St. John’s-based SiftMed announced today that it has secured another $5 million CAD in seed funding to expand the reach of its AI-powered medical claim document review software. “Our mission is to uncover facts that change lives.” Holly Hill, SiftMed In 2010, the American Medical Association said that one in five medical claims is mishandled…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM In 2025, researchers publishing in Nature Medicine found microplastics in human brain tissue at concentrations considerably higher than in the liver or kidneys. The year before, scientists at Columbia and Rutgers counted hundreds of thousands of nanoplastic particles in a single liter of bottled water, many small enough to…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM A lotion made from catnip oil matched DEET in field trials in Uganda, according to research presented at the Society for Experimental Biology conference in Florence last week. Catnip (Nepeta cataria), a common herb in the mint family, contains nepetalactone, the compound that makes cats go sideways. It also…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Think about the last time you ate lunch without also doing something else. Not at your desk, not in the car, not scrolling. Just sitting with food and letting it be the thing. For a lot of Americans, it’s hard to remember. For the French, it’s just lunch. Jane…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Nearly one billion people across Africa cook over charcoal or firewood every day. $3.1 billion in commitments is what it’s going to take to change that, and the number keeps climbing. African countries secured $900 million in new financial commitments to expand access to clean cooking technologies, the International…
The sun is setting on the Banff Venture Forum (BVF), but another financial networking event is already poised to pick up its slack. Earlier this month, the BVF quietly announced it would cease operations after a 25-year run as Alberta’s preeminent financing event, bringing venture capital firms and Alberta’s entrepreneurs and innovators together. The forum,…
Vancouver’s GroundedAI has closed $2 million CAD to help tunnel developers build a better, more comprehensive understanding of shifting subsurface conditions. The news: GroundedAI, which is building “a system of record” for underground construction, sells software designed to make it easier for engineers, geologists, and project managers at firms like Hatch to digitally capture, communicate,…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM If you’re a parent, you’ve had these moments. Not the big, dramatic parenting failures, the ones easy to identify and easier to learn from. The small ones. You held it together through the checkout meltdown, through the bath time standoff, through the third request for one more story. And…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Every air conditioner does the same thing: pull heat from inside a building and dump it outside. On a hot day, millions of units doing that together push street temperatures up, which makes the next hot day worse. “Everything that requires energy releases heat, and that heat has to…
Anthropic—a company valued at more than $1 trillion CAD—announced this week it will invest $10 million in Canadian research. That is, to quote Vass Bednar, managing director of think tank Canadian Shield Institute, if you count Claude credits as investment. The US AI giant said it chose to offer Claude coupons to Canadian institutions because…
