The cocktail party kicked off at 4:30pm on a Saturday in late March, an event held over Zoom and featuring three women, all academics, including two Canadians, bound by friendship and a shared professional interest in the chemical senses, that is, taste (gustation) and smell (olfaction).
Dana Small, a Victoria, B.C. native now at Yale, with a dual professorship in psychology and psychiatry, was engaged in ground-breaking research on the “gut,” and how the modern food environment plays tricks on our system before the pandemic hit. She opted for red wine, as did Theresa White, another foodie/sensory psychology expert at Le Moyne College in upstate New York, while Rachel Herz, the other Canadian, and an adjunct professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I., chose white.
Around the time of the party, reports were starting to surface about a percentage of COVID-19 patients who experienced a profound loss of smell, an aspect of the rapidly advancing global virus the three professors took as a sign, perhaps, that their expertise in all-things olfactory might come in handy.
“I said, ‘We need to come up with a test,’ Small says. “So we started brainstorming.”
Identifying asymptomatic carriers is absolutely critical
What makes COVID-19 especially deadly isn’t the fact that it hangs around on surfaces for a spell, but its prolific transmission rates. It is a 21st century virus that gets around, and a good chunk of its carriers are asymptomatic, meaning they don’t experience a fever, cough – or have difficulty breathing — and instead float through life blissfully oblivious to the risk they pose to others.
“Identifying asymptomatic carriers is absolutely critical in stopping the progression of the pandemic, I believe,” Small says. “So if there is odour loss with some — even if it’s only a small percentage of people — identifying them as carriers would be significant.”
Losing one’s sense of smell isn’t like losing one’s car keys. When the keys go missing, you recognize the loss in an instant. But a person’s sense of smell can slip away quietly, over a period of time, without the person noticing it is going, going, going, until it is effectively gone.
Small and her pals agreed that a simple do-it-at-home sniff test, using common household items, would allow participants — the great mass of us — to start tracking their sense of smell. In this way, an asymptomatic carrier who feels like a million bucks, but notes a diminishing sense of smell one day to the next, could consider quarantining, ASAP, instead of carrying on until their olfactory sense disappears altogether.
Because of the sluggishness of the academic grant application process, Professor Dana Small won’t get funding for her COVID-19 peanut butter test before September.
Courtesy Dana Small
Hence, says Small, the birth of the peanut butter sniff test. Peanut butter, so good on toast, and always a friend to jam, is a North American staple that stimulates the olfactory sense exclusively, unlike, say, ground coffee — a treat to inhale, no doubt — but a fragrance that fires both our sense of smell and the trigeminal nerve governing sensations like “pain and tickle,” which influence how one registers an odour.
As a control on the peanut butter, sniff-test participants are asked to breathe in a snout full of vinegar, another household staple, like coffee, that fires the trigeminal nerve. The big idea? If a subject is registering the vinegar, but the scent of the peanut butter is fading away, they can be confident their sense of smell is decreasing.
“If we find there is a trajectory of diminishing smell over days, we would be able to identify asymptomatic carriers, even before they were conscious of losing their smell,” says Small. “And in those, let’s say, five days, there could otherwise be lots of transmissions.”
The 48-year-old professor, whose favourite scents are cedar forest, patchouli and Vancouver Island campfire, has been circulating the test around Yale and Brown and sending it to family members in B.C. The online survey takes about 30 seconds to complete. It is as easy as smelling an open jar of peanut butter. What is maddening, however, is that because of the sluggishness of the academic grant application process, Small won’t get funding for the test before September.
In other words: a highly regarded academic, who trained at McGill University, and whose star was born 20 years ago after a study involving chocolate and the brain, has a home test ready to go that could save lives, but won’t be saving anybody at least until the fall.
“It is incredibly frustrating,” Small says. “There is a great opportunity here to develop something that could potentially be important — not only for this virus — but for other ones as well.”
Small has been venting her frustrations to friends, family and colleagues for weeks. She adds if there are any philanthropists or other financial high-fliers out there, looking to underwrite a study, and do some good, she would be happy to take their call. Today.
Meantime, she has a grant application to complete, and an unfunded study to circulate that includes herself as a participant. The professor sniffs her peanut butter (crunchy style) at 8:30 am daily. When the urge strikes, she will allow herself to enjoy some of the test material, spread atop a slice of German black bread, with a morning coffee on the side.
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
