Temperature Check: Designing Support Systems for Older Adults in Heat Waves

The climate crisis is escalating and extreme heat events are becoming more frequent, more intense, and longer in duration. The health risks associated with extreme heat are well documented. However, ensuring the health of older adults –the fastest growing demographic in Canada – is a complex challenge that we are already facing today. Taking a design research approach, this study goes through a process of first diverging to explore the issue, and then converging on the ways in which communities can support older adults in adopting adaptive health-related behaviours in times of extreme heat. In exploration, this research connects with the voices of older adults, as well as professionals working in health, social and emergency service role to gain a deeper understanding of the challenge at hand. The Health Belief Model, a framework for understanding health-related behaviours, is used to push examination further, and to define a set of design principles for innovation: encourage self-sufficiency and independence, promote learning and understanding of extreme heat risks, remove barriers or incentivize benefits to taking adaptive measures, support psychological wellbeing as well as physical health, maximize existing community resources, and broaden engagement of stakeholders. These principles are used to generate five community-based interventions suitable even for smaller cities that can help to protect older adults’ psychological and physical health while promoting new social practices and norms in times of extreme heat

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead