👋 Good morning. Those rowdy, kilt-wearing Scots aren’t the only ones traveling overseas for the World Cup — the world's oldest soccer ball hopped across the pond, too. The ball — found in a bedroom once used by Mary, Queen of Scots, and believed to be ~500 years old — is on loan from the Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum in Scotland to the Coral Gables Museum in Miami. While the artifact didn't seem to be a good omen for the Tartan Army at the Brazil v. Scotland World Cup game, it's still pretty cool.
NEWS FLASH
📜 Unwrapping history: Researchers have digitally unwrapped and read the surviving portion of an ancient scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius nearly 2k years ago. Scientists spent centuries trying (and failing) to decipher the texts using methods ranging from pouring mercury between the layers to soaking the scrolls in gelatin and acid, but advanced scans and machine learning have finally revealed nearly five feet of text. The breakthrough, backed in part by the Silicon Valley-funded Vesuvius Challenge, could help unlock hundreds more ancient scrolls.
🚀 Special delivery: Austrian startup Tumbleweed is developing soda-can-sized pods to launch aboard a SpaceX rideshare mission that could one day make sending payloads into microgravity as easy as shipping a package on Earth. The company says its standardized, pre-certified pods could slash the paperwork and wait times that typically come with sending research into orbit, with a return-to-Earth version planned for 2027.
🧊 From the people reviving the woolly mammoth... comes a “modern-day Noah’s Ark” because of course that’s what they’d do next. De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences announced its BioVault, a biobanking collab with the US Fish and Wildlife Service that’ll house frozen genomic samples of 2.3k+ endangered plants and animals. At a cost of tens of millions of dollars, Colossal says it’ll be even more ambitious than the San Diego Zoo’s leading conservation biobank, the Frozen Zoo.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
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Love this update: Last year, we covered the entrepreneurs who invented HaloBraid, a device that helps stylists braid hair 5x faster. Now, they’ve raised $7m to put their product in stores.
- Meta said bet: The company is reportedly launching its own prediction market app, Arena, to compete with Polymarket and Kalshi in an industry projected to reach $1T.
- Not so fast, bots: Despite fears that AI could one day replace software engineers, new hiring data from SignalFire shows that while overall hiring at large tech companies dropped 25% in 2025 compared to 2019, engineering roles dipped just 11%.
- But also: go faster, bots: More than half of respondents in a Parloa poll about customer service bots said they’ll give an automated system less than three minutes to help them before asking to speak with a person.
PERFORMANCE PLAYBOOK
Brag a bit harder, please
In the blank, airless room where the big head decides what you’re worth, nothing is a given. You have to have the words.
These checkpoints are pretty much memes, but can still be pivotal for recognition, raises, promotions, and pure peace of mind. Don’t sweat through another dreaded cycle without this Performance Review Toolkit.
THE BIG IDEA
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Firefly tourism is buzzing
Every summer, for the past decade, growing swarms of tourists have been flocking to eastern America’s most rural regions to see a rare performance put on by the season’s brightest stars: fireflies.
The glowing bugs, who come out for a few weeks a year to blink their butts in search of a mate, have become a sensation among nature lovers, with viewing events and guided tours selling out at lightning speed (figuratively speaking), per The Wall Street Journal.
- In the Great Smoky Mountains, home to 19 firefly species, this year’s lottery for campsites during the official eight-night viewing period saw 45k applicants vie for one of 960 available spots.
- Some overnight tours come at rates comparable to nice hotels, like Tennessee-based A Walk in the Woods’ three-day backpacking trip, priced at $800 a tent.
Firefly tourism has also been a boon to local economies.
- In 2013, after discovering their property was home to rare synchronous fireflies, Peggy and Ken Butler organized the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival.
- The festival, which is located in one of the poorest counties in America, has since generated ~$1.5m for the region and drawn travelers from all over the globe.
Magical summer nights aside…
There are darker consequences to the hype around light shows.
The delicate bugs, which live on the ground and thrive in warm, humid conditions, are facing population declines due to threats like climate change-related droughts, light pollution, and habitat loss.
A 2021 study found that viewing events — and the flashing cameras, foot traffic, and bug spray that accompany them — could wipe out firefly populations if not carefully managed.
- In Amphawa, Thailand, firefly-related tourism has been responsible for killing off ~80% of the insect’s population.
But there are bright spots
Experts say that viewing events can inspire interest in the environment and conservation efforts.
Plus, scientists keep discovering new firefly species. Opening new sites to visitors, some experts suggest, could help take some of the pressure off the few popular ones and make it easier to maintain them in an ecologically responsible way.
The Butlers, who quickly saw nightly festival attendance swell to ~1k people, have since implemented protocols to limit crowds and preserve the habitat, and hired tour guides to provide educational programming.
“Monetizing [the fireflies] was the first temptation,” Ken Butler told Wired in 2021. “But we received this as a gift. And we want to pass it on as one too.”
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Crazy or genius? These seven startup ideas are somewhere in the middle.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
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Share of US employees who prefer hybrid work, which won out as the most favored model among workers, according to ezCater’s 2026 Future of Workplace Experience report, with an understandable 32% preferring fully remote work and just 9% who inexplicably would like to be on-site all week long.
What might boost that last number? For 80% of hybrid workers, that’d be added perks, like free food, flexible work hours, and more vacation time. Yet, nearly half of all workers who were asked to return to the office said they received no incentives at all.
Why employers should care: If they don’t give workers a good reason to RTO, the report found workers are 27% more likely to seek out job opportunities at companies that will.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 2015, same-sex marriage became legal in the US.
🎲 Haha: Games if they were designed by famous philosophers.
🗞️ Newsletter: The Follow Up breaks down the real tactics and secret hacks that are closing deals right now.
🧠 Game: A spin on the crossword puzzle.
🐴 Aww: What a mane.
SHOWER THOUGHT
Gen Z might be the last generation to really remember the world without AI, just like millennials/Gen X were with accessible computers. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Glow big or go home" Friedman.
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