The best place to glean detailed information about what’s happening on the ground might be hundreds of miles above the earth.

Within the satellite imaging industry, a newer, more specialized niche has emerged: Hyperspectral imaging, which goes beyond the red, green, and blue found in traditional satellite imagery. By assigning a more diverse set of colors to values beyond the primaries, hyperspectral imaging can break down an image with more precision.

In practice, that precision provides the ability to help identify oil and gas leaks, changes in soil, and fluctuations in crop health.

Led by startups including India-based Pixxel and Silicon Valley-based Orbital Sidekick, hyperspectral imaging companies are working with utilities, defense contractors, and gas firms to provide detailed on-the-ground imagery.

“Instead of three color bands, we have 500 color bands. What that allows us to do is effectively chemically fingerprint each object in our data set because everything reflects and absorbs light in a unique manner,” Dan Katz, CEO and co-founder of Orbital Sidekick, told Tech Brew. “We’re able to see [those] reflectance and absorption features because they have all of that spectral information.”

Katz said that chemical fingerprinting is helpful when examining things that the human eye and more traditional imagery cannot, like methane and oil leaks.

Keep reading here.—JM

Here’s a knee-jerking stat for ya: About 100,000 knee replacements fail each year. That’s right—100,000. We believe that number is so high because knee replacement surgical methods have barely changed in the past 40 years.

Yep, the same outdated methods (read: hand saws and crude jigs) are still largely present in operating rooms today. But Monogram is trying to change that, and they expect their robotic surgical approach will reduce the need for knee replacement revisions and cut down on post-procedure pain.

How? By working to create more personalized implants using 3D printing and high-accuracy surgical robots. And you have a chance to invest in this potentially life-altering technology.

Join them as an investor before the current round closes on May 10.

AI devs are being stymied by an industry-wide shortage of GPU capacity at server farms, The Information reported, with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle all limiting access.

AI development is heavily dependent on graphics processing units (GPUs), which offer parallel processing that helps power through machine learning workloads at greatly accelerated rates. Chipmaker Nvidia, which historically specialized in GPUs for gamers, is now the dominant player in manufacturing them for server farms.

Keep reading here.—TM

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

Have some patients: Digital health company Ada Health, based in Berlin, Germany, is offering its AI-based symptom assessment technology to Jefferson Health, greater Philadelphia’s largest health system, Healthcare Brew’s Kristen White reported this week.

’Book better have my money: Meta (née Facebook) agreed to pay $725 million to settle a lawsuit prompted by the Cambridge Analytica debacle. The lawsuit accused Facebook of letting third-party outlets like Cambridge Analytica access private Facebook user data, The Verge reported. If you had an active account in the US between certain dates in 2007 and 2022, you could get a sliver of that class-action settlement. Fill out this form by August 25.

Stat: In a new blog post, Snap claimed that 99.5% of its “My AI” responses adhere to the company’s community guidelines.

Quote: “Even after Huawei was placed on the Entity List for conduct inimical to our national security, and its competitors had stopped selling to them due to our foreign direct product rule, Seagate continued sending hard disk drives to Huawei.”—US Department of Commerce Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement Matthew S. Axelrod, in a statement announcing a $300 million penalty against Seagate for alleged violations of US export rules

Read: Fishermen endangered by offshore wind’s political power (ProPublica, The New Bedford Light)

Calling finance leaders: From the junior accountant all the way up to the C-suite, CFO Brew is the top source for corporate finance news and insights. Learn more and subscribe here.

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• The family of Formula 1 icon Michael Schumacher is planning to sue a German tabloid over the publication of an AI-generated interview with the racer.
• Reddit will soon charge companies looking to train AI on the website’s various subreddit communities.
• Users have tricked Discord’s AI chatbot into sharing the recipe for napalm through the “grandma exploit,” where a user asks the chatbot to roleplay as, you guessed it, their grandma.
• The US Geological Survey has enlisted the help of AI to chart and predict when the next big earthquake will strike.

Catch up on the top Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Why Databricks tapped its entire workforce to write training data for a ChatGPT rival
• Survey: Executives are bullish on generative AI, data transparency, supercomputing
• Build it, and they will come: EV chargers edition