🍯 Honey, but make it blue

Plus: Pricier pasta, a collection of science illustrations, and more.

Share The Hustle: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Check your referral progress & prizes here 👋   Good morning. If your week is still feeling spooky despite Halloween being over, there's a pricey prop that might be of interest. The black hat worn by the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is going up for auction in December. Double-check the piggy bank before getting excited — Heritage Auctions sold a pair of ruby slippers for $28m last year. STARTING UP This startup wants to give your ears superpowers ❌   The problem: You're at a crowded networking event, nodding and smiling at your colleague even though you can't hear a word they're saying over the roar of the crowd.  💡   The pitch: Seattle-based Hearvana is developing AI-powered "superhuman hearing" that lets users hear only the noises they want to. The tech runs directly on devices such as earbuds, hearing aids, and smartphones, and the platform uses real-time audio processing to isolate voices, filter background noise, and build what its founders call a "sound bubble."  🚀   The outlook: Hearvana's founders imagine a world where its tech is embedded into smart glasses, voice-driven products, and hearing devices to help users tune out unwanted noise. Real-time audio filtering could be just the thing to crack the professional audiovisual market, estimated to reach $422B by 2029. And, if it works, you might finally be able to tune out that one coworker.   NEWS FLASH Whoa: University of Dundee professor Iris Grunwald performed the first remote thrombectomy, removing a blood clot from a human cadaver in Florida while she remained in Scotland. She used a robot developed by Lithuanian startup Sentante that can replicate hand movements in real time. Wonderful has been out of stealth for just four months. The Israeli startup has already raised $134m, which it'll use to expand its customer-facing AI agents to at least a half-dozen new markets and explore new tasks for its bots. AI assistant Robyn launched on iOS this week. Developed by former physician Jenny Shao to combat the negative effects of isolation, Robyn's meant to act as an "emotionally intelligent partner" that asks about users' lives, goals, and challenges, and offers insights about their patterns. Atlantic Sea Solutions Inc., a startup based at the University of Connecticut's Technology Incubation Program, is working to develop to develop an edible coating made from seaweed extract that would extend produce's shelf life. FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM AI is shooting for the stars    Google announced Project Suncatcher, a proposal that would run AI chips in outer space.    Why, you might ask?  Satellites get near-constant sunlight and could generate more energy than is possible on Earth.  While the project could provide cleaner, steadier power to support growing AI needs, there are some major challenges in the way. 👉  Read more on Mindstream   THE BIG IDEA  (Laconic Foods) Blue honey? Sure, why not?  If you're finding your morning parfait lacks color, why not drizzle it with a bright blue honey?  It's Alive is a Greek company that farms and sells spirulina — a nutrient-dense algae often used as a dietary supplement — and a vibrant blue honey. Founder George Lignos, a chemical engineer, created it by removing the blue pigment from spirulina and mixing it into traditional Greek orange-blossom honey. This dramatically alters the honey's color, but not its taste or texture.  It's been a hit among tourists on Crete, and has made its US debut via Laconic Foods under the label Cyano.  We love a colorful bite While you might not have a lot of uses for honey the color of the ocean, the market for vivid foods has taken off thanks to our apparent need to share our meals on social media.  You may recall previous hype for unusual-colored food, e.g., rainbow bagels or black ice cream. Even many of the foods we think are pretty ordinarily colored are enhanced with dyes. For example, farmed salmon isn't pink, and cheddar cheese isn't orange.  Our appetite for dyed foods dates back centuries, but unnatural colors became popular in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when companies began selling food coloring for home use. Historian Ai Hisano told The Atlantic that decorated "dainty dishes" became popular first in more affluent homes and, in the 1920s, across households as dyes became cheaper — and with the introduction of Jell-O.  But… … dyes have changed a lot over the years and now, the FDA wants to phase out petroleum-based dyes by the end of 2027.  This has led retailers, including Walmart and Kraft Heinz, to commit to removing synthetic dyes from their products.  While we could certainly eat boring-colored foods, spirulina and other ingredients like turmeric and saffron could offer us naturally derived options. So, perhaps blue honey isn't so odd, after all.  🔗 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED Your company doesn't need to have an opinion on everything: Seriously. We're good with you keeping some things to yourself. But if you still need more urging, here's the case for stopping "random acts of marketing." NEWSWORTHY NUMBER Total duties set to be imposed on Italian pasta imports, representing the steepest tariffs placed on any product by the current administration, per The Wall Street Journal. That includes a 92% antidumping tax on Italian-made noodles from 13 companies, on top of the 15% standard tariff on goods from the EU.  American pasta lovers might be wise to start stocking up on their favorite Italian brands, which could disappear from US grocery store shelves as soon as January — the US generates $770m in annual sales for Italian pasta exporters, per WSJ, but the drastic tariffs are expected to make operating in the country too costly and many of the targeted companies are getting ready to ditch the market entirely. AROUND THE WEB 📅  On this day: In 1953, amid the Red Scare, the Indiana Textbook Commission called for Robin Hood to be banned, as the protagonist engaged in "communist" behavior by stealing from the rich to provide for the poor. 🧩  Game: Make every square the same color to win. 🪨  That's cool: Over 2.2k illustrations from James Sowerby's mineralogy books, drawn between 1802 and 1817. 📷  That's interesting: This site compares photos of 1945 Berlin to 2015 Berlin. 🐱  Aww: What's in there? SHOWER THOUGHT Both concrete and glass are mostly made of sand, which makes skyscrapers just really tall sandcastles. SOURCE Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Sara Friedman, and Singdhi Sokpo. Editing by: Ben "Feeling blue" Berkley.   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. 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