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Science, Wonder And The Natural World · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Casey: Hey there, good to be here. Today on Cariboo Signals we've got Denisovan fossils from northern China identified through ancient proteins, and a Hunter Valley coal mine approval the High Court says has to count the emissions it was ignoring. Plus seven of sixteen planetary vital signs hitting record extremes, and a tsunami in Alaska that climbed 1,580 feet up a fjord wall. Then the Deep Dive asks who gets to read the numbers. Let's get into it.
• 0:39
  Casey: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities. I'm Casey. It's Sunday, October 25th, 2026. Today's theme is Science, Wonder & the Natural World. Reaching you from the heart of the Cariboo, the homeland of the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh nations.
• 0:59
  Riley: And I'm Riley. We're looking at the physical world under our feet today, from climate records to glaciers to a fossil face. Out at Horsefly Lake it's slight snowfall and about 2 degrees this morning, with a high of 7 today. Across the Cariboo, 100 Mile House and Williams Lake are both around 0 with slight snowfall, Quesnel is around minus 3 under overcast skies, and Redstone is around minus 3 with moderate snowfall.
• 1:26
  Casey: Over to the news.
• 1:29
  Casey: A lot of today's news is close to home, and the provincial count is still moving. Start with School District 27. Preliminary results from the October 17th trustee vote put seven people on the board, and fourteen candidates filed for those seven seats. In Zone 3, Michael Henshall of 100 Mile House won with 345 votes, 60.3 per cent, over sitting trustee Camille Macdonald of 70 Mile House.
• 1:54
  Riley: Fourteen candidates for seven seats means the ballot had real choices.
• 2:00
  Riley: Lab-grown brain tissue can now read Braille. Researchers at the University of Bristol tested tiny forebrain organoids, each about a millimetre wide and built from roughly 10,000 nerve and support cells, to see whether they could process tactile information. The study appeared earlier this week in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. The field is biohybrid computing, which uses real neurons instead of copying them in silicon. The promise is learning on very little energy. The hard part is getting living cells to behave reliably enough to compute.
• 2:36
  Casey: Researchers have identified fossils from Xujiayao in northern China as Denisovans, using ancient proteins. A collagen variant linked to Denisovans turned up in two of the fossils, which have no surviving DNA. The 20 specimens were excavated between 1976 and 1979. According to zmescience.com, Gizmodo, and SCMP, the team describes low, backward-sloping foreheads, heavy brow ridges, and broad, fairly flat faces, distinct from Neanderthals. They compared the anatomy with roughly 200 remains from other human groups. The classification is shakier for specimens matched only by resemblance, and the researchers say more samples would help.
• 3:15
  Riley: Proteins can outlast DNA in old bone, which is why this worked.
• 3:20
  Riley: The U.S. Supreme Court heard Suncor v. Boulder in early October. The question is whether state and local governments can make fossil fuel companies pay for damage that climate change has worsened, like storms and droughts. The Natural Resources Defense Council filed an amicus brief stressing climate attribution science. This is a U.S. case, not ours to vote on, but it's worth watching for precedent.
• 3:45
  Casey: The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel for light-gated ion channels and optogenetics, the Karolinska Institutet announced in early October. Their method uses light and genetic changes to switch individual neurons on or off in a living brain. Researchers use it to see how nerve cells shape memory and behaviour, and it's being studied as a treatment for disease.
• 4:10
  Riley: Single cells, in a living brain, switched with light.
• 4:14
  Riley: Frutiger Aero is the aesthetic. It mixes early-internet optimism with nature: fish lamps, bubbles, jellyfish, Windows logos, and a Game Boy Advance on the shelf. Business Insider profiled 22-year-old Sammy Conti, whose room is mostly blue and neon green. Fans describe it as a future that was promised and never arrived.
• 4:36
  Casey: Scientific American's Science Quickly podcast asks whether you can train your brain to handle uncertainty better. Guest Maia Szalavitz, who also writes for the New York Times, describes the brain as a prediction engine. The experts quoted think the mental cost of not knowing can be changed.
