😴  Smell ya later, insomnia

👋  Good morning. Stubbed toe take ya down this weekend? Sometimes small injuries humble even the giants. Take Scotty, the largest T. rex ever discovered, for example. Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers used neutron imaging to spot 66m-year-old blood vessels still visible on a fossilized rib, and saw it had been cracked during a brawl with another dinosaur. The broken rib was likely what brought the 43-foot-long dino down to his final resting place in a swamp. 

NEWS FLASH 

🌧️  It’s raining, it’s pouring: California startup Rainmaker claims its cloud-seeding drones showered Alaska in 19m gallons of precipitation. While that sounds like an amount that would quickly end the lifespan of your drugstore umbrella, the millions of gallons were spread out across nearly 100 square miles and fell mostly as snow over three hours, according to Rainmaker — the first private company to successfully measure total precipitation from cloud seeding.

💔  Scan your iris for a first date: Dating apps are increasingly asking hopeless romantics to prove they’re human through biometric verification like face scans, iris scans, and liveness checks. Romance scams across the industry topped $4B between 2015 and 2025, according to the FBI, and nearly half of current online daters in the US have been targeted by one. But cybersecurity experts warn it's mostly smoke and mirrors: a verified face doesn’t equate to trustworthiness, just like saying you like “hiking” in your bio doesn’t mean you’ve ever left your couch.

🍔  Picture perfect: A Seattle food photographer who has spent 25 years shooting commercial photos for major brands is using his archive to train Pallat, an AI production tool designed to prevent costly reshoots, per GeekWire. The software lets art directors adjust lighting, change backdrops, or even add a topping — like a tomato on a burger — in minutes instead of starting from scratch on set.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Say cheese: Barilla acquired Goodles, the “better-for-you” mac-and-cheese brand, for an undisclosed amount. Goodles sells ~260k units a day and accounts for close to 90% of mac-and-cheese adoption growth. 

• IPO has a nice ring to it: Smart ring maker Oura filed to go public. The company says it has sold 3.6m rings over the past year, has ~5m paid subscribers, and generated ~$1B in revenue in 2025. 

  
  

• Everybody has a pod these days: Eternal, a health startup founded by The Athletic’s Alex Mather, launched a feature that turns your blood work, sleep data, and fitness stats into a personalized, AI-generated weekly podcast. 
  

• Drop the hoodie and back away: Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham — who authored the infamous “founder mode” essay — said in an interview with the accelerator that founding a startup is “just about the least efficient way” to seem cool. Noted. 
  

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THE BIG IDEA

Big sleep’s final frontier is your nose

White noise, blackout curtains, and enough melatonin to sedate a rhinoceros aren't enough to help some of us sleep — so a handful of sleep tech startups are looking to a new sensory frontier: smell.

A new wave of companies is betting the fastest route to sleep runs through your nose:

• Israeli company Kimba just raised $6.5m, selling a bedside device that puffs AI-tuned scents your way throughout the night.
  
• Memory Air manufactures a neuroscientist-developed device that wafts 40 secret essential oils past your face all night to improve both sleep and brain health.

Nothing to sniff at

Nearly half of American adults report always or often experiencing disrupted sleep due to stress, and the global sleep tech device market is expected to grow to over $160B by 2035, headed by some prominent incumbents:

• Intelligent bed-cooling manufacturer Eight Sleep recently closed a $50m strategic funding round at a $1.5B valuation.
  
• And Oura (as you saw in today's news) is eyeing an IPO at a $16B+ valuation.

The market is growing, but its whitespace can seem limited. The smell-to-sleep pipeline is mostly uncharted territory.

Can you smell what this tech is cooking?

Sleep tech's effectiveness can be tough to prove. You're not conscious while it's operating — so the prospect of a scent-driven sleep machine might smell like BS to some.

That said, these companies back their tech with some impressive claims on the science behind them:

• Memory Air cites research from UC Irvine that links overnight olfactory stimulation to a 226% improvement in human memory.
  
• Kimba claims its adaptive AI can deliver different scents based on how they impact your sleep over time.

Ultimately, these companies are taking a bold, evidence-backed approach in a market driven by human necessity.

That's nothing to thumb your nose at.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The woolly mammoth might be back by 2028: Here’s what’s actually behind Colossal Biosciences, the buzzy de-extinction startup. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Copies of a “No Influencer” sign now for sale at Four Winds Craft Guild, a Massachusetts shop that went viral last month after posting a photo of the original sign hanging in its store. Despite online backlash from influencers and other people who insist on turning everything into content, the store has decided to capitalize on the controversy surrounding the cheeky sign by leaning into the rage-bait. For what it's worth, the owner told The New York Times it was meant as a joke — though he is, in fact, annoyed by people using the shop as a photo backdrop.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1504, Michelangelo’s 12k-pound, 17-foot-tall statue of David was unveiled to the public in Florence, Italy.

🗺️  Game: Pin these facts to the right place on the map.

🎟️  Don’t miss it: HubSpot Media is throwing a launch party in Boston on Sept. 16 and you’re invited.

🤯  Whoa: How “mad honey” does damage to the human body.

🐿️  Aww: A cozy squirrel.

SHOWER THOUGHT

An iPad is one of those devices you either use all the time or barely use at all. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley, Singdhi Sokpo, and Jay Fuchs.

Editing by: Sara "Scents and sensibility" Friedman.

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