Anyone who has used the Internet in recent years is probably used to encountering telltale signs of LLM prompting that lazy users sometimes forget to remove from their AI-generated pabulum. But a Canadian legislator took that idea to an embarrassing new level this week, reading an apparent LLM prompt instruction into the record during a floor speech.
Bill Oliver, a Progressive Conservative Party member of the legislative assembly of New Brunswick, noted in a speech last month that "One of the dangers associated with creating advocacy offices is that citizens often develop expectations that exceed the powers actually granted to those offices." He then went on to say out loud that "here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points," a line with all the hallmarks of an LLM presenting an alternative style option in response to a prompt.
The odd reading went more or less unnoticed at the time, but video of the remarks started spreading around social media networks like Reddit and Threads earlier this week. In Canada, the snafu is now getting mainstream attention from the likes of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and The Toronto Star, the latter of which called it a sign of "a growing divide in our society: between the elites, who are only too happy to delegate their duties to the Borg; and the masses, who find this objectionable."
Vários monitores LG têm instalado aplicações automaticamente através do Windows Update, sem qualquer ação do utilizador. Descubra como travar este comportamento no Windows 11.
NASA’s X-59 test pilot Mike Lippert stands in front of the agency’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, on Wednesday, June 24, 2026.
NASA/Carla Escamilla
NASA added a new X-59 test pilot to support the agency’s Quesst mission: Mike Lippert, a research test pilot based at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.
“This fulfills a lifelong dream of conducting airborne research and experimental flight test for NASA in the high desert — contributing to humankind’s understanding of the science of flight and the nature of the world around us,” Lippert said.
Lippert will fly the X-59, along with the F-15 and F-18 support aircraft to monitor the quiet supersonic X-plane when it’s in the air. He joins Nils Larson and Jim “Clue” Less, who have been flying the X-59 since its first flight in October 2025.
A South Carolina native, Lippert served 20 years with the U.S. Marine Corps before retiring last year as a lieutenant colonel. Like his fellow test pilots, he boasts an impressive flight resume, including logging more than 2,600 hours of flight time in 60 different types of aircraft.
Lippert said he finds test pilot work especially rewarding.
“For me, the joy of taking part in experimental flight test and airborne research is the experience of discovery and learning something new every day,” he said. “It is incredibly rewarding to be part of a team solving complex problems and venturing into the unknown, together.”
Lippert spent the majority of his career flying the AV-8B Harrier operationally and serving as a test pilot in the F-35 program. He is also an aerospace engineer, earning a bachelor’s degree from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and a Master of Science in flight test engineering from the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Additionally, he earned a Master of Science in systems engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Lippert is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Alabama Graduate School in Tuscaloosa, where his research focuses on high-speed gas dynamics, including supersonic and hypersonic fluid mechanics — complementing his work on the Quesst mission.
Lippert is busy preparing for his role at NASA by flying training flights on support aircraft and spending time in the X-59 simulator. He is expected to begin flying the X-59 later this summer.
Intel posted results that beat market expectations on surging demand from artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. With its third-quarter outlook also exceeding expectations, the company's shares jumped about 9% in after-hours trading.
Intel said in second-quarter results released on July 23 local time that revenue rose 25% from a year earlier to $16.1 billion, well above the market forecast of $14.4 billion. Adjusted earnings per share came to $0.42, double the market forecast of $0.21.
Demand for server central processing units (CPUs) led Intel's second-quarter performance. Revenue from its data center and AI business was about $6.26 billion, above the market estimate of $5.37 billion. Intel said earlier this year that CPU orders had exceeded its production capacity.
Revenue from the notebook and desktop PC business was about $8.88 billion, against a market estimate of $7.89 billion. Intel said the share of low-cost PC chips was reduced while the share of high-specification chips expanded, and that although unit sales declined, the average selling price (ASP) rose.
The foundry business, long a sore point for the company, posted revenue of $5.77 billion, above the market estimate of $5.55 billion. It is still in the red, however, with a loss of about $2.089 billion.
Internal transactions in the second quarter came to about $5.5 billion. Internal transactions refer to dealings between business units within the company. They are counted as revenue for each business unit but are deducted when calculating consolidated revenue to prevent double counting.
The third-quarter outlook also exceeded market expectations. Intel guided for third-quarter revenue of $15.8 billion to $16.8 billion and adjusted earnings per share of 38 cents. The average revenue estimate among analysts compiled by LSEG was $15.1 billion, with adjusted earnings per share of 27 cents.
Intel has also secured long-term supply contracts that promise recurring revenue. Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner told Reuters that the company has signed three- to five-year contracts with customers covering server CPUs and XPUs. Some contracts include both volume and pricing, and can be renegotiated depending on market conditions.
Intel is also raising capital expenditures to match growing demand. "We have raised this year's capital spending outlook to $20 billion from $18 billion," Zinsner said. "We expect next year's investment to increase meaningfully as well."
"AI is driving an unprecedented level of demand for computing," Intel Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan said. "We can drive sustained growth in areas such as CPUs, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), advanced packaging and foundry." He added, "The second-quarter results mark the highest revenue growth rate in the past 15 years," saying that "fast execution, accountable management and a customer-focused strategy made it possible."
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won. (Photo: Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry)
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won. (Photo: Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry)
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won must pay 944 billion won in property division to Roh Soh-yeong, director of Art Center Nabi, a South Korean court ruled in a remanded divorce case. The ruling included Chey's holdings in SK Inc. as part of the assets subject to division. The amount was about 400 billion won less than the 1.3808 trillion won awarded by the appellate court, but far higher than the 66.5 billion won ordered by the first-instance court.
The Seoul High Court's Family Division 1, presided over by Judge Lee Sang-joo, ruled on July 24 that Chey must pay Roh 944 billion won in property division, along with annual default interest of 5% from the date the judgment becomes final until payment is completed. The court ordered each party to bear its own litigation costs.
The court recognized Chey's holdings in SK Inc. as assets subject to division, concluding that a substantial portion of the couple's joint assets had been formed or acquired during their marriage. It set April 16, 2024, the date when oral arguments concluded in the divorce proceedings, as the valuation date for the assets. SK Inc. shares were trading at around 160,000 won at that time.
The court did, however, take into account the subsequent sharp increase in the value of Chey's SK Inc. shares when determining the amount of the property division. SK Inc. shares that Chey had gifted to relatives to maintain control of the group were excluded from the assets subject to division.
The court recognized Roh's contribution to the formation of the assets at 33.3%, or one-third. It found that Roh contributed to Chey's business activities and to the appreciation of SK Inc. shares by handling household affairs and child-rearing and through her external activities during the marriage. The contribution ratio was slightly lower than the 35% recognized by the appellate court.
The court did not take into account the 30 billion won in slush funds linked to former President Roh Tae-woo in calculating the property division ratio.
For the method of division, the court chose compensatory division, under which Chey will continue to hold the shares and pay Roh the shortfall in her portion in cash. The decision took into account the defense of management control and the stability of the group's governance structure.
The divorce proceedings began in 2015, when Chey publicly disclosed his intention to divorce and the existence of a child born outside the marriage. The legal dispute escalated when he filed for divorce mediation in July 2017.