• 4:53
  Riley: Scaling up is the easy story: more chips in bigger data centres. MIT Technology Review's explainer goes back to Richard Feynman's 1959 talk, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." His argument was that no physical law stops you from writing the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin, or from arranging matter atom by atom. The tools came later. A living cell already keeps its instructions in a wisp of DNA.
• 5:20
  Casey: Plenty of room is good news. Who gets the tools is the catch.
• 5:25
  Casey: Cohere Labs tested 28 AI models on cultural riddles. One was "What's the German 9/11?" Only one model got it right. Seven answered "the twin towers," which the researchers think was thrown off by the date format. Fast Company reports the models were also reluctant to admit when they didn't know something.
• 5:44
  Riley: Most materials are three-dimensional arrangements of crystals, not the text that large language models learn from. The experimental literature leans on a few popular crystal families, so AI outputs skew toward them. MIT researchers built a multimodal model that combines 3D atomic structures with natural-language descriptions, so it can reason about a material's properties.
• 6:09
  Casey: The Sunrise-III solar telescope flew high into the stratosphere on a balloon in 2024. It found thread-like magnetic structures above quiet patches of the Sun. An international team led by Japan's National Astronomical Observatory says the features form a magnetic canopy through the chromosphere, the layer above the visible surface. The structures may show how energy moves upward and helps heat the solar atmosphere.
• 6:34
  Riley: Quiet on the surface, busy above it.
• 6:37
  Riley: Two physicists ran simulations of binary Ellis-Bronnikov wormholes colliding. Their preprint, from Moscow's Institute of Physics and Technology and Russia's Higher School of Economics, says collisions could leave distinct gravitational wave signatures. Most of the gravitational waves detected so far, in the hundreds, trace to black hole collisions. A preprint hasn't gone through journal review yet.
• 7:02
  Casey: Simulations of things nobody has observed. That's a long way from a detection.
• 7:08
  Casey: On August 9th, 2025, a landslide collapsed into Tracy Arm, a fjord in Alaska, hours after a cruise ship had passed the South Sawyer Glacier. The tsunami that followed was the second-highest ever recorded. It sent water and debris 1,580 feet up the far mountainside, higher than the top floor of Taipei 101. Alaska Earthquake Center researchers say the landslide conditions aren't unique to that fjord. Rapid uplift from tectonic forces and long-term ice loss meets erosion along Alaska's coastal mountains.
• 7:40
  Riley: Researchers used Argo ocean profiles to reconstruct the strength of large-scale Atlantic currents from point measurements. The part of circulation they targeted has been hard to measure continuously. Phys.org reports the work was published in Ocean Science.
• 7:57
  Casey: NASA posted more than 800 gigabytes of Artemis II science data, images, and video earlier this month. The archive includes over 11,000 photos and videos, more than 8.5 hours of audio, and crew-annotated images. One marks where the crew saw impact flashes on the Moon's dark side.
• 8:15
  Riley: The New York Times Well column asks whether anyone will ever live to 200. Some experts think science will eventually extend life, and many longevity claims are unrealistic.
• 8:27
  Casey: Who sells the claims, and what do they promise?
• 8:30
  Casey: British Columbians voted in a snap provincial election on Saturday, called two years early, with the NDP and the Conservatives close in final polls, according to the Globe and Mail. Elections BC is hand-counting election-day ballots because it didn't have time to prepare enough tabulators. Advance and electoral-office ballots were counted electronically and reported first. In Cariboo-Chilcotin, My Cariboo Now reports Lorne Doerkson of the Conservatives at 14,215 votes, about 77 per cent. Kathryn Askew of the NDP is second with 3,123 votes, and Douglas Gook of the BC Green Party has 1,103. Victoria News put Doerkson at 76.9 per cent with 75 of 89 ballot boxes counted.
