Joanna (J.F.) Penn

Author of thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, horror, memoir, and self-help. Podcaster. INFJ. Cat lover.

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

Off the beaten track in Bruges at Jeruzalemkirk, relic hunting …

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

Architecture and memento mori in Brussels!

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

The Buried and the Drowned Book Book Trailer https://t.co/ggHWd0ZTLM via @YouTube

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

This is so cool!

[Stewart Brand @stewartbrand]

Herculaneum fused scroll read in full.
https://t.co/y8RV6tDzvg

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

@jflWrites That’s from 2011. A lifetime ago!

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

Yes, this makes so much sense!

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

This is awesome!

[Joe Reeve - 🇬🇧/acc @isnit0]

Love this.

You can just clean stuff!

(No matter who you are)

@RadioHumberside

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

Why Pilgrimage? Redefining It for a Secular Age | Pilgrimage by J.F. Penn https://t.co/ezFpdFVJcD via @YouTube

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

Yes, there are lots of us. We are introverts, writers, creatives, readers. 📚 (sometimes there are also cats involved!)

[G. F. Allen @AuthorGFAllen]

Do people actually exist who genuinely enjoy staying home all day, completely alone, without seeing anyone, like people who finish a book in one sitting?

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

@JoshPhillipsPhD Cologne, for sure. Canterbury, absolutely. I have lots more here. https://t.co/KlygCJ0PjO

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

@DMattin That’s why I’m entering this along with many other storytellers https://t.co/0MyujURWT1

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

Writing is like telepathy | Writing the Shadow https://t.co/2zpwxwBm1i via @YouTube

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

Such an exciting possible use of AI technology!

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform.
Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed.
It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this.
You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back.
60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done.
No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution.
Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time.
As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed.
Here's why this matters for the future of your heart.
Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives.
But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime.
Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal.
That's what Midjourney is building toward.
The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine.
The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation.
Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously.
This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations.
It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review.
No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist.
And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet.
So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product.
But.
The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled."
And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years.
For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard.
A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers.
I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging.
This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after.
The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body.
The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

@kodifyit Thanks Mike, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to sign it. It was very noisy and I found it too overwhelming really. I wasn’t there much! I’m glad you had a good conference!

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

I used to do this. I used to collect them from second hand shops too. Obsessed with encyclopedias!

[C H I E F, the NuriaStore Bookseller @bennetowuonda]

Did anyone else read dictionaries and encyclopedias for fun as a kid or am I just weird?

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

@kodifyit I used to love picking up readers digests in the library!

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

This is why many of us are focusing on selling gorgeous print direct with Kickstarter and Shopify and in-person sales. 📚 💙

[James Maxey @JamesAllenMaxey]

My advice to deal with the saturation of AI ebooks is to pour your efforts into selling print. This requires more effort, additional skills, and an investment of money that the AI people will probably not be willing to replicate. When others are rushing toward the easy path, move toward the steepest trails. Physical books endure for decades, and sometimes for centuries. Ebooks essentially stop existing the second they fall out of search results. Print books, however, can lead long and interesting lives.

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

@RobHilliard_66 @bookvault_app Yes, I was one of the first to use the features and am a huge fan of @bookvault_app I hope you enjoy your book design process!

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

@marcelbouk If you’re a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors they have ways to help depending on the circumstance. It’s definitely a common thing.

[Joanna (J.F.) Penn @thecreativepenn]

Absolutely. 📚 💙

[G. F. Allen @AuthorGFAllen]

My five love languages:

Buying me a book.
Taking me to a bookstore.
Reading beside me in silence.
Leaving me alone to read.
Letting me talk about books like it’s my full-time job.