🌭  Power lunch

👋  Good morning. You know that trash bag of clothes you’ve been meaning to donate? Maybe hold onto it. New analysis from mathematicians at Northwestern University suggests that fashion trends really do come back around. The research analyzed a dataset of 37k garments spanning nearly 160 years' worth of women’s clothing, and found that clothing cycles back into fashion every 20 years. Great news for the capris you never tossed. Horrible news for your spouse who really wanted them gone.

STARTING UP

A wearable built to spot your sets 

❌  The problem: In a time when it seems like there’s a wearable for tracking everything, logging weightlifting workouts is still surprisingly hard. 

💡  The pitch: Fort, created by three former Tesla engineers, bills itself as the first wearable built specifically for hands-free strength-training tracking. Its wrist-based sensors measure metrics like reps, exercise type, and bar velocity. Users also have the option to detach Fort from its strap and put it in its magnetic case with an IMU sensor, then attach it directly onto a barbell for more traditional velocity tracking.
 

🚀  The outlook: Fort is betting on growing interest in strength training — especially among women — and says it's targeting customers outside of the gym bro stereotype. Bro or not, the product is currently priced at $289 plus an $80 annual subscription.

NEWS FLASH

• A final role: Val Kilmer, who passed away in 2025, will star in the film As Deep as the Grave thanks to generative AI. Kilmer had been cast in the film but was too sick to perform, so filmmaker Coerte Voorhees worked with the actor’s estate and family to recreate his likeness.
  

• Fashion fix: Rubi, a startup that’s developed a way to make cellulose, which is used in textiles, out of captured carbon dioxide, raised $7.5m to build a demonstration scale of its production system, per TechCrunch. It’s already tested the materials with clothing retailers including H&M and Patagonia.

• Can’t stop dancing: A humanoid robot’s unstoppable dance routine in a San Jose, California, hot pot restaurant went awry, knocking over tableware and breaking plates. The bot was restrained by three workers, dancing all the while. 
  

• A better build: Cocoon Carbon uses byproducts from steelmaking to make LoopCem, a sustainable substitute for cement that produces less carbon dioxide than traditional concrete production. It recently raised a $15m Series A to fund a US demonstration plant, per Axios. 
  

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM

Human-made gets a label… kinda

As AI tools spread, more groups are rolling out “AI-free” and “human-made” badges to help people spot AI in books, films, and online.

The catch? There’s no agreed-upon definition of what “AI-free” actually means.

Without unified standards and oversights, transparency in the AI age is getting complicated. 

👉  Read more on Mindstream.

THE BIG IDEA

Can NYC’s lunch scene run on e-bike batteries?

New York is world-famous for grab-and-go food — city dwellers are usually found balancing their coffee, pretzels, burritos, and bagels while tripping down the subway stairs. 

But if you’re smelling something good as you walk by a cart, you’re probably also smelling a cloud of noxious fumes from the generator that keeps the lights on in the truck. 

One smart ex-Googler might have solved this problem, borrowing from a different way of grabbing lunch: e-bikes. 

Green(er) cuisine  

David Hammer is the co-founder and CEO of battery-swapping service PopWheels. Last summer, on “a lark,” he started a project to bring e-bike batteries to food carts, per TechCrunch. 

The Brooklyn-based startup piloted the green trade-in project during an NYC Climate Week event. 

• Hammer estimates that food trucks spend ~$10 a day on generator gas (not including the propane that is used for the actual cooking).
  
• And PopWheels’ battery-recharging service is ~$75 a month. So the cost and energy savings are basically a no-brainer. 

Charging challenges

E-bikes have popped off since the pandemic, but charging the batteries is a big sticking point for delivery riders. 

It might be easy to find an outlet for your laptop at Starbucks, but a battery is less subtle, and many landlords have banned them at home due to the fire risk, per Streetsblog NYC.

This is where PopWheels comes in, and why they raised $2.3m in seed funding in 2025. Couriers can swap out dead batteries at the 30 fire-safe PopWheels stations around Manhattan. 

The program is popular: last summer there were ~300 people on the waitlist. 

Now, PopWheels is coming for the food cart world.

“There was always a little bit of an underlying thesis that there’s something bigger here,” Hammer told TechCrunch. 

“If you build urban-scale, fire-safe battery-swapping infrastructure, you’re creating an infrastructure layer that lots of people are going to want to get on board with.”

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Harsh truth: Your YouTube subscriber numbers don’t matter. Here’s what you should focus on beyond the vanity metrics.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Estimated global humanoid robot population by 2060, 62% of which will be helping out around the house, according to Bank of America Global Research via Fortune. That’s a big jump from the virtually 0% of humanoid bots currently running households, but BoA still predicts they’ll be outpacing car ownership soon enough.

Consumer adoption has been stalled by high production costs, but those figures are projected to fall quickly — from ~$35k on the lower end for a humanoid model today, to ~$17k by 2030 — roughly a third of the average price of a new car.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1957, Elvis Presley made a $1k down payment in cash on Graceland. That would be ~$11.7k today.
🍔 That’s interesting: You probably didn’t expect to encounter a fascinating saga about a McDonald’s mural today, but here you go.
💐  That’s cool: Send a link bouquet.
🍿  Useful: Find lesser-known watches available on the streaming services you have.
🐇  Aww: They’ll let anyone drive the ice cream truck around here, huh?

SHOWER THOUGHT

It's really convenient that the ice in our drinks floats up, and then the liquid it cools sinks down so the entire drink eventually cools evenly.  SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Rosie Thomas, and Singdhi Sokpo.

 Editing by: Sara "Need to recharge" Friedman.

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