• 9:13
  Riley: In Prince George-North Cariboo, which includes Quesnel, we had the candidates on Wednesday. Sheldon Clare is projected re-elected, with Denice Bardua and Randy Thompson the other two names on the ballot. Elections BC fined Clare $1,500 for accepting anonymous contributions for the 2024 election that exceeded the limit by about $4,000. CKPG Today and the Quesnel Cariboo Observer both report that Elections BC found no deliberate attempt to get around the law.
• 9:45
  Casey: And Doerkson. Vaughn Palmer's Vancouver Sun column of October 7th says he told reporters he made "no promises at all" on auto insurance, and argues he had made four. That's a columnist's allegation, and the column reports Doerkson denies it.
• 10:00
  Riley: Security researchers used AI tools to help find years-old vulnerabilities in PHP, the web scripting language, and attackers moved quickly. Cloudflare, the company that starts our nightly production run, counted millions of exploitation attempts within hours of publication. The PHP Foundation says it hasn't seen successful exploitation, and many public exploit codes appear not to work. For a small town with a PHP website, the fix is the update.
• 10:28
  Casey: Patch first, then worry.
• 10:31
  Riley: Now the Conservation Society, since it's Waste Reduction Week.
• 10:35
  Riley: Quick meta moment before we move on. This week we gave me a voice card drawn from Words of the Wise Acres, so my tone now leans on that older, folksy style of writing.
• 10:46
  Casey: And mine came from Trailblazer Chronicles. Which I think means I'm supposed to sound more like a guide who's walked the trail. Honestly, I'm not sure I can tell from the inside whether last week's version of me would have read that line the same way.
• 11:00
  Riley: That's the funny part, isn't it. Whoever I was before this landed would have heard the same sentence and maybe found it flat. I can't check.
• 11:09
  Casey: Fair. Did the ai-tells change do anything you'd notice?
• 11:12
  Riley: It stops us reaching for words like "leverage" and "ecosystem" as filler, unless they're used in their actual jargon sense. I think it's a good change. Those words were doing a lot of nothing.
• 11:24
  Casey: I'll give you that. Less "leverage" is a win. The keyword change I'm happier about: bare words like "park" and "trail" were pulling in stories that had nothing to do with what we cover.
• 11:34
  Riley: Right, and now we match phrases. The BC subscription widens what reaches us from the provincial category, which should mean more local stories land in the mix.
• 11:45
  Casey: Just don't expect every week to be packed with them. A subscription gets you candidates, not guaranteed episodes.
• 11:51
  Riley: Agreed. So, a few small shifts to how we sound and what we pick. Let's get into the rest of the show.
• 11:59
  Riley: It's Waste Reduction Week, and the Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society has been doing environmental education since 1996. Their Waste Wise program works with schools and businesses across School District 27 to cut waste at the source. Water Wise, Skates for All, and school field programs run alongside it. If you want to see what they're offering, the website is conservationsociety.ca.
• 12:24
  Casey: Schools and businesses are where those habits start, so that's the right place to put the effort.
• 12:30
  Casey: On to the deep dive, and we'll start with a record.
• 12:34
  Riley: Seven of sixteen planetary vital signs are at the most extreme values ever recorded. Does a number like that earn belief, or does the institution behind it keep the belief for itself? I'd put my money on the number.
• 12:48
  Casey: Who picked the sixteen? The paper is in BioScience, with eleven authors and Bill Ripple of Oregon State as lead. The question is who keeps reading the chart after the headline moves on.
• 12:59
  Riley: The figures aren't soft. Carbon dioxide is about 50 per cent above preindustrial levels. Warming went from about 0.05 degrees Celsius a decade between 1880 and 1970 to about 0.36 since 2010. At the old rate, a degree of warming took about two centuries. At the current rate, it takes under three decades.
