Cowboys waste no time rewarding heroic performance from player with much deserved honor ahead of ThanksgivingTORONTO - Canada’s main stock index edged higher in trading on Wednesday, helped by strength in the technology sector, while U.S. stock markets also rose. The S&P/TSX composite index was up 5.45 points at 25,641.18. The index took a “breather” Wednesday ahead of key labour market indicators set to be released both in Canada and the U.S. this week, said Angelo Kourkafas, senior investment strategist at Edward Jones. Statistics Canada will report the latest data from the national labour force survey on Friday, the same day the November jobs report is due in the U.S. “That’s the last important data point for the Bank of Canada before they meet next week,” said Kourkafas. November was a strong month for equities, he said, so it isn’t surprising that investors are digesting the gains while they await new data. He said it’s expected that Statistics Canada will report an acceleration of job gains after last month brought a “relatively weak reading,” with job gains at about half of what analysts were expecting. While Canada’s central bank is expected to cut its key interest rate a fifth straight time on Dec. 11, the size of the cut could depend on that jobs data, he said. “We’re now looking at a rebound, but as the Bank of Canada deliberates between a quarter point cut versus half a percentage point cut, I think what we are going to see in terms of unemployment rate and the base of job gains is going to have a say into that,” said Kourkafas, adding that wage growth is another important metric to watch. “If we see steady job growth and slowing wages, that can potentially tilt the Bank of Canada towards a larger cut.” In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 308.51 points at 45,014.04. The S&P 500 index was up 36.61 points at 6,086.49, while the Nasdaq composite was up 254.21 points at 19,735.12. U.S. markets were propelled by strength in the technology sector, said Kourkafas, highlighting strong results in quarterly earnings released this week by Salesforce Inc. and Marvell Technology Inc. “I think today’s results highlight that there is still a long runway and still enthusiasm, excitement about artificial intelligence and kind of that multi-year adoption cycle,” he said. The Canadian dollar traded for 71.09 cents US compared with 71.14 cents US on Tuesday. The January crude oil contract was down US$1.40 at US$68.54 per barrel and the January natural gas contract was up less than a penny at US$3.04 per mmBTU. The February gold contract was up US$8.30 at US$2,676.20 an ounce and the March copper contract was down less than a penny at US$4.20 a pound. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 4, 2024. Companies in this story: (TSX:GSPTSE, TSX:CADUSD)

AP Sports SummaryBrief at 8:49 p.m. ESTAmazon investing another $10 billion in Ohio-based data centers

Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa has been downgraded from questionable to doubtful for Sunday's road game against the Cleveland Browns because of a hip injury. Tagovailoa, 26, has been limited at practice all week but is still hoping to play, according to media reports on Saturday. The Dolphins (7-8) are fighting to stay in playoff contention and need a win against the Browns (3-12) to stay in the mix. If Tagovailoa doesn't play, Tyler Huntley would get his fourth start of the season. The Dolphins also elevated quarterback Skylar Thompson from the practice squad to the active roster on Saturday. Tagovailoa injured his hip against the Houston Texans on Dec. 15 and absorbed another hit against the San Francisco 49ers last Sunday. He has already missed four games this season because of a concussion while starting the other 11. He is 291 of 399 (league-best 72.9 percent) for 2,867 yards, 19 touchdowns and seven interceptions. Miami selected him with the fifth overall pick of the 2020 NFL Draft out of Alabama. He has completed 68.1 percent of his passes in his career for 15,506 yards and 100 TDs along with 44 interceptions in 64 games (62 starts). Huntley, 26, has started three games this season for the Dolphins while Tagovailoa was out before suffering a shoulder injury. Huntley was 39 of 66 (59.1 percent) for 377 yards, one TD and one pick. He also ran 16 times for 67 yards and a score. He played in 20 games (nine starts) for the Baltimore Ravens from 2020-23, passing for 1,957 yards, eight TDs and seven interceptions. He also rushed 115 times for 509 yards and three TDs. --Field Level Media