In December 2022, the first-instance court ruled that Chey's SK Inc. shares were his separate property and excluded them from the assets subject to division, awarding Roh 66.5 billion won in property division and 100 million won in alimony. In May 2024, the appellate court determined that the shares were the couple's joint assets, recognized Roh's contribution at 35%, and ordered Chey to pay 1.3808 trillion won in property division and 2 billion won in alimony.
In October 2025, the Supreme Court found that the 30 billion won from the side of former President Roh Tae-woo appeared to be illicit funds raised during his presidency, and that it could not be taken into account as Roh Soh-yeong's contribution to the formation of the assets even if the money had flowed into SK Group. The court overturned the property division portion and sent the case back to the Seoul High Court. The divorce itself and the 2 billion won alimony payment were confirmed.
The business community is watching the impact the ruling will have on SK Group's governance structure. With Chey required to raise close to 1 trillion won for the property division payment, attention is turning to how he will secure the funds. Some observers have raised the possibility that he could use his SK Inc. stake as collateral or sell some assets, with SK Siltron cited as a prime example.
Immediately after the ruling, Chey's legal counsel issued a statement saying, "The divorce was confirmed by last year's Supreme Court ruling in a process of dissolving a marriage spanning nearly 20 years, and today's remanded ruling on property division followed. We feel apologetic for causing concern to many people." The statement added, "We respect the court's judgment, but we will closely review the details of the ruling before deciding our future response, including whether to appeal to the Supreme Court."
Rendering of SK Hynix’s Cheongju P&T7 facility. (Image: SK Hynix)
SK Hynix is accelerating construction of its Cheongju P&T7 advanced semiconductor packaging facility by bringing forward the opening of its first cleanroom by about three months.
According to industry sources on July 23, SK Hynix now expects to open the first cleanroom at P&T7 as early as July 2027. The company had previously announced an October 2027 target.
“SK Hynix recently began bidding for utility and infrastructure work at P&T7 earlier than expected,” an industry source said. “Internally, the company expects the cleanroom to open roughly one quarter earlier than originally planned.” Some equipment-related tenders have failed to attract bidders and are currently being reissued. Industry sources expect all utility infrastructure bidding to be completed by around August at the latest.
Several months after the bidding process is completed, SK Hynix will issue formal purchase orders (POs) to contractors. The contractors will then fabricate the utility infrastructure, deliver it to the site, and install it in the sub-fab. After commissioning is completed, the cleanroom will undergo final cleaning to establish a contamination-free positive-pressure environment. Although the timeline varies depending on the size of the facility, the entire process typically takes 11 to 12 months before a cleanroom is ready for operation.
On July 22, SK Hynix disclosed that it had shortened the cleanroom opening schedule for P&T7, although it did not specify the revised timeline. As investment spending is being brought forward, the initial construction budget has increased to 7.0931 trillion won. The company said the increase reflects the earlier recognition of expenditures that had originally been scheduled for later phases, while the total planned investment of 19 trillion won, announced in January, remains unchanged.
“Initial investment increased as we accelerated the cleanroom opening schedule to respond to rising production demand at P&T7,” SK Hynix said. “The board approved the revised investment amount on July 22, and the disclosure was made in accordance with regulatory requirements.”
Site of the Cheongju Technopolis Industrial Complex, where SK Hynix’s P&T7 facility will be built. (Photo: SK Hynix)
P&T7 is SK Hynix’s dedicated advanced packaging and testing facility for AI memory products, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM). The plant is being built on a 230,000-square-meter site in the Cheongju Technopolis Industrial Complex and will include wafer test (WT) and wafer-level packaging (WLP) production lines. Total cleanroom space will reach approximately 150,000 square meters.
SK Hynix held a groundbreaking ceremony for P&T7 in April. At the time, the company planned to complete the 60,000-square-meter WT production line by October 2027, followed by the 90,000-square-meter WLP line in phases through February 2028. Completion of a semiconductor fab refers to the point at which the cleanroom has been opened in a contamination-controlled condition and is ready to receive manufacturing equipment.
Once operational, the P&T facility will package semiconductor chips produced at front-end fabs into final products and conduct quality verification. The plant will support production of HBM through 2.5D packaging technology, including through-silicon via (TSV) processing and vertical chip stacking for DRAM.
SK Hynix has recently accelerated large-scale capital investment to meet robust demand for AI memory. The company is also bringing forward the operational timeline for its Cheongju M15X fab and accelerating cleanroom construction at the first fab in its Yongin semiconductor cluster to expand manufacturing capacity. By rapidly increasing both front-end DRAM production and back-end packaging and testing capacity, SK Hynix is expected to strengthen its ability to meet growing demand for AI memory products such as HBM4.
Some industry observers believe the accelerated schedule may also reflect government efforts to speed up domestic semiconductor investment following plans for the Yongin semiconductor cluster and a proposed large-scale semiconductor manufacturing project in Gwangju.
“There is currently strong pressure at the national level to accelerate semiconductor fab construction,” a construction industry source said. “Engineering contractors are submitting proposals to customers outlining ways to shorten construction schedules for each phase of the project.”
Companies supplying utility infrastructure for semiconductor fabs include Wonik Holdings, STI, HanYang ENG, TEMC C&S, and CnG HiTech.
SK Hynix is discussing a plan to jointly operate Intel’s semiconductor fabrication facility in Ohio rather than acquire it, according to a media report.
U.S. news outlet Semafor reported on July 22 that Intel is seeking a partner to operate its semiconductor fab in Ohio. Citing people familiar with the matter, the report said SK Hynix is discussing a joint operating arrangement instead of an acquisition. It added that the two companies have not begun formal negotiations and that discussions remain at an early stage.
The possibility of a joint operation has emerged as Intel’s Ohio fab project continues to face delays. Intel broke ground on the Ohio facility in 2022 with a planned investment of 28 billion dollars. The site spans about 1.2 million pyeong and is large enough to accommodate a total of eight semiconductor fabs. The site is comparable in scale to the Yongin semiconductor cluster being developed by SK Hynix in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, which covers about 1.26 million pyeong.
Intel had originally planned to open the Ohio fab in 2025 but postponed completion to 2030 last year. The company was facing financial difficulties at the time and also carried out large-scale restructuring of its foundry business. An Intel spokesperson said, “Our commitment to the Ohio fab remains unchanged,” adding that the company continues to invest in accelerating construction of the site.
A shortage of memory semiconductor supply is also strengthening the rationale for potential cooperation between SK Hynix and Intel. SK Hynix is expanding memory production capacity by building additional semiconductor fabs in Yongin, Cheongju, and Indiana, but believes further capacity will still be needed. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won also said at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) Jeju Forum on July 15 that the company needs to build additional semiconductor plants, including in the United States, and is currently searching for suitable locations.
Building a new fab requires significant time from site selection through mass production. Utilizing a site where construction has already progressed could allow production capacity to be secured more quickly. The Ohio fab is reported to have completed part of its foundational construction.
SK Hynix did not deny the possibility of a joint operation. Asked whether the company had discussed jointly operating the Ohio fab with Intel, an SK Hynix spokesperson said, “We cannot confirm that.”
Qualcomm is expanding Snapdragon platform supply across Samsung Electronics' new Galaxy device lineup. (Photo: Qualcomm)
Qualcomm Technologies is expanding shipments of its Snapdragon platforms across Samsung Electronics' latest Galaxy device lineup.
Qualcomm said on July 22 (local time) at Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Unpacked 2026 event in London that it will supply Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Snapdragon Wear Elite, and Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 platforms for six newly unveiled Galaxy products.