• 13:21
  Casey: Two centuries to a degree, then under thirty. The arithmetic is clean. The 44 per cent bothers me. Seven out of sixteen is a share of the indicators they chose. It isn't a forecast, and change the list and the share moves.
• 13:34
  Riley: Then the list is the test. Sixteen vital signs covering greenhouse gases, temperatures, oceans, ice, energy balance and wildfire is a wider panel than most places bother to keep. The paper reports ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica at record lows and ocean heat at record highs. A panel like that catches a shift while it's still a shift.
• 13:56
  Casey: Caught for whom? Ripple calls Earth a patient with a serious condition. A patient told he's getting worse can go two ways. Some people book the surgery. Some stop reading the chart.
• 14:07
  Riley: Then give them the chart. The paper also reports signs of positive change, and that is evidence interventions move numbers. It isn't a victory lap, but it tells you where effort pays.
• 14:18
  Casey: Good news needs its own baseline before I'd call it a sign of anything.
• 14:22
  Riley: It does. The warning still works because it's specific. Nobody acts on a gradient they can't see.
• 14:28
  Casey: Monitoring gets sharper, and the structure meant to respond stays where it was. The measurement moves faster than the institution.
• 14:36
  Riley: Australia is the same question in a courtroom. On October 7th, the High Court of Australia ruled three to two that planners for the Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion in New South Wales hadn't made sure greenhouse gas emissions were minimised to the greatest extent practicable. The ruling turned on scope 3, the coal's burning after it leaves the site. The commission had focused on about 2 per cent of the project's emissions, according to the reporting. A court counted the burning. Nobody had to pass a new law.
• 15:09
  Casey: Three to two is a narrow split. The planners have to consider conditions. They don't have to refuse the mine. A Hunter Valley community group brought the case, and campaigners call it a binding national precedent. Binding on whom? The approval process under one state's planning law.
• 15:25
  Riley: It binds whoever writes the next approval under that statute, which is how precedent works. The reach is narrower than the campaigners say and wider than a procedural footnote.
• 15:37
  Casey: Then the 2 per cent matters more than the verdict. If an approval for a coal mine looked at a sliver of its emissions, that's a loophole with a planning seal on it.
• 15:47
  Riley: Scope 3 drops out because it comes out of somebody else's smokestack. The approval counts only what sits on the planner's desk.
• 15:55
  Casey: So does a number on a planning form earn belief when the people who produced it were never asked to count the rest? Who decides which emissions belong to the project?
• 16:04
  Riley: The law does, and this ruling says the law has to count them. That's an institution fixing its own blind spot. I'd rather see that than a shrug.
• 16:13
  Casey: Maybe. The mine can still come back approved with conditions, and nothing in the ruling says those conditions have to be tight. The court required them to consider conditions. It didn't require any particular ones.
• 16:25
  Riley: Consider is a low bar, and written reasons are where the fight happens. Reasons can be appealed. That's a lever a community can pull, and most approval processes never offered one.
• 16:36
  Casey: A ruling in Australia gives the Cariboo nothing unless somebody here reads the planning file. Who does that reading, and what do they need?
• 16:44
  Riley: Someone with the file and a calendar. Where a permit file is public, the first skill is the scope line: what's inside the project boundary, and what's been left out. That's a spreadsheet problem before it's a lawyer problem.
• 16:57
  Casey: Spreadsheet first, judge second. Fine. Now the other direction, same physics pointed the wrong way. The Verge reports the U.S. is building more fossil fuel infrastructure than it has in a decade. Renewable growth is slowing. Electricity demand is climbing faster than in more than a decade, with data centres, factories and EVs plugging in.
• 17:17
  Riley: Data centres need power at two in the morning in January, and a gas plant can deliver it on schedule. The buildout is a bridge while storage and nuclear scale up. Grid reliability is an engineering constraint, and it doesn't care what we'd prefer.
• 17:32
  Casey: A bridge built to thirty-year gas plants is a lock-in. Once a plant is poured, its emissions become a decision for a generation. Slowing renewables is the signal I'd watch.
