👋 Good morning. Better mark your calendars for April: NASA cleared its 322-foot Artemis II moon rocket for an April launch with four astronauts aboard. It’ll be humankind’s first trip to the moon in 50+ years, and past launches have shown that a new rocket has a ~50% chance of success. While that doesn’t have us wanting to zip up our astronaut suits, perhaps we need to look at the rocket half full.
STARTING UP
Athlete-focused tampon startup tackles leaks
❌ The problem: Tampon design hasn’t changed much since the 1930s, and many athletes worry about leaks during competition, which can affect performance and confidence.
💡 The pitch: Sequel, a startup founded by Stanford graduates and former athletes, redesigned the tampon with a spiral structure that channels fluid toward the absorbent core to reduce leaks. After five years of R&D and FDA clearance in 2023, the company began selling the product online and through TikTok Shop.
🚀 The outlook: Backed by $8m+ from investors, Sequel is partnering with teams like the New York Yankees, D.C. United, and the Indiana Fever to introduce its product to millions of fans.
NEWS FLASH
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From football to fire safety: San Francisco 49ers defensive end Bryce Huff is retiring from football to launch Naberstone, a startup focused on preventing lithium-ion battery fires through “proprietary suppression systems, advanced detection technology, and containment.”
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That’s bananas: Biotech startup Tropic raised a $105m Series C to expand production of its bananas, which remain fresh for longer, and develop disease-resistant bananas.
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That checks out: Coco Robotics has partnered with Niantic Spatial, a spinoff of “Pokemon Go” maker Niantic. All that time we spent catching Pikachu built detailed maps of urban areas, the likes of which Coco’s delivery bots need to navigate to bring you your taco order.
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Everyone needs a hobby: The latest viral TikTok trend is… “butter runs.” Oregon running influencer Libby Cope has racked up 2.3m+ views on her video explaining that if you strap bagged heavy cream and salt to your torso, then run for an hour, you’ll have freshly churned butter. Now others are experimenting with exercise-induced dairy products, including ice cream.
PERFECT PROJECTS
The robots will remember what you said…
This is not a threat (nor a promise). With Project workspaces on tools like ChatGPT and Claude, AI generally recalls your past inputs and continues conversations without trouble.
We tapped Enovair co-founder Alicia Brown to explain setting up your files and prompts for knowledge bases, social content, market research, and more. Feast for free or keep on dropping details.
THE BIG IDEA
Shaking hands, stopping scams
If you’ve avoided falling victim to an AI-generated scam thus far, count your blessings.
- AI-enabled impersonation scams against older adults alone grew eight-fold between 2020 and 2024, from $55m to $445m, per Federal Trade Commission data.
- Deepfakes and voice cloning have gotten so convincing that it can be hard for even digital natives to decipher between what, or who, is or isn’t real.
So, in an increasingly online world where you can’t trust your eyes or ears, how do you establish trust?
Design studios Modem and Retinaa think the answer might lie in a handshake — they designed Quartz, a ring-based ID verification system grounded in real-world connection that wards off online scams by verifying the personhood of its user and their friends.
How it works
The ring, which is only a concept for now, holds a piece of quartz whose unique pattern is recorded on a blockchain certificate and a scanner that records the vein structure of its user’s finger to generate a secure cryptographic identity, similar to Face ID.
- It also has a pulse reader to make sure you’re alive and that your dead arm isn’t being used by someone else. (Scary, but reassuring.)
When two ring owners meet and shake hands, the devices create a “shared secret” — a unique digital key, or an encrypted bond, that gatekeeps their future communications by confirming that both rings are present, connected, and being worn by their authorized users.
If any checks fail, your DMs, calls, or other communications with that person are locked down to prevent potential spoofing.
Technologies of trust
Unlike other biometric human verification systems, like Sam Altman’s eyeball scanner or VeryAI’s palm-based tech, Quartz “reintroduces something… human” by making physical presence “a foundational layer of the security stack,” Modem’s Scott Kooken told Inc.
“The handshake isn’t symbolic: it’s part of the architecture.”
Do they all seem a little dystopian? Yes. But at least with Quartz, proving you’re human through real-life connection restores some meaningfulness to being human in the age of AI.
Plus, you’d get to rock a cool-looking signet ring. (Yes, that was a quartz joke.)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
All that time spent on Discord could pay off… Here’s how one entrepreneur used the platform to build a $14k/month SaaS product.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Share of Angus Token holders who voted to save Angus — a two-year-old cow and the object of art collective MSCHF’s latest stunt — from being turned into 1.2k burgers and four handbags over the weekend. Poor Angus’s life has been hanging in the balance since his birth in 2024, when MSCHF began selling shares of him to stakeholders at $35 for a 3-pack of patties and $1.2k for a purse.
Now, after narrowly evading the slaughterhouse, all the funds will go toward seeing the young bovine live out a full life at the sanctuary Home for Happy Cows... Pretty grim means to a happy end.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1601, the first St. Patrick’s Day parade was held in what is now known as St. Augustine, Florida, thanks to the Spanish colony’s Irish vicar, Ricardo Artur.
🍝 That’s cool: A photo collection of NYC restaurant interiors.
🤔 Game: How well can you remember colors?
🐈 Aww: Is the cat not also a baby?
SHOWER THOUGHT
Phone cameras need a "junk photo" setting for all those throwaway photos you take to remember where you parked, what's on a menu, QR codes, and all the other random stuff we use them for now. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Trust issues" Friedman.
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