BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM New babies go through eight to ten diapers a day, and diapers run about $100 a month. For families already stretched, that bill arrives before they’ve slept. Some parents leave diapers on too long or reuse disposables, which leads to rashes and infections. This particular problem often starts the…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most people assume music makes workouts feel better because it’s distracting or energizing. Both are true. But a new study found something more specific: music doesn’t raise your physical ceiling. It just delays when your brain calls it. The study: same effort, two conditions Twenty-nine recreationally active adults did…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most dinner party advice is written for hosts. How to plate things beautifully, keep conversation going, and handle a soufflé without panicking. Guests get less coverage, which might be why so many of them don’t really think about it. But hosts notice. They notice the friend who showed up…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Tuberculosis kills more than a million people a year. It’s the world’s deadliest infectious disease. And for most of its history, the standard diagnostic hasn’t changed much since the 1880s: a phlegm sample examined under a microscope. The test has real problems. Not everyone can produce phlegm. Children, elderly…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Letting your lawn grow wild in May to help bees and other pollinators? That’s the pitch behind No Mow May, a conservation campaign that has bloomed on social media and in neighborhoods across North America. The idea is simple: stop mowing for one month so early-season pollinators can feast…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM When a cluster of hantavirus cases emerged aboard the M.V. Hondius, a Dutch polar expedition vessel sailing from Argentina toward the Canary Islands, it was the kind of news that triggers comparisons to the early days of COVID-19. An outbreak on a ship. People confined to cabins. Questions about…
A decorated Canadian Armed Forces officer, police officer, elected member of parliament and minister of defence, Harjit Sajjan has spent his career in public service roles where he believed he could make a difference. “I know people with amazing ideas, but they don’t have the right investment to take their idea to the prototype stage….
This has been a hard year for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. Founders in the space have been wringing their hands and nervously ruminating over the ongoing “SaaSpocalypse”—a term for the sudden loss of investor confidence driven by belief that AI will replace software tools. But is AI actually killing off SaaS tools? According to Avery Pennarun,…
When Halal Meals joined ventureLAB’s Critical Industrial Technologies (CIT) initiative last year, the Toronto-based meal-subscription service thought it had an algorithm problem. The company delivers thousands of ready-to-eat halal meals across Ontario and Quebec each week, and has built an AI recommendation engine to help customers choose dishes that fit their tastes and dietary needs….
Quantum computing startup Nord Quantique has achieved so-called unicorn status, securing a $1.4-billion USD ($1.9-billion CAD) valuation. First reported by The Globe and Mail on Thursday, the Sherbrooke, Qué.-based company raised $30 million USD earlier this spring from investment giant Fidelity. BetaKit has confirmed the size of the valuation, and the funding, with multiple sources…