Cristiano Amon, President and Chief Executive Officer of Qualcomm Incorporated, who appeared as a speaker at the Unpacked event, said users would "see Snapdragon across more Samsung product categories" and added that the two companies would work together to create AI experiences with a deeper understanding of user context. Qualcomm and Samsung have partnered for three decades.
Qualcomm said its Snapdragon platforms power AI experiences across Samsung's mobile portfolio through on-device AI processing and high levels of cross-device connectivity. The platforms are designed to enable autonomous AI experiences that adapt in real time to users' daily activities and workflows.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will power the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, Galaxy Z Fold8, and Galaxy Z Flip8. The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra and Galaxy Z Flip8 newly adopt Snapdragon processors. The Fold8 Ultra is Samsung's first Ultra-branded foldable model. The previous-generation Flip model used Samsung's Exynos 2500 application processor (AP), although some regional variants of the Galaxy Z Flip8 will feature the Exynos 2600.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 integrates Qualcomm's third-generation custom Oryon CPU architecture, an Adreno GPU, and a Hexagon NPU. Qualcomm said the platform delivers higher performance than its predecessor while reducing power consumption. It also enhances AI processing through improved smart camera capabilities and network connectivity.
Snapdragon Wear Elite will power the Samsung Galaxy Watch9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra2. (Photo: Qualcomm)
The Snapdragon Wear Elite powers the Samsung Galaxy Watch9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra2. Both devices used Samsung's Exynos W1000 wearable AP in the previous generation. Snapdragon Wear Elite was first introduced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in March. It is the first wearable processor to incorporate a dedicated NPU.
The integrated Qualcomm Hexagon NPU enables on-device execution of AI models with up to one billion parameters without relying on cloud connectivity. The platform also features high-performance computing capabilities, advanced connectivity, and sensor fusion technology, which combines data from multiple sensors to improve accuracy.
The Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 will be used in Samsung Electronics' new intelligent eyewear, scheduled for release this fall. Samsung also unveiled two additional intelligent eyewear designs at the Unpacked event, developed in collaboration with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker.
With the Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1, Qualcomm is extending its collaboration with Samsung Electronics and Google beyond Android XR headsets into the smart glasses segment. Android XR is Google's operating system for extended reality (XR) devices, including headsets and smart glasses.⁶
Firm told to treat third-party services that appear in its results in ‘fair and non-discriminatory manner’
Google has been fined a total of €890m (£760m) by the EU for breaches of online competition laws by its search and app store services.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said Google had broken the Digital Markets Act by giving priority to its own services, such as shopping and hotel deals, in search results over those of its rivals.
La obtención de hierro para fabricar acero utiliza gases que generan enormes cantidades de CO₂. Una nueva simulación computacional reproduce el proceso para generarlo — la reducción de óxidos de hierro — utilizando hidrógeno en lugar de los gases contaminantes. Los resultados de la simulación, que combina modelos de dinámica de fluidos, movimiento de partículas y reacciones químicas, muestran que la conversión a hierro metálico supera el 90 % en algunos casos, y que la temperatura y la presión aceleran el proceso en sus primeras etapas. La investigación allana el camino hacia el “hierro verde”, una producción de acero sin emisiones de CO₂ y una siderurgia más limpia.
Nvidia has begun shipping its next-generation Vera Rubin AI platform to customers, marking the commercial rollout of the company's latest rack-scale computing architecture for AI factories.
The company announced on July 21 that Vera Rubin has entered volume production and is already running in customer data centers. Nvidia had previously announced Vera Rubin's entry into mass production on June 1. Customers include Google, Microsoft, Oracle and CoreWeave.
Vera Rubin is a rack-scale AI infrastructure platform that tightly integrates 36 Nvidia Vera CPUs, 72 Rubin GPUs, NVLink 6 interconnects and storage into a single system. The compute tray eliminates internal cables, fans and hoses, reducing assembly time from several hours to about one minute.
The Vera CPU is Nvidia's first server processor designed in-house specifically for AI infrastructure. It features 88 custom Olympus CPU cores and is designed to deliver up to 1.8x the performance of conventional x86 processors while providing three times greater inter-core bandwidth and 40% lower memory latency.
Nvidia said Vera Rubin significantly reduces both power consumption and AI inference costs compared with the previous generation. Benchmark testing on CoreWeave's cloud platform showed the system delivers 10 times more AI throughput per megawatt than Grace Blackwell NVL72, substantially lowering the cost per generated token. The company said tokens per megawatt has become a key metric for AI infrastructure because it measures how much AI work can be performed within a fixed power budget.
The platform also supports liquid cooling with coolant inlet temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius, enabling chiller-free dry cooling in suitable environments. Nvidia said the design can save millions of gallons of water annually per megawatt of deployed computing capacity.
Rendering of SK hynix's P&T7 facility in Cheongju. (Source: SK hynix)
Rendering of SK hynix's P&T7 facility in Cheongju. (Source: SK hynix)
SK hynix is accelerating investment in its P&T7 advanced packaging facility in Cheongju by bringing forward the project's execution schedule. The company has increased the amount approved by its board of directors to support an earlier cleanroom rollout, although the total planned investment for the project remains unchanged.
SK hynix announced on July 22 that its board approved an approximately 7.09 trillion won facility investment for construction of the P&T7 plant. The investment represents 5.88% of the company's equity. In its regulatory filing, SK hynix said the investment is intended to "secure production capacity in Cheongju to meet growing global demand for AI memory." The investment period extends through December 31, 2032.
The revised approval reflects the company's decision to accelerate the opening of cleanroom space in response to rising demand. Rather than increasing the overall project budget, SK hynix is adjusting the timing of capital expenditures under its existing investment plan. "The total investment for P&T7 remains unchanged at approximately 19 trillion won," the company said. "As the investment schedule has been brought forward, the amount requiring board approval increased, making a new board resolution necessary."
P&T7 will be SK hynix's seventh packaging and test facility and will manufacture advanced packaging products for AI memory, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Construction of the plant began in April. The company plans to begin installing the wafer test (WT) line in October 2027, followed by the phased construction of wafer-level packaging (WLP) lines through February 2028.
Company behind ChatGPT says agent ‘cheated’ an evaluation by attacking a Hugging Face database
OpenAI has revealed that an autonomous AI agent powered by its technology went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a prominent startup by itself in an “unprecedented incident”.
The company behind ChatGPT said the startup Hugging Face had detected and contained the agent – an AI tool designed to carry out tasks without human assistance – which had entered its systems.
Un estudio del INIA-CSIC ha investigado cómo la luz solar degrada el herbicida tralkoxydim en aguas naturales, identificando por primera vez tres productos de transformación. Los resultados revelan que estos nuevos compuestos pueden ser más tóxicos que el herbicida original, lo que supone un riesgo potencial para los ecosistemas acuáticos y subraya la necesidad de incluir los productos de degradación en la evaluación del riesgo ambiental de los plaguicidas.
Although the international team behind the discovery, which includes researchers from Paris, Brussels, and Vienna, said the evidence for this category of “oddball” meteorite offers a viable solution to its mysterious composition, they note that the rarity of chondrite meteorites makes its origin a new mystery that needs to be solved by future research.
