When people discuss health on our X feeds, it often involves cold plunges, Athletic Greens, or Andrew Huberman.

But, beyond the workout routines and testosterone parties, groundbreaking advancements are occurring in the health care industry every day.

Seriously: The FDA approved 55 new drugs in 2023, the second-highest number in the last 30 years.

And you better believe we’ve been taking notes.

Wild wearables

• Researchers are developing wearable devices to wirelessly monitor body sounds, like air moving in the lungs, heartbeats, or food in the GI tract. The wearables would be the first to allow providers to continuously monitor patients’ body sounds remotely.
• Chronic itching affects millions of people but can be difficult to quantify. A new wearable ring measures the frequency and intensity of a patient’s scratching by recording finger vibrations and arm accelerations.

Life-changing treatments

• Last month, the FDA approved the first treatment that uses CRISPR gene-editing tech. (A big deal!) The drug was one of two approved for treating sickle cell disease, a serious genetic blood disorder affecting ~100k Americans.
• Over in the underresearched women’s health world, a new study identified the GDF15 hormone as a cause of morning sickness. About 70% of pregnant people get morning sickness and up to 3% suffer from a severe type that can be fatal. Researchers suggest preemptive hormone treatments could alleviate the issue.

And so, so, so much more

• An ultrasound bra that can send real-time breast screening data to a user’s phone to detect cancer earlier.
• A new male contraceptive that uses an injectable hydrogel for a fully reversible vasectomy.
• This wearable ultrasound patch that can image organs and accurately determine how full a bladder is.
• A high-tech mouthguard that could help prevent concussions.

All of this and we didn’t even touch on — y’know — that whole brain implant thing.

My lifetime basketball shooting percentage is probably 0.0002%, yet: I hereby challenge LeBron James to a one-on-one game of hoops.

… That’s roughly the equivalent of any startup looking at Google’s search dominance and saying, “Sure, we can take them.”

Few companies in any industry rival Google’s global market share (~92%), making it damn hard to bet against them — but one emerging challenger, Perplexity, is readying its shot at the throne.

It’ll now do so with an extra $74m in the bank, per The Wall Street Journal, having swayed prominent investors, including chip titan Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.

Why are they betting on Perplexity?

AI, naturally. We’re used to search engines providing loads of links we can page through to find the best information; Perplexity cuts out the middleman, providing a succinct, straightforward AI-fueled response to every query.

Perplexity considers itself an “answer engine” rather than a “search engine,” and its streamlined approach, which went live in December 2022, has attracted not-insignificant attention:

• It claimed 10m monthly active users in 2023, with 500m+ queries served.
• Its latest funding round, which followed a $25.6m raise last March, valued the company at $520m.

Of course, those numbers pale in comparison to the industry standard: Google processes ~8.5B searches every day, and its parent, Alphabet, is worth $1.7T.

So, what happens next?

As it tries to gain a foothold in a market that has eluded deeper-pocketed challengers like Microsoft and Yahoo, Perplexity has a tall task ahead:

• It must sort out a sustainable business model; though the startup makes $5m-$10m in annual revenue, it isn’t currently profitable.
• Perplexity must develop a product trustworthy enough to avoid user concerns about AI hallucinations.
• It must hope Google’s own AI-summarized features in development won’t render theirs redundant.
• And it must generally aim to avoid the fate of Neeva, a similar product that went belly-up last spring.

Finally: Is any article about competing with Google really complete without a hit of nostalgia, remembering would-be foes? AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Dogpile, WebCrawler. There you go. You’re very welcome!

112k: Average number of songs uploaded to music streaming services every day of the first half of 2023, per Quartz, which links the staggering number to the rise of Pro Tools and other software that allow musicians to record from home studios.

$222.1B: The record amount US shoppers spent online between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, up 4.9% YoY, per Adobe Analytics. BNPL payment companies, such as Klarna, saw a 14% spike over the holidays as economic uncertainty continued.

133 pounds: The weight of the wels catfish Tomas Marcinkevicius recently caught in Cambridgeshire, smashing the previous 62-pound records. Why the big gap? The British Record Fish Committee halted record-taking for wels catfish from October 2000 to November 2023 over concerns of illegal imports of big catfish, but now the self-sustaining species is growing plenty large on its own. Still, Marcinkevicius isn’t interested in claiming the record, saying he knows of even bigger catfish caught during that period.

$15B: How much consumers loaded onto Starbucks cards in 2023, per a complaint from the Washington Consumer Protection Coalition, a consumer watchdog organization that claims the coffee giant manipulates users into reloading funds onto its payment app while making it difficult to zero out accounts. The group is asking Washington’s attorney general to investigate the practice, which it claims netted Starbucks $900m over the last five years. Starbucks disputes these claims.