High school girls basketball: Kingston’s Steve Garner likes look of youthful Tigers squadEven if you knew nothing about astronomy, you’d understand that exploding stars are forceful and consequential events. How could they not be? Supernovae play a pivotal role in the Universe with their energetic, destructive demises. There are different types of supernovae exploding throughout the Universe, with different progenitors and different remnants. The Zwicky Transient Facility has detected 100,000 supernovae and classified 10,000 of them. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a wide-field astronomical survey named after the prolific Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky. In the early 1930s, Zwicky and his colleague Walter Baade coined the term ‘supernova’ to describe the transition of normal main sequence stars into neutron stars. In the 1940s, Zwicky and his colleague developed the modern supernova classification system . The ZTF bears his name because of these and many other scientific contributions. (Zwicky was also a humanitarian and a philosopher.) The ZTF observes in both optical and infrared and was built to detect transients with the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California. Transients are objects that change brightness rapidly or objects that move. While supernovae (SN) don’t move, they definitely change brightness rapidly. They can outshine their entire host galaxy for months. In 2017, the ZTF began its Bright Transient Survey (BTS), an effort dedicated to the search for supernovae (SNe). It’s by far the largest spectroscopic SNe survey ever conducted. The BTS has discovered 100,000 potential SNe, and more than 10,000 of them have been confirmed and classified according to distance, type, rarity, and brightness. These types of astronomical surveys create a rich dataset that will aid researchers well into the future. “There are trillions of stars in the universe, and about every second, one of them explodes. Reaching 10,000 classifications is amazing, but what we truly should celebrate is the incredible progress we have made in our ability to browse the universe for transients, or objects that change in the sky, and the science our rich data will enable,” said Christoffer Fremling, a staff astronomer at Caltech. Fremling leads the ZTF’s Bright Transient Survey (BTS). The effort to catalogue supernovae dates back to 2012 when astronomical databases began officially tracking them. Since then, astronomers have detected nearly 16,000 of them, and the ZTF is responsible for more than 10,000 of those detections. The first documented SNe discovery was in 185 AD when Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a ‘guest star’ in the sky that shone for eight months. In the nearly two millennia since then, we’ve seen many more. 1987 was a watershed year for supernovae science when a massive star exploded in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. Named SN 1987A. it was the first supernova explosion since the telescope was invented. This was also the first direct detection of neutrinos from a supernova, and the detection is considered by many to be the beginning of neutrino astronomy . Each night, the ZTF detects hundreds of thousands of events, including everything from small, simple asteroids in our inner Solar System to powerful gamma-ray bursts in the distant Universe. The ZTF uses a pair of telescopes that act as a kind of ‘triage’ facility for supernovae and transients. The Samuel Oschin Telescope has a 60-megapixel wide field camera that images the visible sky every two nights. Astronomers detect new transient events by subtracting images of the same portion of the sky from subsequent scans. Then, members of the ZTF team study these images and send the most promising to the other ZTF telescope, the Spectral Energy Distribution Machine (SEDM). This robotic spectrograph operates on the Palomar 60-inch telescope. “We combine the brightness information from the ZTF camera with the data from the SEDM to correctly identify the origin and type of a transient, a process astronomers call transient classification,” said Yu-Jing Qin, a postdoc at Caltech, who is running much of the daily operations of the BTS survey. ZTF Detections are also sent to other observatories around the world who can examine transients with other spectroscopic facilities. About 30% of the ZTF transients have been confirmed this way. ZTF detects so many transients that it’s difficult for astronomers to keep up. In recent years, Caltech has made an effort to develop machine-learning tools that can examine SEDM spectroscopic data, classify the transients, and send them to the Transient Name Server. In 2023, the BTSBot system was employed to help manage the flow of detections. “Since BTSbot began operation it has found about half of the brightest ZTF supernovae before a human,” said PhD student Nabeel Rehemtulla from Northwestern University, developer of the BTSBot. “For specific types of supernovae, we have automated the entire process and BTSbot has so far performed excellently in over a hundred cases. This is the future of supernova surveys, especially when the Vera Rubin Observatory begins operations.” Though every supernova discovery is scientifically valuable, there are some highlights among all these detections. The ZTF has detected thousands of Type 1a supernovae. They occur in binary systems where one star is a white dwarf. The white dwarf draws gas away from its companion and the gas gathers on the white dwarf. Eventually, this causes a supernova explosion. SN 2022qmx is one of these Type 1a supernovae that appeared to be way brighter than it should be. It turns out that an interceding galaxy was gravitationally lensing the SN’s light, making it appear 24 times brighter. The ZTF is also responsible for detecting the closest and most distant SNe (with help from the JWST). “Back when we started this project, we didn’t know how many astronomers would follow up on our detections,” said Caltech’s Fremling. “To see that so many have is a testament to why we built ZTF: to survey the whole sky for changing objects and share those data as rapidly as possible with astronomers around the world. That’s the purpose of the Transient Name Server (TNS).” The TNS is where the global astronomical community announces the detection and classification of transients so that work isn’t duplicated. Since 2016, the TNS has handled over 150,000 reported transients and over 15,000 reported supernovae. “Everything is public in hopes that the community will come together and make the most of it,” said Fremling. “This way, we don’t have, say, 10 telescopes across the world doing the same thing and wasting time.” Soon, the ZTF will have a powerful partner in time-domain astronomy. The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) should see its first light in the next few months and then begin its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The LSST will also detect transients but is far more sensitive than the ZTF. It’s expected to detect millions of supernovae, and handling all of those detections will require a machine-learning tool similar to the BTSbot. “The machine learning and AI tools we have developed for ZTF will become essential when the Vera Rubin Observatory begins operations,” said Daniel Perley, an astronomer at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK who developed the search and discovery procedures for the BTS. “We have already planned to work closely with Rubin to transfer our machine learning knowledge and technology,” added Perley. Astronomical surveys like the ones performed by ZTF and the VRO provide foundational data that researchers will use for years. It’s impossible to know how it will be used in every case or what discoveries it will lead to. Even better, the ZTF and the VRO will overlap. According to Caltech astronomy professor Mansi Kasliwal, who will lead ZTF in the coming two years, this will be a very important and exciting time in time-domain astronomy. “The period in 2025 and 2026 when ZTF and Vera Rubin can both operate in tandem is fantastic news for time-domain astronomers,” said Kasliwal. “Combining data from both observatories, astronomers can directly address the physics of why supernovae explode and discover fast and young transients that are inaccessible to ZTF or Rubin alone. I am excited about the future,” added Kasliwal.