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👋 Good morning. If you’re in Utah — every morning might just be a good one. The state claimed No. 1 on the US News Best States Rankings list. South Dakota, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Nebraska rounded out the top five, with rankings taking into account data on everything from health care and education to economics, infrastructure, and safety. Condolences to Louisiana, which came in dead last in the overall rankings. At least it has beignets?

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NEWS FLASH

A house with a for sale sign out front showing $$$

🏘 The best at pricing out the rest: Atherton, California, is once again home to America’s most expensive ZIP codes, reclaiming its former glory from Fisher Island, Florida. Want a home in the exclusive Silicon Valley community alongside residents Marc Andreessen and Stephen Curry? Start saving up to meet its median home sales price of $9.93m. And that’s just to slum it — the enclave has already seen five properties sell at $30m+ this year.

🎮 Gaming without guilt: Climate tech startup CleanPlay, founded by former gaming execs concerned about the industry’s energy usage, rolled out a way for gamers to support renewable power initiatives, all within PlayStation. How it works: Users enrolled in CleanPlay’s $3.99/month service can purchase special add-on game features that’ll crowdfund for one clean energy project, a solar farm in Texas.

🪨 One man’s trash… is another man’s precious metals. Startup Fast Metals raised $4.3m to extract valuable materials — like titanium and rare-Earth elements — from red mud, a waste product of the aluminum refining process. With 3B+ tons of caustic red mud piled on Earth, Fast Metals has its work cut out for it. The startup’s method uses another refinery waste stream to separate minerals from mud, turning waste into a revenue stream.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

Today’s hit of nostalgia: Winamp, the music player you probably used to listen to Nine Days’ “Absolutely (Story of a Girl)” for the first time, is returning next year with its own “premium music subscription service.”
Speaking of music subscriptions… Spotify is sprinting ahead. The company launched Running Mode, which builds personalized workout playlists matched to your pace, goals, and music taste.
And after that… You can slide on the new collab from Nike and Hyperice: a heated, vibrating slide-on sandal that massages the top of athletes’ feet to help them recover.
Not what the doctor ordered: The FTC sued telehealth company Hims & Hers, alleging the company shared sensitive health data with advertisers and made subscriptions hard to cancel.

REDDIT RAMP UP

How’s your presence on Reddit?

Not using Reddit, strictly from a business standpoint, is usually ridiculous.

The helpful and curious humans love their subcommunities, and you should, too. Join the conversations on Reddit to boost your visibility and engage with way more strangers in a zero-click world.

Grow better on Reddit

THE BIG IDEA

The desalination startup spinning brine into business

Water covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, but just 2.5% of the world’s water is fresh.

That’s made desalination — pulling salt and other minerals out of nonpotable water to create fresh water for drinking or industrial use — vital to communities in arid regions from the Middle East to California.

And thanks to factors like climate change, urbanization, and industrialization (shoutout data centers), more important than ever.

The trouble is…

… that conventional desalination is:

An energy intensive process that only retains ~30%-40% of the water it processes.
Harmful to the environment, given that many facilities are powered by fossil fuels and the leftover brine is usually dumped back into waterways, which can damage marine ecosystems.

Eden Tech — a Texas-based startup founded by Hunter Manz, whose interest in water conservation grew from his upbringing in Nevada — thinks its novel approach could solve both issues by making the process more efficient while turning waste into profit, per Fast Company.

How it works

Whereas traditional desalination systems act as “high-pressure strainers,” using reverse osmosis to filter out salt by pushing water through a semipermeable membrane…
… FC describes Manz’s reverse osmosis centrifuge system as functioning like “a salad spinner, using centrifugal force to help separate salt from water.”

Employing natural forces rather than pressure alone, Eden says its approach requires less energy — 2x-3x less compared to thermal systems — while retaining ~2x as much water.

Eden also plans to extract valuable minerals, like lithium and rubidium, from the remaining brine (possible depending on the water source) and sell them to create an additional revenue stream that could reduce costs for consumers while reducing the amount of waste that returns to the environment.

What’s next?

The company, which has raised $3.3m in funding since launching in 2020, hopes to scale its newly debuted Genesis machine over the next year for commercial use.

“We want to take water that is currently hurting the environment and make it something that will actually help the local community,” Manz told FC.

Making that vision a reality won't be easy — Eden still has to navigate hurdles like water rights, permitting, and public concerns over privatization — but as clean water grows scarcer around the world, it will likely become necessary.

Fortunately, Eden isn’t the only one working on making desalination cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Hate to hear it: Box CEO Aaron Levie says AI could make us all work more, not less.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Estimated value of Grady-White Boats, a North Carolina fishing boat maker, based on offers received by owner Eddie Smith. But with no heir and no need for “a 200-foot yacht or to spend the winters in the Mediterranean,” the 83-year-old has decided to give the company away to charity rather than sell it, per The New York Times.

Earlier this month, he transferred ownership to a purpose trust and nonprofit that will donate all future profits to charitable causes, a move inspired by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who set the blueprint in 2022 when he gave away his $3B outdoor apparel company — partially because it “really, really pissed [him] off” when he hit billionaire status.

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 1964, unmanned US lunar probe Ranger 7 took the first close-up images of the moon’s surface. The 4.3k images were 1k times clearer than anything seen through telescopes.

👂 Woah: The quietest place on Earth right now.

🐟 Game: Tetris, but with fish.

🌍 That’s fun: Claim your spot on a world map.

🐶 Aww: Unlikely buds.

SHOWER THOUGHT

You could defeat Medusa by wrapping your arms and legs around her and then looking into her eyes. SOURCE

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Editing by: Sara "Cue the waterworks" Friedman.

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