🐕  Labs in the lab

👋  Good morning. If you think branding feels tired these days, you have no idea. Researchers now believe that brands might have started 3.2k+ years ago during the Bronze Age. Potters at an oasis in Northwestern Arabia made Qurayyah Painted Ware featuring distinct animals and human rituals — so distinct that it inspired its own dupes and knockoffs. Archeologists are now searching for the first “like and subscribe” etching. 

NEWS FLASH 

🚨 These entrepreneurs are big wrist takers: Luffu Link is a new fitness band coming next year from two Fitbit founders. It’ll track location, sleep, and steps, as you’d expect, but also means to serve aging parents — the band can send for a family member, call out missed medications, and more. The startup behind it, Luffu, identifies as an “intelligent family care system” aiming to help monitor multiple loved ones’ health in one centralized location.

🍪 Want to get ahead on the next big snacking trend? Fair warning, it sounds really unpleasant: Scientists at SIU Carbondale made a slurry out of yeast, upcycled plastic, and agricultural waste and turned it into edible 3D-printed cookies. The NASA-backed research project explores new ways to feed astronauts and address global food demand in the process, and eating plastic is, well, definitely a new way. The cookies apparently smell good, but nobody has tasted them yet.

🔬 Lady Gaga’s boyfriend has living human skin in his lab: Yup, we figured that would hook your interest. Outer Biosciences co-founder — and yes, partner to Gaga — Michael Polansky has found a way to keep donor human skin alive outside of the body for up to a month and is training an AI model to discover new cosmetic ingredients. The company says it currently generates a new ingredient candidate every six weeks — pretty good, considering there are only 120-130 FDA-approved active ingredients.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Watch list: How do you know if you’re in Sam Altman’s inner circle? You’re wearing a $180k+ custom timepiece from Swiss watchmaker Vanguart. Altman commissioned seven watches for OpenAI brass, per WSJ.

• Ruff riders: Dunkin' and dog toy maker Bark are teaming up on the first dog-specific drive-thru lane where they’ll dish out bandanas, treats, and plush toys, though, to our knowledge at least, dogs still cannot legally operate motor vehicles, so…?
  
• While AI races ahead… kids still like Legos. Oddly comforting. Lego reported a 22% rise in consumer sales in the first six months of the year and revenue that grew 21% to $6.54B. 
  
• BlackBerry — yes, that one — already pivoted once: It made QNX software, which runs in 275m vehicles. Now, the company is turning to robotics, saying the same “safety-critical” software could be used to power industrial robots in warehouses, forklifts, and medical spaces. 
  

STEAL BACK TIME

285 prompts for email, meetings, content, and more

How many hours in your day are siphoned toward writing emails, attending meetings, managing administrative tasks, and creating marketing assets?

This AI Prompt Library has 285 options built for one purpose: taking back time.

• 28 playbooks for cutting down on manual busywork
  
• Detailed instructions and bonus tips for customization
  
• Improve pesky workflows from cold outreach and customer service to lead magnet and product launch engines

All of the small stuff could be simpler.

Seize These Prompts

THE BIG IDEA

Who let the dogs out (to detect cancer)?

If someone in your life is obsessed with "PAW Patrol," you've likely learned that for heroic canines, no job is too big, no pup is too small.

That certainly holds for a group of dogs in India who have been tasked with sniffing out early signs of cancer in human breath.

The excellently named startup Dognosis trains a team of Labradors, beagles, and other breeds, and uses sensors to interpret signals from the pups for a low-cost cancer screening, per Bloomberg.

Teaching an old dog new tricks

Dogs have been known to detect drugs, explosives, and whatever your neighbor's dog left behind. Now their impressive olfactory sense is being used to sniff out medical conditions, including seizures, low blood sugar in diabetic patients, covid, and cancer.

Early detection — before blood tests, scans, or biopsies — is critically important:

• Seventy percent of cancers are diagnosed after symptoms appear.
  
• The average cancer screening rate among US adults is below 60%.

India's need is especially acute:

• One in 10 Indians risk developing cancer before 75.
  
• It has the third-highest prevalence of new cases worldwide, yet screenings are rare.
  
• It saw ~1.5m new cancer cases and over 900k related deaths in 2024.

How Dognosis works

• Patients breathe into a mask; samples are sent to the lab.
  
• Dogs sniff the samples.
  
• Sensors and AI analyze the dogs' movement, brain activity, respiration, and body language to determine if the sample has signs of cancer.

Don't worry, it's no dog-eat-dog workplace. The pups only spend 30-60 minutes a day detecting and are rewarded with treats, walks, and playtime on a farm.

Nonetheless, they've shown promising results:

• A ~90% sensitivity for over 20 types of early-stage cancers.
  
• It's identified cancer types they hadn’t previously encountered.
  
• Dognosis plans to process 1m tests/year, double its canine team to 30, and halve turnaround times to a week.
  
• The US facility could open by late 2027 or early 2028.

Next year, Dognosis aims to release an inexpensive at-home, multi-cancer prescreening test in India.

Who else?

Last year, startup SpotitEarly landed $20m in funding for a platform that also uses dogs for early cancer detection.

And while a dog's nose is considered 100k times more sensitive than a human's, one woman detected Parkinson's disease with her sense of smell.

Seems like the "PAW Patrol" pack is getting bigger.

Share this story

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Wedding season is almost over… but did any of those summer bashes have fake friends standing at the altar? 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Cost of health startup Amble’s “Oh Sh*t Bag,” a pouch full of pills intended to help you stay healthy in the event of a nuclear disaster, including: six prussian blue capsules, 14 potassium iodide pills, and six tabs of an anti-nausea med.

The apocalypse kit is outrageously overpriced for what it is: you could get enough of the latter two meds to supply a whole family for as little as ~$25, per Futurism. But for doomsday preppers who don’t want to DIY their own, the company does offer a buy-now-pay-later option — so, if the end is near enough, you could potentially get it for a steep discount.

HOW YOU HUSTLE

Our readers are always up to neat things. Here's our weekly feature highlighting one of your ventures.

Co-founders: Jessi and Chase Anderson (a sibling pair!)

Building: Harvi — a personal social concierge who matches adults with compatible friends and handles all the logistics (venue, calendar invite, introductions) so you actually follow through on "we should hang out sometime."

Edge: Harvi's "never walk in alone" feature pairs you with someone before an event so you both arrive together. The pre-launch campaign let waitlist signups vote on Harvi's voice — 2k+ people joined before the app even launched.

Advice: "Send the cold email... Our press, our partnerships, our advisors: all of it started with a message someone could have ignored. Most people never ask. Be the one who asks."

Working on something cool? Tell us here.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1939, the first televised Major League Baseball game was broadcast.

🌘  That’s cool: Every solar eclipse, mapped.

💰  Game: Guess the gadget’s price.

⛅  Whoa: A shade map that simulates how the sun will (or won’t) hit you anywhere, anytime of day.

🐈  Aww: Make yourself at home.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Disposable chop sticks should have a couple of toothpicks cut into them that you can pull off and use after your meal. SOURCE

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

Editing by: Sara "Hiii puppy!" Friedman.

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.
Working on something big?
We've got a whole library of business-building resources for you.

 Subscribe to our other newsletters
Grow your business: Starter Story
Stay up-to-date on AI: Mindstream
How to use top AI tools: Futurepedia
Expert insights: Marketing Against the Grain
Sell better: The Science of Scaling

Follow The Hustle on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram.