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.
Molly Knight, a grade four student in Nova Scotia, noticed her school library did not have many books on female athletes, so she started her own book drive in hopes of changing that.
Almost 7,000 bars of pure gold were stolen from Pearson International Airport exactly one year ago during an elaborate heist, but so far only a tiny fraction of that stolen loot has been found.
When Les Robertson was walking home from the gym in North Vancouver's Lower Lonsdale neighbourhood three weeks ago, he did a double take. Standing near a burrow it had dug in a vacant lot near East 1st Street and St. Georges Avenue was a yellow-bellied marmot.
A moulting seal who was relocated after drawing daily crowds of onlookers in Greater Victoria has made a surprise return, after what officials described as an 'astonishing' six-day journey.
Just steps from Parliament Hill is a barber shop that for the last 100 years has catered to everyone from prime ministers to tourists.
A high score on a Foo Fighters pinball machine has Edmonton player Dave Formenti on a high.
A compound used to treat sour gas that's been linked to fertility issues in cattle has been found throughout groundwater in the Prairies, according to a new study.