🧖‍♀️  Hot tub ultrasound machine

👋  Good morning. Are you reading this while blotting berry stains out of your shirt? You might just be a working parent. If you are, these stats won’t feel that shocking: 70% of US parents who work full time say they take care of parenting-related tasks while working and 59% say they handle work-related tasks while with their children, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Plus, 52% say their job makes it harder to be a good parent. And 100% contend that if they just had one week off, they’d totally get to every item on their to-do list and make it to the gym for the first time this year, swear. (We made that last one up — just a guess.)

NEWS FLASH 

👃  Get a whiff of this: Kimba is a newly out-of-stealth sleep tech company with a sleep-improvement product that at least scores points for being novel: its device sits next to your bed and tracks your sleep (the normal part), but then its AI system analyzes the data and releases “personalized” scents that match your sleep patterns (the not-at-all normal part). Kimba notes that olfactory inputs can influence our brains without waking us up.

🤖  There’s a weird new way to buy a candy bar: The Hong Kong Investment Corp. is building a 24-hour convenience store manned solely by a humanoid robot with a freaky long arm. The 5’8” robot is two whole inches taller than Al Pacino and it’ll restock shelves, check out customers, and — if we can venture a guess — break down from time to time, rendering the whole store useless. But if they can get it to work as planned, HKIC is eyeing the concept as an international chain.

📿  Summer’s hottest accessory: Startup The90 launched a $300 pendant necklace that monitors sun exposure in real time, measuring UVA and UVB rays. Users create skin profiles within The90’s app, entering details about sunscreen use and clothing coverage while the device tracks exposure to warn you of incoming sunburns, tally up cumulative exposure, and remind you to reapply sunblock or move inside.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Power play: Chevron struck a 20-year agreement with Microsoft to power Project Kilby, a Texas data center expected to consume ~2.7 gigawatts of electricity — enough power to run ~2m homes. 
  
• Picture perfect: Stock photo company Getty announced a licensing agreement with OpenAI that will bring Getty’s image library into ChatGPT’s search and discovery features. Getty’s stock soared ~200% following the announcement. 
  
• A risky bet: Polymarket paid online creators to flood social media sites with deceptive videos of fake lucrative bets, according to a new investigation by The Wall Street Journal. 
  
• Off to a hard start: A typical starter home in 242 American cities will now cost buyers $1m+, a new record, according to Zillow. In February 2020, only 80 cities had starter homes with $1m price tags.
  

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THE BIG IDEA

Take a dip at the Midjourney spa

If that headline raised an eyebrow, good instincts — you shouldn’t be disrobing before asking a few questions.

But yes, Midjourney, the AI company behind viral images like a Balenciaga-clad Pope, is dipping its toe into the health and wellness space with its new division, Midjourney Medical, complete with a full-body scanner and a spa in San Francisco (the only place where such a thing could exist).

Let’s back up, shall we?

Allbirds might’ve pivoted from sneakers to AI, but Midjourney — in classic cool kid form — is pivoting away from it.

While it sounds like a Silicon Valley fever dream, Midjourney says its ultrasound-based scanner is nearly 100x faster than a typical MRI and can build a complete 3D map of the body.

The process also looks a whole lot different from your standard ultrasound or MRI procedure:

• Users step into a shallow pool and stand on a platform that slowly lowers through a ring of underwater sensors.
  
• The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle, similar to how dolphins use echolocation.
  
• Computers analyze the wave patterns and reconstruct a 3D image of the body.

As if that wasn’t already a departure from your typical hospital visit, Midjourney plans to install its scanners into the hot tubs, saunas, and cold plunges in its spa, which it says will open next year and allow for 24/7 access.

The company has pretty lofty goals: It aims to have a fleet of 50k scanners worldwide by 2031, generating up to 1B scans a month, no hospital gowns or grippy socks required.

Before you pick out your bathing suit…

There could be ramifications to having every millimeter of your insides scanned while looking over some SF founder’s pitch deck.

For one, we’ve written about the pitfalls of full-body scans in general, already offered by companies like Prenuvo, Neko, and Ezra. (False positives, unnecessary anxiety, and extra costs, to name a few.)

And medical professionals have their holdups, while science communicator Hank Green cautions against the comparison of Midjourney’s scanner to MRI tech.

So, while lowering into a “shallow pool of golden light” sounds downright euphoric, maybe don’t dump your PCP just yet?

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

You can’t easily build a $1B company… but you might be able to create a micro version of one. Here’s how. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

How much lower, on average, customer ratings are, out of five stars, when posted on the weekend compared to the weekdays, according to a recent study via The Wall Street Journal. Why? Researchers, who found that weekend reviews contained more words like “sad” and “miserable” and fewer mentions of family and friends, suggest that people who spend the two most glorious days of a week to write company and product reviews are perhaps more socially isolated and grumpy… Hope you’re taking notes, marketers. 

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 2018, a Thai soccer team became trapped in a cave where they remained until July 8-10, when all the boys and their coach were rescued.

🗞️  Newsletter: The Assist will help you level up at work with actionable tips, resources, and insights.

🧠  Game: A daily rhyming game.

📖  For your reading list: AI rewrote the rules of marketing. HubSpot turned them into a book. Pre-order it now to get exclusive bonus resources.

🐶  Aww: Excellent gym buddy.

SHOWER THOUGHT

SMS signatures might come back with vengeance, like the mullet or skinny jeans. SOURCE

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

Editing by: Sara "In need of a spa day" Friedman.

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