🌶️  Chicken is on fire

👋  Good morning. You think a dust bunny is scary? Make sure to check under your desk for meat-eating crabs. Turns out they’re the real obstacle to finding Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane. A 17-person Purdue expedition has just arrived at Nikumaroro, the Pacific island where Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, are believed to have crashed 89 years ago, to investigate an underwater object. While coconut crabs aren’t dangerous, they’re annoying: The team has to sleep on their boat instead of the island to avoid them.

NEWS FLASH 

👁️  Eye can see clearly now: Science Corporation claims to have successfully implanted PRIMA, its vision-restoring chip, into its first patient with Stargardt disease through a trial at the Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia. The inherited eye disease gradually destroys the eyes, causing vision loss for ~150k people worldwide. During the first rehab session, Science Corporation says the patient saw one letter and, during the second, could read a full word. That’s less time it takes us to learn the rules to a board game.

☂️  Wrapping things up: Australian startup Eudaemon Technologies is ramping up manufacturing for the "condom of the future." The world's first hydrogel condom is 50% water, latex-free, inherently wet, and designed to more closely replicate the thermal and, um, mechanical properties of human tissue. Following an oversubscribed $4.5m seed raise, the company opened a $10m funding round and launched the surprisingly vanilla-sounding Operation International Relations, inviting Australians with "a bit of stamina" to represent their home-grown condom abroad.

🧳  Nothing beats a holiday: Travel giant Booking Holdings announced a planned $100m investment in new Seattle-based startup, Vayo, for its AI-driven personal travel agent. The platform connects to users' inboxes and organizes flight, hotel, and restaurant reservations into trip itineraries. Vayo monitors prices and availability, alerting travelers to better deals or helping them secure restaurant reservations. To fill in itinerary gaps or plan future travel, Vayo looks to the user's interests and travel history. It won't pack your bags, though.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Backsies: Reese Witherspoon is partnering with Mediawan to buy back her production company, Hello Sunshine, from Candle Media, after selling it for $900m five years ago.
  
• Paying an arm and a leg and a jaw: A ~70% complete Nanotyrannus skeleton — one of only three known to exist — is headed to Sotheby’s on Oct. 27 with an estimated auction price of $6m-$9m. 
  
  
• Keep on truckin': Amid record diesel prices, MIT startup LNK Energies aims to convert existing long-haul trucks to run on hydrogen using mini-fridge-sized reactors, while cutting pollution and costs.
  
• If you print it, they will come: Austin-based Icon announced $200m in financing for multi-story 3D-printed construction, which promises to cut home-building time, the number of workers needed, and reduces costs by 40%.

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM

The pressure is on for peer reviewers

The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), one of AI’s biggest conferences, received ~500 papers a decade ago.

For its 2027 event, it received 40k+.

The problem? There aren’t enough qualified reviewers to keep up. And they’re not the only organization buried under piles of paper.

👉 Read more on Mindstream.

THE BIG IDEA

How Nashville hot chicken took over the world

I once ate a Hot Ones-style lineup of hot wings that would make Sean Evans blush. I completed the challenge, profusely sweating and hiccuping, and regretted it for days.

And I didn't learn a thing. I order spicy food all the time.

Apparently, I'm not the only glutton for punishment.

The fiery heat of Nashville hot chicken has spread its wings across the US and is now taking over the globe, per Marketplace.

Some like it hot

Like all good food trends, Nashville hot chicken began with a scorned lover.

Legend says that in the 1930s, Thornton Prince's girlfriend sought revenge on her philandering partner by spiking his fried chicken with a "devilish" amount of spices. Instead of suffering, Prince loved the heat and opened a hot chicken shack with his brothers. Prince's Hot Chicken still serves its bright brick-red chicken, available plain to XXX hot.

For decades, the dish remained popular among Nashville's Black communities and musicians from the Grand Ole Opry.

Then, in 2007, the first annual Music City Hot Chicken Festival solidified the city's signature dish, promoting the spicy bird to a wider audience and inspiring countless imitators.

Over the next decade, Nashville hot chicken restaurants flocked across the US, including chains like Hattie B's and Dave's Hot Chicken. Soon, fast food giants like KFC, Popeyes, and Chick-fil-A were battling for spicy supremacy.

Now the trend is global:

• Around 2.4k restaurants worldwide sell Nashville hot chicken.
  
• There's been a 65% increase in menu mentions from 2018 to 2023.
  
• Hangry Joe’s Hot Chicken & Wings was 2024's fastest-growing chain, and 2025's was Wingstop.
  
• Dave's Hot Chicken has nearly 500 franchise locations — a 58% increase from 2025 — including 30 international locations and 300 more already sold.
  
• The global hot chicken restaurant market was worth $7.8B in 2024 and is expected to reach $16.1B by 2033.

The trend is partly attributed to a growing demand for protein, and chicken offers an inexpensive option.

But why so spicy? Researchers say the way our bodies respond to capsaicin in hot peppers could be "benign masochism," akin to enduring initially unpleasant experiences like watching horror movies or running (yikes!) that eventually release endorphins for a mild high.

At least I can blame science the next time I take on a dumb spicy challenge.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Throw the event of the year: We surveyed 300 B2B decision-makers on what matters — and what doesn’t — when it comes to a corporate event. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Number of processing facilities for agave hearts in India, where the tequila-making plant grows wild but has yet to be commercialized — though entrepreneurs like Desmond Nazareth, who launched the country’s first agave spirits brand in 2011, are working to change that, per BBC. For now, India’s agave spirits industry is small. Still, with domestic demand growing 31% and millions of acres ripe for agave cultivation, Nazareth says it has the potential to rival Mexico’s one day. Before then, a second facility might be a good baby step.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1973, Dolly Parton released “Jolene,” which rightfully shot to the top of the charts.

🎟️  Mark your calendars: The business expert behind YouTube channel “Kenji Explains” will show you how to turn your business data into smart decisions in this free webinar.

📸  Great stuff: The winners of an international dog photography contest.

💪  That was close: One teacher vs. 29 second graders in tug of war.

🦭  Aww: This’ll get your seal of approval.

SHOWER THOUGHT

It’s weird to think that “this tastes good” might sometimes just be your brain responding to cues that, throughout our evolutionary history, meant “this has energy or nutrients worth eating.” SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley, Singdhi Sokpo, and Danny Jensen.

Editing by: Sara "Feeling the burn" Friedman.

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