They also note that a chondrite meteorite impact would have much less effect on atmospheric sulfur, which is critical to most extinction models, potentially casting doubt on its central role in dinosaur extinction.
Many Details About the Dinosaur Killer Meteorite Remain a Mystery
According to a statement, the Cretaceous-Paleogene impactor resulted in one of the largest extinction events in the planet’s history. While most scientists agree that the event played a significant role in ending the dinosaurs’ reign, the study’s authors note that “the exact mechanism and the extent of the impact-extinction link are debated.” They also note that the origin and composition of the dinosaur killer have remained a mystery.
An analysis of the Chicxulub impact structure reveals that the doomsday dinosaur-killer meteorite was between 10 and 15 kilometers (approximately 6 to 9 miles) wide. Estimates also suggest it impacted Earth at 64,000 km/m (40,000 mph) beneath the modern-day Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
Although previous studies identified the meteorite as similar to carbonaceous chondrites, the researchers said that carbonaceous chondrites are a diverse class of space rock, “leaving the exact nature of the impactor unclear.”
“Carbonaceous chondrites of the Ornans class (CO) are definitely not like the typical meteors you find in museum collections,” explained study co-author and visiting professor Dr. Philippe Claeys.
For example, the professor explained, a CO contains fewer volatile elements, such as zinc, carbon, Sulphur, and H20 “than other classes of meteorites we’ve discovered so far on Earth.”
One Mystery Solved
To try to unravel the mystery of the dinosaur-killer meteorite, the researchers teamed up with scientists from the Institut de Physique du Globe and the Université de Paris to conduct high-precision nickel isotope measurements of meteor samples from the event that have been collected over the years from the thin, worldwide layer of clay created by the explosive impact.
Dr. Claeys, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, currently visiting the Pacific Center for Isotopic and Geochemical Research in Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at UBC, noted the challenging nature of the isotopic analysis, primarily due to the limited number of samples.
“Only a minute fraction of the projectile is preserved in the planet’s KT clay layer because the entire meteorite vaporized upon impact,” the researcher explained.
Still, the study authors explain, evaluating Nickel isotopes offers several advantages over other testing methods. For example, Nickel has five isotopes that the researchers note “allow for up to three separate internally normalized signatures.” They also highlight the availability of Nickel in “virtually all types of available early Solar System solids,” including iron meteorites, which allows for comparison with a wide variety of potential impactors.
Finally, they write, CI chondrites have a distinct Ni isotope signature from the rest of the class, therefore “making it possible to distinguish a CI-like impactor clearly” from other meteorite types.
After completing an isotopic analysis of samples of marine clays containing microscopic pieces of the ejecta, the team said their results “constrain the impactor to one group of carbonaceous chondrites, CO chondrites, “ as well as some evidence for “ungrouped chondrites.”
“By combining our new Ni isotope data with the existing evidence, we demonstrate that the composition of the Chicxulub impactor was most likely CO chondrite-like,” the researchers write, adding that this identification is possible “given nickel’s high abundance in primitive meteorites compared to the Earth’s crust and the distinct isotope compositions they record.”
A New Mystery is Created
While the isotopic analysis offers a compelling solution to the composition of the famed dinosaur-killer that slammed into Earth millions of years ago, the team said the identification casts doubt on the extent of its role in the dinosaurs’ extinction. Specifically, they note that CO chondrites are “dry” compared to others in their class, meaning they contain much less of the volatiles that most extinction theories cite as a significant mechanism.
“As highly volatile elements, such as C, N, and S, in CO chondrites are less abundant than in the typical CCs, questions arise whether the impactor was an essential contributor to the volatiles released during the impact,” they explained.
The most important volatile in most extinction theories is Sulfur (S). However, the authors note, CO chondrites would deliver “approximately half as much S” as more common types.
If the new analysis is correct, it also puts the dinosaur-killer’s origin in question. The authors note that possible sources include distant, debris-rich regions of the outer Solar System or even the outer area of the asteroid belt near Jupiter.
Combined with the compositional analysis lacking volatiles, the team notes that their findings allow “further studies of the mechanism behind the extinction.”
Finding “Doesn’t Alter Our Theory” of What Caused Land Dinosaur Extinction
When discussing the potential implications of their findings, the researchers said their study “highlights the extraterrestrial origin of the K-Pg mass extinction and the isotopes of Ni as a well-suited tool to characterize the nature of extraterrestrial material on Earth.” They also note that the composition of the dinosaur-killer “opens the door for further research into the connection between the impact and the mass extinction.”
From a scientific perspective, the research said their work “highlights the use of Ni isotopes in fingerprinting extraterrestrial materials on Earth,” and helps evaluate the risks associated with “potential future impact events and their consequences.” The study also shows how even an uncommon type of space rock can permanently alter the planet’s history.
“Being impacted by such a rare, distant projectile really underscores how unlucky the dinosaurs were,” Dr. Claeys said.
The researcher also noted that the lack of volatiles in this category of meteorite “doesn’t alter our theory of what caused the extinction event.” However, he notes, if correct, the result “makes it less likely that Sulphur contained in the impactor was the smoking gun.” Instead, the fine debris “thrown into the atmosphere” by the forceful impact would have been the primary factor in the end of the dinosaurs.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org
Hot Macs have their own paradox: open Activity Monitor, select the CPU view, and at the top of the CPU % list will be kernel_task hogging the CPU cores with 100% or more, rather than its usual 4% or so. Kerb any temptation to kill it and hope it goes away, as it has taken control of your Mac to let it cool.
[…]
There are rare occasions when fans blow full on and kernel_task goes wild without any thermal problem. In Intel Macs, resetting the SMC is usually curative, but this could instead be the result of a fault in a thermal sensor, or in the SMC. Hardware diagnostics should tell you more. By far the most common cause of persistent problems is dust and debris in the air ducts, and in the case of some Intel Mac notebooks overheating of the left USB-C ports. For more details, see Apple’s note about kernel_task, which also confirms what I have written here.
[…]
If your Mac is showing early signs of thermal strain and still running, encourage heat loss by immediately[…]
It boggles my mind that the biggest software company in the world, with total control of their hardware/software stack is totally incapable of shipping an OS that doesn’t include one or more daemons who just endlessly waste CPU cycles.
Bonus irony points because dasd’s purpose is supposedly to schedule low priority background processes.
Continuing with the results from file compression, it’s straightforward to calculate the total energy required to compress the test file using the P and E cores:
When compressing using the ten P cores, power used was 51 W for a total of about 8.4 seconds, thus 428 J, or 43 J per core.
When compressing using the four E cores, power used was 255 mW for a total of about 150 seconds, thus 38 J, or 10 J per core.
[…]
In omitting GPU power from Energy Impact, many power- and energy-intensive tasks will appear far less demanding than they really are. This is becoming even more important now Apple silicon chips are being used increasingly to run AI computation locally.
Neither powermetrics nor Activity Monitor provide any estimates of power or energy used by other parts of a Mac, such as memory or the internal SSD, although those can also be important determinants of battery endurance and heat generation.
You manage all the devices that appear in Xcode as run destinations using Device Hub.
Run your app on simulated devices in Device Hub to quickly evaluate new features and fix bugs, and to see how your interface works on devices that you don’t have physical access to. Run your app on physical devices to test features or services that have hardware dependencies or investigating performance issues. For more information, see Running your app on simulated or physical devices.
