👋 Good morning. If you spent the weekend changing your elderly beagle’s diaper, just know he might not be as special as you thought he was. A dove in Missouri has been named the oldest living dove in captivity by the Guinness World Records at the ripe age of 44 years and 72 days — more than double the bird’s average life expectancy of ~20 years. Sugar’s owner said his favorite activity is sitting on the couch watching TV — let’s hope that’s the secret to longevity.
NEWS FLASH
☀️ Didn’t Ryan Gosling just stop this? Stardust Solutions, an Israel-US solar geoengineering startup, raised $60m to dim the sun, per Futurism. In theory, it would spray aerosol particles into the atmosphere, mimicking a volcanic eruption, and shade the planet to curb global warming. Many scientists, however, think it’s a dangerous idea with unknown, potentially long-term consequences. Similar experiments have already been shut down and Mexico has banned the practice.
❤️🔥 That’s a long time: Fan fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) has come out of beta after 17 years, per The Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit that runs it. Since launching in 2009, the site for people who love writing spicy Twilight and Star Trek prose has garnered 10m registered users and 17m fan-created pieces. AO3 noted the site has been stable for a long time, so the change is “mostly cosmetic,” and they’ll continue to iterate on new features, which fans can check out — and volunteer for — on Jira.
🧊 Move over, Labubus: There’s a new toy in town, and it’s a squeezable cube called a NeeDoh. While the product launched in 2017, NeeDohs recently went viral on Instagram and TikTok, driven in large part by tweens, and have since become incredibly difficult to buy. The CEO of NeeDoh’s parent company, Schylling, said they’ve seen a 10x surge in demand and have taken a “short pause” on orders while they race to keep up with the shortage.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
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Can’t spell "on air" without AI: OpenAI acquired the tech and business streaming show "TBPN," which airs for three hours a day, five days a week, for an undisclosed amount.
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More money, more problems: As fuel prices climb, the wealthiest travelers are paying more to fly private — even on flights booked in advance — with private jet charter prices up 5%-20%.
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Can we use LinkedIn’s Easy Apply button for this? UBTech Robotics Corp., a Chinese humanoid robot company, is hiring for a chief scientist to lead its AI research with an annual salary of $18m.
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Going rogue: Meta has already reduced funding to its Oversight Board, which helps make content moderation decisions, and may stop after 2028, per Platformer, as it cuts costs and shifts to AI.
REVISIT YOUR ICP
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Upload to Claude, start a conversation… You know the drill.
THE BIG IDEA
Hitting a dead end
Remember the old dad joke: Why do cemeteries have fences?
Because people are dying to get in. (Badum-tss.)
Well, those fences could prove useful considering that many cemeteries are running out of room to bury the dead, with some even looking to utilize vertical mausoleums and closed schools.
Faced with limited space and an increasing number of annual deaths, some cemeteries are considering greener, space-saving alternatives to traditional burials and cremations.
- Around 3m Americans die annually — a number that's expected to climb to ~4m over the next 20 years, according to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA).
- The organization found 61.4% of people are interested in 'green' funeral options.
Brooklyn's historic Green-Wood Cemetery plans to be the first on the East Coast to offer "natural organic reduction" — or human composting, per The Wall Street Journal.
The nutrient-rich material could be used for the cemetery's greenery while saving space and meeting growing demand for more environmentally sound and affordable means of memorializing loved ones.
Compost mortem
For its human composting project, Green-Wood Cemetery is working with Berlin-based startup, Meine Erde (My Earth).
- Bodies are sealed in temperature-regulated vessels — or "cocoons" — full of straw, hay, and clover.
- The cocoon gently rocks for 40 days while microbes break down all but the bones, which are then ground into the mix.
- The process costs roughly $5k — about twice the cost of a basic cremation, but less than the $8.3k median cost of a traditional burial.
Meine Erde is far from the only deathcare startup to offer human composting. Washington, the first of 14 states to legalize the practice, is home to four companies, including early pioneer Recompose.
Other startups offer similarly eco-friendly alternatives, including memorial reefs, mushroom coffins and burial suits, and natural burials.
Not everyone, however, is thrilled about the growing interest in burial alternatives, including religious groups, and, not surprisingly, traditional funeral-service providers, who worry about losing their share of America's $20B+ deathcare industry.
But Christopher Robinson, former president of NFDA, notes that with only a few human-composting facilities in the US, the association's 11k funeral homes probably don't have to worry.
Of course, now that Martha Stewart said she wants to be composted, we may have a serious trend on our hands.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Kraft and Heinz: big names for your hot dog and for the food industry. But their merger, which could have been a perfect union, became a $15.4B disaster.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Years that you’ve been stuck with that now-embarrassing Gmail user name you came up with in middle school. But no longer — under a new policy announced last week, and for the first time since its launch in 2004, Gmail users can now change their email address without losing any data or account access, per The New York Times.
Unless you like being a 30-something-year-old professional with the handle basketballguy94, in which case, forget we said anything at all.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1930, baker James Alexander Dewar invented the Twinkie when he used a machine typically used to fill strawberry shortcakes to inject banana cream into a snack cake.
✈️ Game: You’re freefalling from an airplane, but it’s actually pretty fun.
🥁 Chill out: with this browser drum machine.
⌨️ That’s cool: If you miss typewriters…
🐶 Aww: Two friends, one ham.
SHOWER THOUGHT
Our dogs probably think we are weakly barking when we cough. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Danny Jensen, and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Will die on that hill" Friedman.
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