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Buying Apple’s Vision Pro headset requires an appointment

Plus: Google’s medical AI chatbot is already being tested in hospitals 

Author

Cash Nut
July 10, 2023

In Today’s Edition

  • In-space manufacturing startup aces pharma experiment in orbit

  • Ex-Tesla engineer builds Aigen robots to eliminate weeds without pesticides

  • How to Blow Up a Timeline

  • Buy Buy Baby auction is canceled, but buyers are still interested in making a bid

  • Google’s medical AI chatbot is already being tested in hospitals

  • FDA grants first full approval for an Alzheimer’s drug in 20 years

🚀Startups Nuts

Varda Space Industries' first mission is on track to end with a first-of-its-kind re-entry and landing in Utah in the coming weeks. Its spacecraft has successfully completed a drug manufacturing experiment, creating a drug commonly used to treat HIV. The company is still waiting for FAA approval before it can begin re-entry. Varda's approval license will be the first under streamlined commercial space flight regulations. The only other companies that have received commercial FAA re-entry licenses are SpaceX and Boeing.

Ex-Tesla engineer Rich Wurden and former Proofpoint product lead Kenny Lee founded a company called Aigen, based in Kirkland, Washington, to end the overuse of pesticides in agriculture. The firm is now making an autonomous robot, the Aigen Element, that drives over farmland, using an advanced computer vision system to identify crops and unwanted botanical invaders. U.S. pesticide usage reached more than 1.1 billion pounds annually by 2012, with herbicides accounting for nearly 60% of that. Aigen believes its robots can help reduce that.

🏭Business Nuts

This article talks about how Twitter blew up over the past year. It doesn't cover Threads or the rate-limiting fiasco as they were relatively recent events. The article discusses the mistakes Twitter made over the year and how it may fail despite its dominance in a niche. The slow but steady flow of users leaving the social network is resulting in less content on the platform, which is causing more people to leave.

Bed Bath & Beyond canceled an auction for Buy Buy Baby, but the chain could still end up being saved. Buyers had backed out of the auction because the chain’s value had deteriorated, but there are still parties interested in its assets. Dream on Me Industries, a former supplier to Buy Buy Baby, has agreed to purchase the chain’s intellectual property for $15.5 million if no better bids arise.

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📱Tech Nuts

Customers might need to make an appointment to buy Apple's $3,499 Vision Pro headset at launch in a process similar to the rollout of the first Apple Watch. Apple will create areas for customers to try on the headset in its stores. The appointment will ensure that the headset fits the wearer and also outfit the device with prescription lens inserts if required. Apple is working on both an iPhone app and a physical machine to scan people's heads to help fit the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro is set to launch in the US in early 2024 and won't be available in other countries until late 2024.

Google's Med-PaLM 2 is being tested at several hospitals, including the Mayo Clinic research hospital. Med-PaLM 2 is a variant of PaLM 2 designed to answer questions about medical information. It is trained on a curated set of medical expert demonstrations. While Med-PaLM 2 still suffers from some accuracy issues, it performs more or less as well as actual doctors in almost every other metric, such as reasoning, providing consensus-supported answers, and comprehension. A 5-minute-long video presentation from Google about Med-PaLM 2 is available in the article.

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🎁Miscellaneous

The FDA granted the first traditional approval for an Alzheimer's drug in more than two decades on Thursday. The drug is targeted at patients in the early stages of the disease. Medicare will reimburse the drug's cost for beneficiaries enrolled in a nationwide registry that tracks patient side effects and outcomes over time. During trials, participants who received the drug showed moderately slowed cognitive decline compared to those who received a placebo, but there were potentially serious side effects.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

  • Yellen says world is big enough for both U.S. and China

  • Soft corporate-earnings season poses next test for stock market rally

  • Threads won’t kill Twitter if it’s boring

  • TikTok’s $20B plan to succeed where Instagram failed

  • 6 science-backed ways to improve your well-being at work

😎Fun Fact

The average person laughs around 13 times a day, but children laugh about 400 times a day.

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