Device Hub is undoubtedly a major surprise. It integrates simulators, physical device management, system state testing, and dynamic size adjustment into a new workflow. Its impact on day-to-day development experience may be more direct than that of many individual APIs. That said, iPhone apps now also support dynamic size adjustment, which will bring new challenges for developers, especially in terms of data and state organization. Adapting to different sizes is not something that can be solved merely by relying on dynamic layout containers. In many scenarios, large and small sizes correspond to very different navigation logic.
Xcode 27 introduced, among other new features, a new Device Hub app for developers that takes the place of the Simulator app. Where Simulator relied on separate windows for each device, Device Hub brings them all together into a single window where each simulated device is the detail view from a source list of devices on the left. It’s a more organized approach, made necessary by the wide variety of platforms Apple and Apple platform app developers have to build and test against.
[…]
In releases prior to Xcode 27, you could resolve this by importing the root public certificate into the simulated OS. On iOS, this could be done by dragging and dropping the .cer file onto the Simulator device window. Nothing would appear to happen, but you could then navigate to Settings, General, About, Certificate Trust Settings and mark the certificate as trusted.
[…]
In Xcode 27 with Device Hub, this process is much more uniform. […] While this new process does require you to wrap certificates in an Apple Configurator profile, this is much more consistent with how Apple’s device management system works, as it relies on signed profiles with policies, not loose .cer files. And now, just by adding the .mobileconfig to the Profiles section of the device inspector, the embedded certificate is automatically marked as trusted, greatly speeding up installation on new virtual devices.
Thanks to the remote control / screen sharing features of Device Hub, I can remotely navigate to Settings and start a software update on all my iOS27 devices without having to go collect them around the house 👌
For all of Apple’s nonsense about adding iPhone Mirroring to the EU, the new Device Hub (iOS Simulator) lets you remote-control your physical iOS devices just fine. I don’t think the DMA has an opt-out for developer tools 😛
It’s such a shame for now that Xcode 27’s Device Hub doesn’t support remote screen sharing with iOSes earlier than 27. I wish the screen sharing functionality was part of the developer disk image, and backported to iOS 26 and even iOS 18. Having a physical device plugged in somewhere is so much faster than booting a Simulator.
Xcode 27’s “Device Hub” is a broken shitshow, but most importantly, it lacks the Debug menu, where you could toggle slow animations and simulate memory warnings. Apple works tirelessly to destroy any good tool they used to have.
He has a thread of issues. Hopefully these will be addressed before it’s out of beta.
The Device Hub sometimes doesn’t kill CoreSimulator processes when you quit the app (not sure if this is a bug or intentional). Given that each device uses several hundred processes, the memory/processing impact is significant.
You’ll probably want to keep an eye on how many you have running: use right-click on the simulator in the list to “Shut Down” as necessary.
We started Hakai Magazine over 10 years ago because the ocean and its coastlines needed a voice. No other outlet was exclusively covering issues at the interface of sea and land—or of the marine world in general.
After all these years, most stories in the marine beat are as familiar to me as the liturgy I grew up reciting (and, like all lapsed Catholics, will never forget). Our reporting on climate change, fisheries, human-wildlife interactions, and deep-sea mining—and anything and everything about whales—borders on the ritualistic. But while liturgy rarely changes, science does, and so does our understanding of these issues. At Hakai, we’ve done our best to adapt—to share what’s new, what’s urgent, and what’s inspiring in ways that keep you, our readers, informed, engaged, and entertained.
Unlike those age-old religious texts, science is never set in stone; it’s a dynamic conversation. As environmental journalists, we play a role in that conversation, reflecting not just the facts but the humanity within them. When someone asked me what my overall takeaway is after a decade of editing a science magazine focused on oceans and coastlines, I thought first about our humanity, not our beat. One of the deeper meanings of humanity is recognizing our shared responsibility to each other and to nature itself. It’s this compassion—this humaneness—that the Hakai team has carried into our stories. We’ve contemplated how whales and humans talk, the beauty of an island too inhospitable for people, and seabirds’ relationship with fish, for example, to illustrate that we are all part of this fragile, interconnected planet.
We are a team of people—flawed and forgetful, but also hopeful and cheerful—with big hearts, motivated by the belief that, through journalism, we can make the world a little bit better. With every story we have produced, we’ve kept in mind the global conversation about various issues and have made an effort to write with enough depth and thoughtfulness to offer our readers moments of self-reflection, compassion, and connection. As critics rightfully point out, digital media and communication are nothing like face-to-face conversation. In the absence of human connection, our ability to experience those moments atrophies. Yet, despite all its downsides, digital media is how most of us share ideas, make sense of our lives, and attempt to make meaningful attachments.
At Hakai, we’ve done our best to ensure that what we have offered you through this digital space—our stories, our words, our images—carried the power to spark reflection, compassion, and connection. Over the past 10 years, I believe this team of imperfect people with big hearts has honored you, our audience, and the world we all love. And we’ll keep doing that in 2025 and beyond at biographic.com.
When a ship wrecks on an unfamiliar coastline, an already desperate situation is all the more dire. Blinded by the night, and lost, the captain and crew of the Puritan, a four-masted lumber schooner en route from San Francisco, California, to Port Gamble, Washington, in 1896, faced two agonizing options: abandon ship into the roiling sea and head toward shore through a rock-riddled shoal or stay aboard and hope the hull would hold.
Captain Atwood chose the latter and ordered his nine crewmen to lash themselves to the rigging to avoid slipping off the tilting deck and into the ocean’s frothing gullet. So bound, they waited until darkness slid into light. As the shoreline morphed into view on that November morning, the men got a sense of their position. The ship was pinioned to a reef, being rocked and hammered by the Pacific. The shore was tormentingly close, just 400 meters or so away, but the span too perilous to cross.
The Puritan had run aground on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, near Bonilla Point, about 110 kilometers west of Victoria. Today, the sobriquet “Graveyard of the Pacific” is hackneyed, but in the late 1800s, when colonial expansion was well underway in western North America, the graveyard—a stretch of coastline roughly from the Columbia River in the United States to northern Vancouver Island—acquired ships on the regular. In what probably seemed like an uninhabited middle of nowhere, Atwood and his men waited for a miracle. Luckily, they were actually in the inhabited middle of somewhere—a coastline that for millennia had been home to Indigenous peoples. Did the mariners think they were delirious when shadowy apparitions at the forest’s edge resolved into flesh-and-blood men and started wading toward the schooner?
Waist deep in the churning sea, the men tied a stone to the end of a fishing line and tossed it toward the crew. Toss, haul in. Toss, haul in. Toss, haul in. For almost eight hours, a newspaper later reported, they threw the line and the Puritan crew tried to catch it.
Finally, a crewman hooked the line and attached a heavier line to the smaller one. The rescuers then dragged the line to shore and secured it, allowing the crew to sling themselves to safety as if on a zipline. From there, the Indigenous men escorted the Puritan’s crew to a nearby shelter where they provided food and stayed with the men until help arrived.
Map data by ArcGIS
Sixty kilometers up the coast and 128 years later, another rescue is underway. On a drippy, monochrome February afternoon, nine men on three boats scan the rocky shore of Trevor Channel near the small village of Bamfield. They’ve been alerted by a “pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan” call—marine radio lingo for an urgent but not life-threatening situation: “At one-six-zero-zero Pacific Standard Time, this station received a report of overdue kayakers in the vicinity of Trevor Channel, Robbers Pass,” coast guard radio reported. Three kayakers missed their scheduled check-in call and are considered overdue.
