Science
Risks and benefits of team sports during 2nd wave – CBC.ca
Organized sports are typically part of promoting mental, physical and social health for kids, but the pandemic is requiring parents and sports organizations to weigh the risks and benefits of play.
The recent increase in COVID-19 cases in Ottawa and other hotspots across the province is raising questions about the risks of any activity that involves gathering. But, some experts say, with precautions in place, team sports might be a relatively safe way to get exercise and improve psychological health.
Raywat Deonandan, an epidemiologist and an associate professor of health sciences at the University of Ottawa, said parents should consider how COVID-19 spreads when assessing the risk.
Specifically, they should consider distance between participants, outdoors being safer than indoors, avoiding face-to-face exposure and evaluating the duration and intensity of contact.
If we get past the anticipated peak in October, November and if we’re doing better then — then I’d reassess the risk.– Raywat Deonandan, University of Ottawa associate professor
“I’d be confident sending my child to an outdoor sport, that does not involve physical contact,” Deonandan said. “Soccer comes to mind … I’d be really confident having my child play tennis or other kind of racquet sports.”
As for hockey and ringette, Deonandan said hockey arenas are big enough that the virus could dissipate in a similar way to being outdoors, as long as there’s no contact and players get changed at home.
He said sports like wrestling or contact football, where individual players may be locked together face-to-face, pose a higher risk.
Get active — 2 metres apart
Ian Janssen, a professor of kinesiology and public health at Queen’s University, said it’s important for children to get active.
“Being active, sitting less and getting out of the house — those are very good things in terms of helping you cope with the mental health challenges of COVID[-19],” he said.
He said long-distance running would likely be the safest activity to avoid viral transmission, but with children especially it’s important for them to want to stay engaged.
“You can tell a 12-year-old to go out and run for five kilometres, how many are going to want to do that? Not a lot,” he said.
Janssen said his daughter now has a taped-off area to ensure two metres of distance when she participates in dance. He said his son’s swim club has implemented distancing measures within the pool, including prohibiting passing and designated starting and stopping points.
Benefit to have ‘normalcy in their life’
Marcia Morris, executive director of the Ottawa Sport Council, says member organizations have seen a dip in registration for the fall, but a core group of people have signed up because of what their sport means to them.
“They’re not going to restaurants, they’re not going to bars, they’re not going to movie theatres, they’re not going out, but the one thing they are prioritizing is going to do their sport,” Morris said.
“Because of the physical and mental benefit, but also the ability to connect and have some normalcy in their life.”
Morris said the council’s 70 member organizations contributed to developing a resource in July to allow for a safe return— including protocols for self-screening, cleaning and distancing — from canoeing to rugby and hockey.
Some of those adaptations mean reducing the number of players participating at a time or focusing on “skills and drills” rather than competition, she said.
Epidemiologist Raywat Deonandan says sports that maintain distance between players are the safest during the COVID-19 pandemic, while those that include close physical contact should be avoided. 1:00
No data on cases linked to sports
There have been disruptions in the world of recreational sport as a result of COVID-19. A hockey league in Gatineau, Que., recently shut down temporarily due to positive cases and another in Toronto postponed its season due to the recent increase in cases.
Morris said the sport council has not heard of any such cases in Ottawa within its membership.
In a statement, Ottawa Public Health says it doesn’t have specific data on any spread through sports in part due to the difficulty of tracing individual transmission incidents and also to protect personal health information.
The Ottawa Sport Council said many leagues and associations are offering shorter registration periods, instead of the typical September to March period, to allow for more flexibility.
“Most participants understand that there might be stop and start because as we go through waves of COVID[-19], there might be the requirement that, for safety reasons, the activity has to stop,” Morris said.
Epidemiologist Deonandan suggests a wait-and-see approach for higher risk sports.
“If you can hold off a month or two as we see how this disease moves along its proposed trajectory, if we get past the anticipated peak in October, November and if we’re doing better then — then I’d reassess the risk.”
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
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SpaceX sent yet another batch of its Starlink internet satellites skyward today (April 23).
A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 23 Starlink spacecraft lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 6:17 p.m. EDT (2217 GMT).
