🥩 The hottest dish is a petri dish

Who among us hasn’t gotten inebriated on a hot summer day and wondered, “Why don’t we launch a giant umbrella into space and block out the sun?”

I have, certain I had solved climate change — until I remembered my lack of credentials.

No Ph.D. in astrophysics from Johns Hopkins University. No experience as an astronomer at University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy.

Well, István Szapudi has those exact bona fides, and he’s actually on board with a space-umbrella climate solution.

For real?

Szapudi published a paper on the idea last week. It proposes:

• Parking a solar shield between Earth and the sun — in a fixed spot ~1m miles from our planet — to reduce direct exposure to sunlight.
• The idea has come up before, but ran into a feasibility wall: the need for a shield light enough to be launchable, but heavy enough that gravity and solar radiation wouldn’t knock it out of position.
• Szapudi beats that with his proposal: capturing an asteroid (something that’s apparently possible) and using it as a counterweight for a screen.

The concept now theoretically works, and would offer quite a lifeline: It’d block ~1.7% of solar radiation, offering a small but meaningful global temperature drop.

Here’s the reality check

This solar shield idea entering the realm of possibility is the headline here. In practice, there’s still a long way to go.

• Today’s materials for a shield and asteroid tether are still too heavy for today’s rockets — though Szapudi suggests that may change in the next few decades.

But hey, even if we’re a lifetime away, it’s silly-hot out there; it couldn’t hurt to have more nontraditional planet-cooling solutions in the works.

P.S. This space umbrella isn’t alone — other “solar geoengineering” possibilities include adding aerosols into the atmosphere and artificially brightening clouds to reflect some sunlight back into space.

Moo-ve over, pea protein? Soy long, beet blood?

Sales of plant-based meat alternatives are dropping, according to data from Circana. The industry has dipped 19.8% YoY in units sold this summer, quite the fall compared to conventional meat purchases (down 2.7% YoY).

We’re not gonna sugarcoat it: investor sentiment is down, too.

• Beyond Meat stock has fallen ~76% since the company’s IPO. At Impossible Foods, employees’ shares have declined 89% in value since 2021.
• After venture funding for plant-based meat startups fell by half last year, companies raised $75.2m in Q1 of 2023, down from $703m in Q1 of 2022, per PitchBook.

Tofu or not tofu?

Meanwhile, cell-cultivated meat bagged $356.6m in Q1. These kinds of proteins are grown in a bioreactor, and, as Axios put it, “emerge in the consistency of soup or pancake batter” which can then be shaped. Yum.

So, since that consistency isn’t a great consumer selling point, what is?

• For one, the production process is cleaner than how we get our meat today. It’s also greener — the lack of actual animals means less methane and land use.

At this point, there’s just so little of it available. Just two companies, Upside Foods and Good Meat, have received regulatory approval to sell their cultivated chicken — and you can only eat it via:

• Bar Crenn’s $150 tasting menu in San Francisco
• China Chilcano’s $70 tasting menu in Washington, DC

Though, if you really, really want to buy and cook it yourself, you can do that. For now, per Axios, it’ll just involve flying to Singapore.

1) Even a house full of bookings can’t prevent Wall Street from demanding a refund. Case in point: Airbnb stock dipped after the company reported bookings rose ~11% YoY. Packing 115m+ nights and experiences booked into Q2 sounds as good on paper as a four-star “Cozy Bungalow” — unless you’ve got Wall Street’s high expectations. In their case, Airbnb’s quarterly numbers sounded more like a glorified garden shed with a leaky faucet.

2) With today’s diners being as flaky as phyllo dough, restaurants are increasingly turning to reservation deposits that are applied to bills or refunded after meals. Per OpenTable data, 28% of Americans admitted to being no-shows at least once in 2021.

3) The hobby games segment (think: trading card games, board games, card and dice games, and role playing games) seems to be playing its cards right. A spike in popularity during the pandemic has held up nicely, with North American sales up 7% last year, reaching $2.89B in 2022. That’s up from $2.69B in 2021, $2.03B in 2020, and $1.68B in 2019.

4) Pixar’s Elemental began as a slow box office flicker but appears to have turned up the heat, clearing the $400m mark and becoming the first animated movie with original IP to do so since before covid. BTW, by “slow box office flicker,” we mean it opened to just $29.6m, the studio’s worst opening ever when adjusted for inflation.