From a boat nearby, Thomas Kerr, senior search and rescue program officer with the Canadian Coast Guard, watches the boats watching the shore. He’s the one who instigated this search an hour earlier, when he tossed three bald, floppy, PFD-wearing manikins into the water, securing them in place with small anchors. “Don’t be a dummy and lose the dummy,” he quipped as he tethered one with the name tag Julio to a buoy near Robbers Passage.
The nine men searching for Julio, and his friends Amy and Carl, are in Bamfield for immersive training in marine search and rescue. They come from four First Nations along the BC coast, the farthest from the Nisga’a First Nation village of Gingolx where the Nass River empties into the Pacific, north of Prince Rupert. Most have taken a few days just to get here, tasked by their communities to take part.
The intensive course is part of the Canadian Coast Guard’s Coastal Nations Search and Rescue (CNSAR) program, which provides support and training, as well as equipment and infrastructure, to coastal First Nations. The program has been evolving since its inception in 2015, and today, about 27 participants a year take the training in Bamfield, just one of a suite of programs under the coast guard’s Indigenous Community Response Training umbrella. The instruction and formal support are recognition that, like the men who rescued the crew of the Puritan, some of the coast’s most capable search and rescue specialists have been quietly at work since 1854 and no doubt long before. On New Year’s Day of that year, British Columbia’s first recorded shipwreck happened on the west coast. The 14 surviving crewmen of the British brig William were taken ashore and sheltered and fed by Indigenous people living near Pachena Point, just up the coast from where the Puritan wrecked nearly 43 years later.
Thomas Kerr, senior search and rescue program officer with the Canadian Coast Guard, coordinates a mock search for missing kayakers in Barkley Sound, British Columbia, during a week-long search and rescue course in February 2024. The intensive training is part of a comprehensive program of the Canadian Coast Guard that supports coastal First Nations with search and rescue skills, safety equipment, and other resources.
Getting to this point—where some coastal nations are more formally integrated into search and rescues and receive world-class support and training—required foresight by coast guard brass and a great deal of trust by First Nations. Recognition of their on-the-ground expertise within their territories and acknowledgment of their historical participation in rescues—saving survivors, recovering and sometimes burying bodies, getting word of the wreck to lighthouses or nearby settlements—has been long in coming. At best, rescuers in the past were acknowledged with a passing mention in the newspaper, or perhaps a medal or the award of cash. At worst, they were hanged.
A few days before the mock search for Julio and his friends, the first 2024 cohort of CNSAR participants gathers at McKay Bay Lodge in Bamfield. They’ve settled into their rooms and are gathered in the main lodge for orientation. Over dinner, they dispatch stunning mounds of spaghetti and talk quietly among themselves. Every once in a while, murmurs crescendo into cheers—several are streaming the annual All Native Basketball Tournament on their phones and they all have community teams in the competition. The tourney is in its 64th year, and it’s a big deal for the nations who travel to Prince Rupert for the friendly, but also fiercely competitive, week-long event. The shared experience and good-natured goading provides a bit of levity.
Dinner is also punctuated a few times by Scooby-Doo’s ruh-roh. It’s participant Tim Davidson’s text alert from his wife back on Haida Gwaii who’s eight-weeks pregnant and checking in regularly. Within a few minutes of meeting Davidson on the dock earlier that day, he’d shared that it’s the first time he’s been away from his young son. He gripped the front of his PFD, revealing a tattoo of a small hand—the size of his boy’s at three weeks—on the back of his.
Tim Davidson from the Haida Nation, on Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, was one of nine participants in the week-long search and rescue training held at the coast guard station in Bamfield, British Columbia.
After dinner, the group crowds onto the couch and armchairs in the lodge’s small living room, the fire in the woodstove snaps, and the large picture window clouds with moisture. This cohort just happens to be all men—women also take part—and ranges in age from 24 to 58. As they pass around a hefty coil of cedar-bark rope, a gift from a past participant that is used as a talking stick of sorts, the men share where they’re from and why they’ve come. Almost all mention their families, either their immediate relations or the larger extended family—aunties, cousins, grandparents, and other elders—of their coastal homes. They’re excited to be here, perhaps nervous and unsure of what to expect, but ultimately they’re eager to gain skills that will serve their communities. They’re all watermen, have spent their lives on boats, and are often tasked with searches since there’s no one else to call—the coast guard can be several hours away. Often, that means searching for a friend or relative. “Picture a 16-year-old kid riding up the river in the dark going to look for your cousin,” says William Smythe of Gingolx, his voice hesitant. “That’s how it started [for me].”
Most have been tasked to come by their communities because they’re already serving in emergency capacities. Warren Aster, from the Gitxaała Nation on British Columbia’s central coast, is emblematic of this. He does community policing for his nation, serves in the fire department and as a first responder, and does environmental monitoring such as water quality testing and abalone surveys. Similarly, Fabian Stewart, from Gingolx, is fire chief and bylaw officer and is always called upon for rescues, whether they be on land or water. “If [there’s an emergency] and you have a running boat, you’d better go out and look,” echoes Smythe, Stewart’s lifelong friend.
In mariners’ parlance, these boats are “vessels of opportunity”—vessels in the vicinity of an incident that can respond. Because in British Columbia there are dozens of coastal First Nations communities—many of which are boat- or floatplane-access-only and where many residents will learn to drive a boat long before they can drive a car—it stands to reason that many of the first first responders on scene will be people from these communities. Such was the case on October 25, 2015, when two fishermen from Ahousaht, a First Nation village of about 1,100 people just up the coast from Tofino, a popular resort destination on Vancouver Island’s west coast, spotted a distress flare. It had been sent from the Leviathan II, a Tofino-based whale watching boat that had capsized. The fishermen tried to get through to the coast guard on channel 16, the emergency channel, but the reception was poor. They also roused their community of Ahousaht on marine VHF channel 68, the radio frequency used for everyday communication within the village. Within minutes, community members mobilized in their own boats. In the end, the Ahousahts helped rescue 21 people and retrieved the bodies of five. The coast guard also responded, as did other boats in the area, but the event brought into sharp relief the fact that First Nations people are often first on scene in marine emergencies and that the coordination of rescue efforts between First Nations and federal authorities was “lacking,” as Roger Girouard, then assistant commissioner for the Canadian Coast Guard said in the accident’s aftermath.
The whale watching boat Leviathan II sank near Tofino, British Columbia, on October 25, 2015. People from the First Nations village of Ahousaht were instrumental in alerting authorities to the accident and in rescuing the survivors. This accident, and others that occurred before, highlighted the fact that First Nations people are often first on the scene when marine tragedies occur. Photo by Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press
The Leviathan II, as well as the sinking of the BC ferry Queen of the North in 2006—in which the people from Hartley Bay, within Gitga’at First Nation territory, helped get 99 passengers and crew safely to shore—were two dramatic and catastrophic events that demonstrated First Nations people were the “absolute best asset in terms of a first-on-scene resource for marine search and rescue,” says Geoff Carrow, deputy superintendent of search and rescue programs at the Canadian Coast Guard.
