News roundup, 21 Aug 2025

- Winnipeg's Granite Curling Club is appealing the City of Winnipeg's decision to develop a city-owned surface parking lot into affordable housing to the Manitoba Municipal Board. The building, if built, will be a mixed income facility, with 55 market rent units and 56 at various reduced rates. The club's management fear that reducing the amount of available parking will devastate them; perhaps they think that curlers aren't proper athletes and would thus balk at having to walk a couple of hundred metres. 

- The CEO of Target, Brian Cornell, is stepping down after several bad years for the company. This year has been especially bad; one factor seems to be that the company had jumped on the anti-DEI bandwagon despite previously having taken DEI policies more seriously than most chains. As a result, the chain's customers, who have tended to be politically more progressive on average than those of other retailers due to those former policies, found themselves with a lot less reason to choose them over another company.

- China's carbon emissions in the first half of this year have declined compared to the year before. US emissions, however, have increased in the same time period.

- A Chinese company claims to have developed a robot with an artificial womb. The product, billed as "a pregnancy alternative for those who wish to avoid the burdens of human gestation", is supposed to come out next year at a cost of only 100,000 yuan (around $US 13,900).

- A daycare in Brantford, Ontario was closed for several days after a dead bat found on the premises tested positive for rabies. A case was also detected in a bat in Centre Wellington; one person is undergoing precautionary treatment due to the possibility of exposure to the deadly disease. 

- A man in Kawartha Lakes, Ontario has been charged with aggravated assault and assault with a weapon after attacking a home invader. Given that the intruder has also been charged with possession of a weapon for dangerous purposes, I do have to wonder why the police didn't think the resident's response was "proportionate to the threat faced" as required by law, though the details definitely matter in a case like this (if, for instance, the intruder was attacked from behind while fleeing, or beaten after he was no longer a threat, charging the resident might be legitimate). Rightwing populists aren't waiting for the facts to come in before shooting their mouths off, of course.

- The family of a man who died after a suicidal jumper landed on the car in which he was riding are suing the City of Toronto for failing to install suicide barriers on the Leaside Bridge, from which the other man jumped.

Could a coat of paint make wind turbines safer for wildlife?

Opponents of wind turbines often point to reports that they are responsible for significant mortality among some animals, especially birds and bats. There's controversy over the accuracy and significance of those reports, but it's certainly worth looking at ways of reducing wind farms' impact on wildlife. Which makes this a valuable discovery:

A study has revealed that a wind turbine's colour affects how many insects it attracts, shedding more light on why the turbines occasionally kill bats and birds.

Scientists say that turbines, most commonly painted white or grey, draw in insects. These then lure bats and birds - as they pursue their prey - into the path of the turbine blades.

Support for the idea comes from another study showing that bats are most often killed by turbines at night and in summer, when insects are most abundant.

"It had been speculated that insects may be attracted to turbine structures for some reason and this then could attract insectivorous species, such as birds and bats, to forage in the vicinity," said PhD student Chloe Long of Loughborough University, UK.

However, she added, "no other study has looked in detail at what specific insect species might be attracted to turbine installations or why".

So Miss Long and her Loughborough colleagues, Dr James Flint and Dr Paul Lepper, conducted the first empirical study of insect attraction to wind turbines, the results of which are published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research.

From the BBC. Apparently painting the turbines purple would be the best way to minimize the number of insects attracted to them.