Quebec doctors are sounding the alarm over recent deepfake videos that have been appearing online, saying they can erode public trust in the medical system and put people's health at risk.

The AI-generated videos use the likeness of real doctors to give questionable health-care advice and falsely advertise or sell certain products.

"It is something that is putting a lot of damage on all physicians in Quebec and in Canada," said Dr. François Marquis, chief of intensive care at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital in Montreal.

Marquis said he was in disbelief when he first learned his image was being used in a deepfake video.

He received phone calls from people saying "you're all over Facebook," he said, "or that you have discovered something and they want to know if it's true and if they can get the drugs."

Marquis said the problem is that his face is known and that he's trusted.

"So it's not only my patients, it's any patient who's trusting me or any patient trusting physicians at large," he said, explaining how people can be duped.

Dr. Alain Vadeboncoeur, an emergency physician at the Montreal Heart Institute, said his image has also been used to falsely promote various products. In the past week alone, he says four different videos were brought to his attention.

Quebec doctors are sounding the alarm over recent deepfake videos that have been appearing online, saying they can erode public trust in the medical system and put people's health at risk.

The AI-generated videos use the likeness of real doctors to give questionable health-care advice and falsely advertise or sell certain products.

"It is something that is putting a lot of damage on all physicians in Quebec and in Canada," said Dr. François Marquis, chief of intensive care at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital in Montreal.

Marquis said he was in disbelief when he first learned his image was being used in a deepfake video.

He received phone calls from people saying "you're all over Facebook," he said, "or that you have discovered something and they want to know if it's true and if they can get the drugs."

Marquis said the problem is that his face is known and that he's trusted.

"So it's not only my patients, it's any patient who's trusting me or any patient trusting physicians at large," he said, explaining how people can be duped.

Dr. Alain Vadeboncoeur, an emergency physician at the Montreal Heart Institute, said his image has also been used to falsely promote various products. In the past week alone, he says four different videos were brought to his attention.

Wasps living around a Cold War-era nuclear facility in South Carolina have built at least four radioactive nests, raising questions about their source of hazardous material and the extent of environmental contamination, according to a report by The New York Times.

Last week, news broke that officials at the site—Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina—had found one radioactive nest on July 3. The discovery was documented in a July 22 report by the US Department of Energy, which owns the site.

The report said that the nest was on a post near a tank used to store nuclear waste and that it "was probing 100,000 dpm/100 cm2 beta/gamma." This contamination level "is greater than 10 times the total contamination values" listed in federal regulations for areas that require contamination posting and monitoring, the report said. Still, it concluded that the radioactivity of the nest was considered to be from "onsite legacy radioactive contamination not related to a loss of contamination control."

But the Times uncovered that three additional radioactive nests had been found since the July 3 discovery.

"The U.S. Department of Energy is managing the discovery of four wasp nests with very low levels of radioactive contamination," Edwin Deshong, the manager of the DOE's Savannah River Operations Office, said in an emailed statement to the Times. "The nests do not pose a health risk to SRS workers, the community, or the environment."

The SRS is a 310-square-mile facility built in the 1950s to produce material for nuclear weapons, including plutonium and tritium, a component of hydrogen bombs, the Times noted. Activity at the SRS, which is located near the border with Georgia, declined at the end of the Cold War. The DOE began cleaning up the site in 1996—a slow process that is currently estimated to be completed by 2065.

According to the DOE, the site produced 165 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste, which has been evaporated to 34 million gallons. The site has 51 waste tanks, eight of which have been operationally closed, with the remaining 43 in various states of the closure process.

Outside experts have been quick to point out critical information missing from the DOE's nest report, including the absolute level of radioactivity found in the nest, the specific isotopes that were found, and the type of wasps that built the nest. Some wasps build their nests from mud, while others might use chewed-up pulp from wood.

Scientists at the University of British Columbia have discovered a previously unknown virus in farmed Pacific oysters during a mass die-off in B.C. in 2020.

The paper, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said that while mass die-offs have been attributed to various factors, including viruses, in many cases, there is no definitive cause.

“We’ve recently seen annual mass die-offs in B.C. and elsewhere of Pacific oysters, the most widely farmed shellfish worldwide,” said first author Dr. Kevin Zhong, research associate in the UBC Department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences (EOAS).