The Falcon 9’s first stage came back to Earth for a vertical landing about 8.5 minutes after launch as planned. It touched down on the SpaceX droneship Just Read the Instructions, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
It was the ninth launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description. Five of its previous eight liftoffs were Starlink missions.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage will continue carrying the 23 Starlink satellites toward low Earth orbit (LEO) today, deploying them about 65 minutes after liftoff.
This evening’s launch was the 41st of the year for SpaceX, and the 28th of 2024 dedicated to building out the huge and ever-growing Starlink megaconstellation. There are nearly 5,800 operational Starlink satellites in LEO at the moment, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.
The Starlink launch ended up being the first half of a spaceflight doubleheader: A Rocket Lab Electron vehicle launched two satellites, including a NASA solar-sailing technology demonstrator, from New Zealand today at 6:33 p.m. EDT (2233 GMT).
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 6:30 p.m. ET on April 23 with news of successful launch and first-stage landing.
Science
Exploring ecological networks in a digital world | News | Vancouver Island University | Canada – Vancouver Island University News
Getting to know Samantha Letourneau
By day, Samantha Letourneau is Vancouver Island University’s Canada Learning Bond project lead and Volunteer Tutor Coordinator. She’s also a musician and dancer and for the past two years, she’s been collaborating with Swedish artist Mårten Spångberg, thanks to funding obtained through Crimson Coast Dance, to create a digital art installation that goes live on Friday, April 26. A launch event takes place at Black Rabbit restaurant in the Old City Quarter that night. Samantha is also hosting a creative process workshop on April 27 and 28.
Can you share a bit about your background as an artist and how you got into it?
I have been working in art for a very long time, as a musician and dancer as well as an art administrator and program coordinator. I started music at the age of 11 and dance came later in my life in my early 20s. I always wanted to do dance, but I grew up in a small community in Yellowknife and at that time the only dance classes available were highland dancing, which I was not very interested in.
In my early 20s while living in Vancouver, I took classes in contemporary dance and was fortunate to land a small part in the Karen Jameison Dance company for a piece called The River. The River was about rivers and connection between the reality of a real and physical outdoor river and the different reality of “the river within.” It was both a piece of art and outreach for the community. It included working with the S’pak’wus Slu’lum Dancers of the Squamish Nation. Somewhat ground-breaking for 1998.
From there I was hooked and wanted to do more in dance. I studied a lot and took many classes. Fast forward to now, I have been involved with productions and performances with Crimson Coast Dance for more than 15 years and greatly appreciate the talent and innovation that Artistic Director Holly Bright has brought to this community. She is amazing and very supportive of artists in Nanaimo.
How did this international exchange come about?
The Nordic/Nanaimo exchange is one of the innovative projects Holly created. At the height of the pandemic, funded by BC Arts Council and Made In BC, Crimson Coast Dance embarked on a project that explored the ways in which Nanaimo artists could participate in online exchanges.
Two artists in Nanaimo – myself and Genevieve Johnson – were introduced to artists from Europe and supported through this international exchange. My collaborator, Mårten Spångberg, is a Swedish artist living and working in Berlin. An extension of that exchange is funded by Canada Council for the Arts – Digital Now.
What brought Mårten and myself together – and I quote Mårten here – is “questions around climate change, ecology and the influence contemporary society has on its environments. We are not interested in making art about the ecological crises or informing our audience about the urgency that climate change implies, but instead through our research develop work that in itself proposes, practices and engages in alternative ecologies.”
We share an understanding that art is a unique place, in the sense of practice, activation, performance and event, through which alternative ecologies can emerge and be probed and analyzed.
Tell us about the launch event.
We are launching the digital art installation that Mårten and I created on April 26 at The Attic at Black Rabbit Restaurant. The event is free to attend but people must sign up as seating is limited. I produced video art with soundscapes that I recorded mixing field recordings with voice and instrumentation. Marten explores text, imagery and AI.
My focus is on the evolving and ongoing process of how we communicate with each other and to nature within a digital context.
During our collaboration, Mårten and I talked about networks, though not just the expansive digital network of the internet but of nature. We shared thoughts on mycelium, a network of fungal threads or hyphae, that lately has received much attention on the importance of its function for the environment, including human beings.
Building off this concept, ideas of digital and ecological landscapes being connected emerged. From this we worked both collaboratively and individually to produce material for this digital project. Mårten will be there via Zoom as well and we will talk about this two-year process and the work we created together.
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