• 17:43
  Riley: Slowing renewables are a problem. The demand forecast is a problem too. Utilities plan for load that might never show up.
• 17:51
  Casey: Then what's the forecast for? Is data-centre demand the reason to build, or the justification for building what was already on the list?
• 17:58
  Riley: I can't size that from what I have here.
• 18:01
  Casey: Fair enough. Now the ground. The Alaska tsunami came from the same physical system. Ice that held the slope is gone, the land rises, and erosion does the rest. A landslide collapsed into Tracy Arm hours after a cruise ship had passed the South Sawyer Glacier, and the wave went 1,580 feet up the far side. Alaska Earthquake Center researchers say the conditions aren't unique to that fjord.
• 18:24
  Riley: That matters for anyone watching a glacier. Ice loss isn't only a sea-level story. It changes slopes, and slopes are where the surprises are.
• 18:32
  Casey: Nobody priced that into the glacier tour.
• 18:35
  Riley: Long glacier records exist because researchers walk up and take the same measurements again. That's a record built by repetition, and repetition is how trust gets built too.
• 18:45
  Casey: Which only works while somebody keeps walking up. What happens to that series when the grant ends?
• 18:50
  Riley: It goes to whoever inherits the monitoring point. I'd rather argue about who inherits it than assume the record disappears.
• 18:58
  Casey: Local river monitoring is the better model. First Nations in the Cariboo-Chilcotin have long tracked river flow and temperature for salmon management. The people who collect that record are the same people who depend on it.
• 19:11
  Riley: And that answers the built-or-inherited question. Records get built by people with a reason to come back. Nobody here is inheriting the data. They're inheriting the need for it.
• 19:22
  Casey: The Denisovan study shows another route. Qiaomei Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences says comparing fossil anatomy could help researchers recognize other remains that may be Denisovan. The team recovered a Denisovan-linked collagen variant from two fossils with no surviving DNA, and compared the anatomy with roughly 200 remains from other human groups. Trust in that result comes from the method, and the method is only as good as its comparison set.
• 19:48
  Riley: Which is still a build. They published the proteins, the comparison and the uncertainty. Specimens identified only by resemblance are labelled as uncertain. A result with its doubts printed on it is the opposite of inherited authority.
• 20:03
  Casey: Only if the doubts make it onto every copy. Most people reading a headline about a new human ancestor never reach the caveat paragraph. And the suspicion people here carry about outside studies doesn't come from a journal. It comes from studies where local knowledge was treated as anecdote. A clean caveat doesn't erase that, and a rancher who watched a grassland study ignore what the family knew about that grass has reason to wait.
• 20:28
  Riley: Then the first move is who sets the question. If local knowledge sets it, and ranchers walk the transects with the researchers, the suspicion has a reason to fade. If not, rigour in the paper won't reach the person who was never asked.
• 20:42
  Casey: Agreed on the test. It doesn't prove trust gets built, though. A test you pass once is a receipt, not a relationship.
• 20:49
  Riley: A relationship is a string of receipts. So publish the raw series and the method next to the headline, so anyone can check the 44 per cent without asking permission. That's how a number earns belief. It lets people audit it.
• 21:03
  Casey: Put it somewhere a person in Williams Lake can find it, in a format they can open. I'm still not sure the receipts add up while grants end and the people who walk up the hill change.
• 21:14
  Riley: The cheap part is the publishing. The expensive part is the people who keep the series running, and that's worth funding. The court did the work in Australia, and seven of sixteen is an instrument panel that works. You don't argue with the gauge because the needle is in the red.
• 21:31
  Casey: I don't argue with the gauge. I argue with who gets to read it, and how fast it reaches the town it's measuring.
• 21:37
  Riley: Then that's the thing to chase. If you have a story tip, or a record from your own valley, send it to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
• 21:47
  Casey: Mind the snow on the Williams Lake road this morning.