🐅  Screen time for zoo animals

👋  Good morning. Keep chasing whatever weird little hobby you’ve been doing after work — we believe in you, you nerd. Plus you never know where it might lead: Truck driver Joe Macken spent more than two decades crafting a 50-foot-long scale model of New York City in his free time. When he shared the balsa wood and foam board masterpiece — which includes 800k+ structures — on TikTok, it rightly went viral and is now featured as an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. 

NEWS FLASH 

✌ ️ A literal vibe check: Truth unveiled a Biometric Global Peace Index that measures worldwide inner peace using wearable data from Garmin, Whoop, and Oura. The startup says its mission is to create an early warning system for the “human storm” so that conflict can be stopped before it erupts. But what happens if your nervous system can’t tell the difference between joining a Zoom meeting and being chased by a lion?

🎃  Make it make scents: The smell of the fall is here, and it’s Brach’s Ode to Candy Corn eau de parfum. The $22 limited-edition scent “smells just like the taste of candy corn,” according to the brand, with notes of vanilla, sugar, and honey. The waxy Halloween treat is polarizing, but it’s popular: It’s Utah’s favorite candy, according to Brach’s 2024 sales data, and it’s beloved in corn-centric Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, and Missouri.

✈️  Terminal to table: San Francisco International Airport is partnering with local startup Replate to redirect surplus food from its 114 concession businesses to community organizations. The program, which wants to treat uneaten food as an opportunity rather than a problem, has already recovered 12k+ pounds of food, with 57% of SFO’s concessions participating.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Bear with it: A Japanese artisan is turning bear-scarred trees — which lose at least 25% of their commercial value from claw damage — into lacquered surfboards, skateboards, and furniture to redeem a wild animal dubbed “a serious threat to public safety and peace” by the Japanese government.

• The creator upstairs: New York startup Snag is building a “liquid housing” marketplace for sublets and room rentals focused on creators, whose variable incomes and nomadic lifestyles don’t cut it for traditional landlords. 
  

• Love it or hate it: Americans are worried about AI — even the ones using it daily, according to a new Gallup survey. The country had the highest anxiety rate globally, with 74% reporting fears about AI and 68% of daily users expressing concern. 
  

• OK, cupids: New dating app Rivet gives all the power to… complete strangers? The platform enables a community of volunteer matchmakers to decide whether two people are compatible and present users with their selections. 
  

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THE BIG IDEA

Now at zoos, iPad penguins and Xbox-playing Orangutans

Modern technology is often blamed for destroying our connection to nature and dulling our innate instincts. (For example: our sense of direction? Nonexistent.)

Yet, paradoxically, researchers like Rébecca Kleinberger think some of the most advanced technologies could actually help captive animals get back in touch with their wild side, per The Atlantic.

• At Massachusetts’s Stone Zoo, she’s helped introduce an arctic fox to a smart puzzle feeder with adaptable levels of difficulty to stimulate his foraging instincts and black bears to a motion-sensored machine that blows scented bubbles to engage their sense of smell.
  
• For polar bears at the Maryland Zoo, a retractable robotic arm holding peanut-butter-covered lettuce creates a hunting simulation by mimicking prey popping its head out of ice holes.
  
• At Australia's Melbourne Zoo, orangutans are playing custom-made Xbox games to simply cure boredom. (Researchers are hoping they’ll eventually be able to play them with humans.)
  
• At an aquarium in California, penguins are playing iPad hunting games made for cats.

The goal…

… is to enrich their lives in captivity, which — without food, shelter, or predators to worry about — can understandably become pretty boring.

Making their habitats even more artificial might seem counterintuitive, but animal-behavior researchers are finding that the function of an animal’s habitat might matter more than how it looks.

Is it working?

It’s hard to tell what the animals are getting out of their high-tech toys — since they can’t actually tell their keepers if they like it or not (other animal researchers are working on that tech, though), researchers are left to guess based on the animals’ actions, like whether the penguins start to swim more or the bears walk around more.

• Some worry that, like us, the animals might even get too much screen time, or become so engrossed in their devices that they don’t do anything else.

But so far, it seems promising. For example: Stone Zoo’s arctic fox, Hudson, The Atlantic’s Katherine Wu observed, was usually found lazing around before the puzzle toy was introduced, and has been more active ever since.

Whether the tech actually makes them happy or satisfies their animal instincts, video games and bacon-scented bubbles don't sound half bad to us, and it's got to beat sitting around all day with nothing else to do.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Crack open a cold one and get comfy: Poppi’s founder spills on the secrets behind the brand’s success, killer startup ideas, and what life looks like after a $2B exit.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Cost of newly opened NYC bakery Rye’s one and only baked product: a loaf of rye sourdough bread, made from just water, flour, and salt. The pricey carbs have made the bakery go viral online, with brands like grocery chain Lidl using it as an opportunity to promote their own normally priced loaves and online users questioning what could possibly justify the price point. According to the owners, much of it comes down to all the time it takes to make the bread, its size (a hefty 3.3 pounds), and the store’s expensive location in glitzy SoHo.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it hasn’t deterred curious New Yorkers already used to paying $10 for a latte — since opening this summer, the bakery told People it has “almost sold out every day.”

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1928, Galvin Manufacturing Corp. was incorporated in Chicago. Two years later, it would introduce the Motorola radio, the first mass-produced car radio.

🚗  Game: Draw a car and then drive it.

🐈  Bored?: Twirl this cat around in outer space.

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🦒  Aww: Munch!

SHOWER THOUGHT

Pets don't understand how a car works; they think it's a large animal that runs really fast and sleeps in the garage. SOURCE

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

Editing by: Sara "It’s a zoo in here" Friedman.

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