🫎  Make way for wildlife

👋  Good morning. Pee-ew! It’s not the Tupperware full of tuna salad your co-worker forgot under their desk last week — it’s an Amorphophallus titanum, AKA corpse flower. One of the rare tropical stinkers resides in the Talcott Greenhouse at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, which houses ~2k plant species. Nicknamed “Pangy,” the towering flower bloomed this week for the first time in three years, much to the delight of brave visitors looking to get their nostrils blown off.

NEWS FLASH 

🍫  If it tastes the same… Mondelēz International made 12 milk chocolate bars using Celleste Bio’s lab-grown cocoa butter, which Celleste CEO Michal Beressi Golomb says proves the tech works, per Food Dive. Celleste is now seeking interested buyers of its cocoa butter, of which it hopes to produce 50k tons of cocoa butter per year by 2035. The product could cut costs for confectionery manufacturers, as cocoa prices have popped amid climate change and other issues. 

🎶  Everyone’s a critic… except ChatGPT, a bot that occasionally practices sycophancy in hilarious ways. Philosopher and author Jonas Čeika asked ChatGPT to provide an honest review of his music. The bot praised it as an "atmosphere piece” with a “cool lo-fi, late-night, slightly eerie vibe” that might play over end credits or a quiet city montage. Now, we ask you to picture a sprawling metropolis after dark while what Čeika actually submitted plays: a bunch of fart noises. 

🤖  Not your mother’s make-believe: While we were content tying bedsheets around our necks to become wizards, today’s kids are pretending to be different characters: AI bots. On the website Your AI Slop Bores Me, anyone can submit a prompt, as you would with ChatGPT or Claude — but the entity answering isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s another human with a 75-second time limit to generate a written or drawn response. The site, which has been live for a month, has seen 25m unique visitors and almost 280m hits.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Higher education: Gizmo, an AI-powered app that turns students’ notes into gamified study sessions, raised a $22m Series A to expand its workforce and US market presence. Since launching in 2021, it’s amassed 13m users across 120+ countries.
  
• Justice for Swifties? A federal jury ruled that Live Nation and subsidiary Ticketmaster operated as an illegal monopoly that overcharged concertgoers. This verdict follows a separate $280m settlement with the DOJ in March.
  
• Revving up: Italian startup Positive Motorcycles is entering a pre-seed funding round after five years of self-funded R&D for its Egera bike, a 40-horsepower electric motorcycle.
  
• One Oreo Blizzard, please: Dairy Queen is testing drive-through chatbots at some US and Canadian locations that take orders with ~90% accuracy and provide faster service.
  

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THE BIG IDEA

Why AI is yelling at geese

You know that part in Hoppers where the human developers who want to build a highway through a wildlife habitat plant speakers disguised as trees to scare the animals away by playing sounds only they can hear?
Maybe you don’t (which is fair… You’re probably an adult and it’s a children’s movie).

Well, that’s essentially the concept behind Flox Intelligence’s new AI-powered Edge device — except, instead of using tech against wildlife, it uses tech to protect wildlife from existing man-made environmental dangers, like train tracks, airports, and mining facilities.  

How it works

• The battery-powered device, which can be strapped to trees or other tall structures, operates 24/7. 
  
• It uses an AI-enabled camera to detect and identify a range of animals, from migrating geese to rabbits to moose, from as far as 131 feet away. 
  
• When it sees one approaching a hazardous area, it uses AI to generate species-specific bioacoustic sounds to signal danger, or “communicate” with the animal, per The Daily Orange.   
  
• The device’s owner can then review a comprehensive report of the incident, as well as footage, which is uploaded to a cloud server. 

Since launching in 2025, Edge, which Flox compares to a “digital sheepdog or a dynamic invisible fence,” has already helped guide 60k+ animals out of harm’s way. 

It costs $3.5k, plus a $500 annual maintenance subscription after the first year.

A critter-cal solution 

The startup, founded in Stockholm and based in Syracuse, views its tech as a modern, harm-free method of animal regulation that’s become increasingly necessary.

“We turn wildlife communication into coexistence in all shared landscapes,” co-founder Sára Nožková told The DO. “As humans take more space from them, we need to figure out a better way to coexist.”

It recently raised $3m in funding and is already working with orgs like the World Wildlife Fund, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Transportation, helping to: 

• Prevent wildlife collisions 
• Keep public spaces clean
• Protect livestock and crops 

But Nožková says the goal is to eventually be “everywhere,” including home gardens.
So long, scarecrows.

🔗

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NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Average volume of gas per toot from men, according to a study by gastroenterologist Dr. Michael Levitt, which sought to determine which gender had smellier farts. Long story short: women didn’t let it rip like the men did, so their toots were smaller in volume but more concentrated, with the study ultimately concluding that it was more or less a tie, per The Washington Post. 

To measure it, Levitt — a distinguished scientist and NASA collaborator — essentially sniffed bags of farts collected straight from the butts of 16 healthy adults. “Smell a bag of farts” sounds like an insult but is, in fact, simply the worst job in science.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 2023, SpaceX launched a full Starship vehicle for the first time. It exploded four minutes after liftoff. 

🍿  That’s cool: A simple movie release calendar. 
🗞️  Newsletter: Neatprompts teaches you how Fortune 500s are future-proofing their businesses. 

👋  Useful: Traveling soon? Check out Cultural Atlas to learn more about where you’re going, including etiquette, greetings, and more. 

👃  Aww: Unlimited boops.

SHOWER THOUGHT

I’m just intelligent enough to know that I’m not really that intelligent. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.

 Editing by: Sara "Herd mentality" Friedman.

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