The researchers collected 33 oysters from two farms in B.C. during a mass die-off in 2020, as well as 26 wild oysters from 10 nearby sites.

RNA analysis revealed the presence of a previously unknown virus, Pacific Oyster Nidovirus 1 (PONV1), in 20 of the dead and dying farmed oysters, according to the research. However, the virus was not found in healthy wild oysters, which suggested the virus was killing the oysters.

“This discovery highlights how little we know about viruses infecting invertebrates in general and oysters in particular,” said senior author Dr. Curtis Suttle, professor of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences, botany, microbiology and immunology, at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries.

The virus, which has one of the largest RNA genomes on record, according to the research, is so genetically different from other nidoviruses that the research team has proposed a new family, Megarnaviridae, or ‘large RNA viruses’ PONV1, which the team is proposing to name Megarnavirus gigas, or ‘large RNA virus giant.’

Suttle said these large RNA viruses appear to be specific to oysters, so humans are not at risk of contracting the virus.

However, the team said this discovery is a reminder that oyster farmers should use an abundance of caution when moving juvenile oysters as little is known about what causes disease in the bivalve molluscs.

“This research is not a cause for alarm,” Suttle added. “Rather, this is a meaningful step forward in advancing our understanding of oyster health and supporting the long-term sustainability of shellfish aquaculture.”

Note, this article is from a few weeks ago

Buildings are the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. In many cities, including Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary, buildings are the single highest source of emissions.

The recently launched Infrastructure for Good barometer, released by consulting firm Deloitte, suggests that Canada’s infrastructure investments already top the global list in terms of positive societal, economic and environmental benefits.

In fact, over the past 150 years, Canada has built railways, roads, clean water systems, electrical grids, pipelines and communication networks to connect and serve people across the country.

Now, there’s an opportunity to build on Canada’s impressive tradition by creating a new form of infrastructure: capturing, storing and sharing the massive amounts of heat lost from industry, electricity generation and communities, even in summer.

It looks like a massive update. Here are some excerpts, with more changes listed in the link above. I'm especially excited about the companion app:

"Calibre-Web Automated is extremely lucky and privileged to have such a large and vibrant community of people who support, enjoy and contribute to the project. The bulk of the new features and bugfixes this update brings were created by the best and brightest of our community and I want to celebrate that and their work here in the hope that our community only continues to grow!" - CrocodileStick

Major Changes 🚀

NEW: Split Library Support 💞

• As promised, all CWA features are now fully compatible with Calibre-Web's Split Library Functionality
• This enables users to store their Calibre Library in a a separate location to their metadata.db file
• To configure this, in the Admin Panel, navigate to Edit Calibre Database Configuration -> Separate Book Files from Library
  • The use of Network Shares (especially NFS) with this functionality is discouraged as they sometimes don't play well with CW & CWA's SQLite3 heavy stack. Many users use network shares without issues but there aren't enough resources to support those who can't get it working on their own

NEW: Hardcover API Integration 💜📖

• Hardcover is now officially not only available as a Metadata Provider, but using Hardcover's API, Kobo Shelves & Read Progress can now also be synced to a user's Hardcover account!

• Current workflow is scraping a book by title, you can then use the resulting hardcover-id identifier to search for editions of that book, by searching "hardcover-id:". Edition results are filtered to exclude Audiobooks editions, and sorted by ebook then physical book.

• If a shelf in CWA is selected for Kobo sync, when a book with id and edition identifiers is added to the shelf, it will also be added to Hardcovers want to read list. As the book is read on the Kobo device progress is synced to Hardcover as well when pushed to CWA.

• To use Hardcover as a Metadata Provider, simply provided a Hardcover API Token in your docker-compose under the HARDCOVER_TOKEN Environment Variable

  • To enable Kobo sync, a Hardcover API Token must be provided for each user in each user's respective Profile Page

• Thanks to demitrix! <3

NEW: Greatly Improved Metadata Selection UI 🎨

• Demitrix was really on a roll the last couple of months and also contributed some really cool functionality to the Metadata Selection UI

• Much more Elegant & Readable UI, both on Mobile & on Desktop

  • Improved CSS for the Fetch Metadata interface—making it easier and clearer for you to review and select metadata sources.