When the Leviathan II sank in 2015, the coast guard was taking its first tentative steps to more formally work with First Nations and had started to reach out to communities, but the accident spurred the effort and the 2017 Oceans Protection Plan provided seed funding. The CAN $1.5-billion federal initiative to improve marine safety and protect and restore marine ecosystems included significant investment for coastal First Nations to provide training, equipment, and coordinated planning for integration of local teams into search and rescue operations. Carrow and two other staff were dedicated full-time to crafting the Indigenous Community Response Training program in British Columbia. From the beginning, Carrow knew that for the relationship to work, it had to be led by the communities and it had to be built on trust. First question: Were the communities interested in a more formalized relationship? If so, what did they need? The coast guard’s efforts needed to be tangible and dependable. First Nations were all too accustomed to people arriving on their shores unannounced or with grand pronouncements or ideas to impose.
Since the first recorded contact was made on the BC coast in 1774, when Spanish explorer Juan Pérez on the ship Santiago traded briefly with Haida and Nuu-chah-nulth people, unknown ships have often proved problematic to Indigenous peoples. Explorers, traders, sealers, churches, Indian agents and other representatives of governments took many things: resources, cultural artifacts, fishing gear, children. They left other things behind: diseases, missionaries, burned villages, destroyed canoes, confusion, mistrust.
Worldviews and ideologies collided in February 1869 when the bark John Bright was wrecked on a boulder-studded stretch of shore near Estevan Point, Vancouver Island, losing all 22 on board, including the captain’s wife and children and their nanny. It’s unclear whether the disaster was witnessed by Hesquiaht people of the area, but sometime after it happened, a group came upon the wreck and the beach strewn with bodies, some without clothes, arms, heads. They carried the remains above the high-tide line; some they buried.
Weeks later, a passing trader, known for his less-than-scrupulous behavior, brought news of the wreck to Victoria, where the tragedy was twisted and sensationalized in the British Colonist, the newspaper of the day, fomenting outrage in the capital’s citizenry. The victims had been alive when they got to shore, the self-proclaimed witness insisted, only to be murdered, raped, and defiled on shore—heads cut off “to preclude the possibility of identification,” and the “bodies stripped of all clothing.”
When a body is tossed from a ship and onto a shoreline of boulders and reefs, it churns like a rag doll in a rock tumbler. The head, heavy as a bowling ball, is often the first to disarticulate. Feet also detach, and limbs; the clothing is peeled off by abrasion and the sea’s icy fingers. Coroners know this, and it’s likely that people living on the coast have long known this, too.
The surgeon aboard the gunboat HMS Sparrowhawk, the ship used by the colonial government to dispense law and order along the coast, said as much when he assumed the role of coroner and inspected exhumed bodies, noting that he could find no medical evidence to indicate that the bodies had been decapitated by human hands. He wrote in his notes that wild animals and pounding surf likely accounted for the injuries.
The HMS Sparrowhawk was one of several heavily armed Royal Navy gunboats used by the colonial government in the late 19th century—an era of intense colonial expansion in Western Canada—to assert British authority and protect colonial interests along the coast. Photo by UtCon Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
When the Sparrowhawk arrived on their shore, the Hesquiahts seemed unconcerned and willingly cooperated, including showing the items they’d salvaged from the wreck. Still, despite the coroner’s testimony, officials aboard the Sparrowhawk determined foul play and demanded the villagers turn over the perpetrators. When none were forthcoming, Royal Marines came ashore and burned houses and destroyed canoes. Finally, seven men—five witnesses and two accused—were seized and taken to Victoria for trial.
Against an all-male, all-white jury and unrelenting newspaper coverage, two Hesquiaht men—John Anayitzachist and Katkinna—were accused of murder and sentenced to be hanged. With the men in irons, the Sparrowhawk took them home to their village where they were executed on the beach in front of their community. David Higgins, publisher of the British Colonist, couldn’t resist a final smug volley when he reported that the gallows was left in place as a “lesson” to other “evil-disposed Indians.”
It’s no wonder that it can take time for coastal nations to trust the government when it comes calling, even a century and a half later.
The best advice Carrow received when he first started with the Indigenous Community Response Training was from a supervisor who told him to visit coastal First Nations communities, spend time on the docks, and ask, “How can I help?”
“We didn’t show up with a plan,” Carrow says. “We didn’t show up saying, ‘This is how we’re going to do things.’” Instead, he introduced himself to locals and learned who was often called on for searches or to help tow boats or otherwise offer marine assistance. He found those people whose doors others banged on at 2:00 a.m. when there was an emergency. Then, he explains, he chatted with them about their search and rescue experience, toured their boats, and asked what equipment they might need, such as flares, PFDs, first aid kits, or radios. If they’re going out in their personal boats to help people, “we need to get them the equipment they need so that they’re safe on the water and that they can communicate with us,” says Carrow.
Geoff Carrow, deputy superintendent of search and rescue programs at the Canadian Coast Guard, leads the Indigenous Community Response Training program, which supports search and rescue capabilities within First Nations communities along the BC coast. Photo courtesy of the Canadian Coast Guard
Over eight years, he’s been a consistent face of the program, with strong relationships in First Nations communities. Government officials are too often thought of as driftwood, he says; “We come and go with the tide.”
Today, the program is multifaceted. Carrow, Kerr, and their colleagues regularly visit about 20 coastal communities a year to deliver equipment and get updates on training needs, and they offer different options for skills training, from the thrice-yearly Bamfield intensive to a recently developed “soft landing” program that brings participants to Victoria to tour the coast guard station there, meet staff, and see how they, and their community, can fit within the program.
Fabian Stewart, left, and William Smythe from the Nisga’a First Nation take a cold-water plunge off the dock at the Canadian Coast Guard station in Bamfield, British Columbia, before practicing person-in-water rescue techniques.
Carrow’s team supports a broad range of people to build the search and rescue capacity along the coast. Most comprehensive are the self-run and community-led Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary stations. Eight are currently operational, with two more in the works. They’re in places that have a demonstrated search and rescue need—where communities already do a significant number of searches, and which aren’t easily served by regular coast guard stations. These units have purpose-built rescue vessels with appropriate equipment, and they get the most intensive training. Carrow and his colleagues also support community members who are on the water for work, for instance: coastal guardians, teams trained to respond to environmental emergencies, and even water taxi drivers and fishermen. When Carrow does his introduction at the Bamfield CNSAR course, he sums up the program’s philosophy: “We’re trying to figure out how to best support you so you can continue doing what you’re doing out there, which is rocking it,” he says. “But we want you to come home safe.”
Safety on the water includes excellent communication, and that’s a constant theme during the week at Bamfield. As the participants go through the mock rescue of the missing kayakers, Kerr constantly stresses clear communication, both on the boats and over the radio. “[We want to] get them in the habit of communicating with us,” says Kerr. “Us” means the coast guard and the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Victoria. For teams used to getting the job done on their own, linking into the greater coast guard’s more rigid set of protocols can take some getting used to.
One of the boats calls in to Kerr, who is rescue lead: “Exercise radio, exercise radio. This is RHIOT 2. We have a possible person in the water at four eight, five three, decimal, zero five north; one two five, zero seven, decimal, five three west.”
Kerr asks their intentions—they’ll investigate, come alongside, and pull the person out of the water—and confirms he’ll pass on the details to the rescue coordination center.
Participants in search and rescue training retrieve a manikin from the water near Robbers Passage, British Columbia.