• Individually Selectable Elements

  • Say goodbye to having to having all of your book's metadata overwritten simply becuasse you wanted a better looking cover!
  • As of V3.1.0, all metadata elements can be individually updated from multiple sources instead of the only option being to take everything for a single source!

• Visual Quality Comparison Between the Cover Your Book Already Those Available from Metadata Providers

  • Looking for a specific cover but not sure if the image file is low quality or not? As of V3.1.0, the resolution of cover images is now displayed on the bottom right corner of the preview, the background of which is colour-coded to indicate whether the available cover is of greater, lower or equal quality to the one already attached to the ebook!

• Thanks to demitrix for their contributions to this! <3

NEW: KoReader Sync Functionality! 📚🗘

• CWA now includes built-in KOReader syncing functionality, providing a modern alternative to traditional KOReader sync servers!
• Universal KOReader Syncer: Works across all KOReader-compatible devices, storing sync data in a readable format for future CWA features
• Modern Authentication: Uses RFC 7617 compliant header-based authentication instead of legacy MD5 hashing for enhanced security
• CWA Integration: Leverages your existing CWA user accounts and permissions - no additional server setup required
• Easy Installation: Plugin and setup instructions are available directly from your CWA instance at /kosync
• Provided by sirwolfgang! <3

NEW: Support for the Latest Versions of Calibre, even on devices with older Kernels! 🆕🎉

• ABI tag from the extracted libQt6* files removed to allow them to be used with older kernels
• Adds binutils to install strip for calibre-included Dockerfile. strip libQt6*.so files of the ABI tag so that they can work with older kernels (harmless for newer kernels). These libraries appear to still contain fallbacks for any missing syscalls that calibre might use. add .gitattributes to enforce LF checkout on .sh files (useful for those who build on windows)
• Thanks to these changes, CWA now has much greater compatibility with a much wider range of devices & is able to keep up to date with the latest Calibre Releases! 🎉
• Provided by FennyFatal <3

NEW: Calibre Plugin Support (WIP) 🔌

• Users can now install Calibre plugins such as DeDRM
• The feature is still a work in progress but users with existing Calibre instances can simply bind their existing Calibre plugins folder to /config/.config/calibre/plugins in their docker-compose file

NEW: Bulk Add Books to Shelves 📚📚📚

Contributed by netvyper, you can now select multiple books from the book list page and add them to a shelf in one go!

• New "Add to Shelf" button in bulk actions on the book list.
• Modal dialog lets you pick your shelf.
• Backend checks for permissions, duplicates, and provides clear success/error feedback.

NEW: Better Docs Cometh - The Birth of the CWA Wiki 📜

• The documentation for CWA while for many enough, could really be better in helping as many users find the answers and information they need as quickly as possible
• Therefore We have started work on the CWA Wiki to strive towards this goal!
• While still very much a work in progress, submissions for pages, edits ect. are open to the community so if you stumble across something that seems wrong, missing or outdated, please jump in and change it if you can or let us know if you're not sure :)

Affliated Projects 👬

• In the spirit of community, I also wanted to give a shout out to some really great affiliate projects made by members of our community!
• As well as being featured here in the release, affiliated projects will now also be prominently feature on the CWA GitHub page to drive as much traffic & enthusiasm to them as possible
• If you've had an idea for a companion project for CWA, or want to get involved in helping improve CWA and/or it's affiliated projects, please just do so! We're all open-source here so you don't need anyone's permission, just go for it! :)

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Calibre-Web Companion

• Built with Flutter and using Material You, Calibre Web Companion is an unofficial companion application for Calibre Web & Calibre Web Automated that allows you to browse your book collection and download books directly on your device, providing a much more modern, mobile-friendly UX than either service can currently provide on its own

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Calibre-Web Automated Book Downloader

• An intuitive web interface for searching and requesting book downloads, designed to work seamlessly with Calibre-Web-Automated. This project streamlines the process of downloading books and preparing them for integration into your Calibre library

Supporting the Project ❤️

If you are in a position to, donations no matter how small are really appreciated & really help to keep the project going. Currently all money that has been and will be received is going towards a Kobo device so I can finally help out with the development & testing of CWA's KoSync & Kobo specific features :)