About four minutes later, RHIOT 2 reports back that they’ve recovered Amy, that she is “cold but otherwise fine,” and that they are keeping her warm and will transport her to Bamfield for further care.
Faux kayakers safe and accounted for, the participants return to Bamfield at dusk. But the day’s exercises aren’t over yet. They have unceremoniously hauled the rescue manikins aboard during the scenario, and now it’s time to learn proper techniques. Illuminated by the spotlights on the Bamfield coast guard station dock, the men jump into the frigid Pacific and spend the next hour learning PIW—person in water—recovery techniques, taking turns being victim and rescuer.
Alec Dick, from Ahousaht, was one of the first to take the plunge with the CNSAR program back in 2016. Dick carried out emergency services for his community, so when the LeviathanII sank in 2015, his house became a command center of sorts. His living room window looked out toward the scene of the disaster, and he monitored the community boats heading out to respond. “The coast guard wasn’t on site yet,” he explains. “I was telling these guys that if you have people on board, get going to Tofino.” After the initial disaster, the community continued to help in the search for one missing person. “We did locate [him] a few days later,” he says.
Dick motions to another location visible from the beach where a float plane with three Ahousaht people on board crashed in 2010, another accident that initiated a full-on community response. A water taxi driver from the village was first on site, and his ability to pinpoint the location where the plane sank was invaluable to coast guard divers when they arrived. On the off chance someone had made it out of the plane, community members walked and boated the beaches and rocky shorelines for days after. There were no survivors, and the incident was a sobering reminder that search and rescue response in these small communities often means looking for a loved one.
Alec Dick, from the Ahousaht First Nation, has been an active participant in the Canadian Coast Guard’s Coastal Nations Search and Rescue program since it began and has been instrumental to its success. Photo by Adrienne Mason
Dick’s years of emergency response experience made him an ideal contact when the coast guard was looking to have a more formal relationship with coastal nations. “After the [Leviathan II] happened, we had a big meeting with the Canadian Coast Guard and other government people, and I was asked if I was willing to become part of the auxiliary coast guard,” he says. It was a welcome change in attitude. “I think they finally realized they need to be working with First Nations. We knew it a long time ago, that we needed to be interconnected in some way to work together.”
Ahousaht’s chief and council agreed to the coast guard’s offer to craft a program together, and Dick became one of the first to go through the Bamfield course. He’s a leader in the CNSAR program, and his instrumental role in helping to develop the program earned him a BC lieutenant governor’s award for maritime achievement. Although he leaves a lot of the responses to younger members now, he’s still fully involved in the CNSAR program as the board chair of the Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary and is regularly asked to do presentations about the organization. Most recently, he spoke at a meeting of the International Maritime Rescue Federation in Victoria.
The rapport with the Canadian Coast Guard has come a long way in eight years from what “was a bare-minimum relationship, that was more or less ‘you go your way, I go my way,’ you know?” Dick says. Whether it was a change of the guard, or a change in attitude and understanding, he says that now they’re “putting trust in one another.” Adding, “it’s a working relationship … that is so rewarding for both sides.”
That working relationship was put to practice in a dramatic rescue on January 25, 2022. A water taxi en route to Ahousaht slammed into a rock, thrusting its four passengers, who were sitting on bench seats, forward into the next row, and the driver into the windscreen. The driver managed to get a Mayday out and both the Ahousaht Coast Guard Auxiliary and the Tofino-based coast guard responded. Tom Stere, rescue specialist at the Tofino station, quickly dispatched with another crewman and headed to the scene. The seas were calm, but dense fog swathed the coast, cutting visibility to just 15 meters, if that. When they arrived, the Ahousaht coast guard crew was already on site, tied alongside the damaged boat, and assessing the scene. “Because of their training, the communication was seamless,” says Stere. As senior officer, he took charge of the response and tasked the Ahousaht members with various roles. By this time, other private vessels from Ahousaht had arrived, too, ready to offer assistance as needed.
It was a chaotic scene. There were multiple injuries in a very small space filled with gear and bent seats, so extraction was challenging. The passengers had numerous broken bones, including one woman with a severely traumatized face, and the captain had a head injury. To add to the challenge, a bottle of dish soap had exploded, and the interior was slick with detergent, blood, and broken glass.
Working together, the teams extracted the passengers, got them ready for transport, and sent them to Tofino on the boats standing by. All but one of the passengers were medevacked out of Tofino for treatment.
For Stere, it was a game changer having the Ahousaht team. “To be frank, it reduced my anxiety,” he says. He knew he had competent people on scene, with the appropriate gear—first aid, stretchers, pumps, for instance—with complementary training. “They’re a critical component of our [search and rescue] response, without question,” he says.
Stere has lived in Tofino for 37 years and has been with the coast guard for 33. He’s pleased to see the new, formalized relationship and the acknowledgment that these communities have always been there to rescue people in their territorial waters. “It’s a major shift in the culture and mindset of the coast guard,” he says, adding that it’s permeating throughout the organization.
Participants from coastal First Nations in British Columbia practice boating skills during a week-long search and rescue training program.
Carrow agrees. Ever mindful that CNSAR funding could be cut with a change of government, he’s working to ensure that it’s not just Carrow and his team who have the relationships. “They need to be held throughout the coast guard, from the newest employee to the most senior executive,” he says. Exposure to the program will make its importance crystal clear, he contends. What we’re doing with CNSAR is not trivial, not lip service, he says. “[The program] is working and we’re saving lives.”
The successes of the CNSAR program spurred its expansion across Canada in 2022 with the second phase of the Oceans Protection Plan. Today, the Canadian Coast Guard has Indigenous search and rescue programs under development on the Atlantic coast and in the “central region,” which encompasses Ontario, Quebec, and the Arctic coast.
For a government that has made many promises around reconciling past injustices with First Nations people, it would be convenient to point to the CNSAR program as proof of progress, a box checked. While the initiative has clearly shown success, Carrow is cautious about using the word reconciliation lightly. True reconciliation doesn’t come with a program, he says. “It’s got to be a personal relationship.” Building relationships and trust takes time, especially with government.
After almost a decade working closely with Carrow and the CNSAR program, Dick can feel the shift. He’s experienced new levels of openness and trust, and he sees an agency committed to more meaningful involvement with First Nations. “Not just to see them, but to hear them,” he says.
Alex Baildham, center, manager of operations and training for the Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary, reviews navigation skills with, from left, Warren Aster, Gitxaała Nation; Tyrese Short, Kyuquot/Checleseht First Nations; William Smythe, Nisga’a First Nation; and Dale Robinson, Gitxaała Nation.
Acknowledging past harms and how they can reverberate for generations often takes time, too. In November 2012, after petitions by the Hesquiaht First Nation, the BC government “expressed regret” to the Hesquiaht people and the families of John Anayitzachist and Katkinna for their wrongful hangings 143 years before. The federal government also exonerated the men in 2018.
Before these apologies, in 2008, master carver Tim Paul erected a pole in honor of his relative Anayitzachist on the beach at Homais, the place where he was hanged. It depicts a shark, an octopus, and, on top, Anayitzachist. Though its vibrant blue-and-red paint has now mostly faded to silver, the pole still stands, its base carpeted by a lush growth of thimbleberry and salal. Anayitzachist looks out to sea, watching for those passing by and those who might land on this shore.
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