👋 Good morning. Consider this your official reminder to make Mother’s Day plans for the special mom in your life (you’re welcome). Might we suggest a restaurant brunch? Many moms are hoping for more official plans this year, with 42% saying they’d prefer going out to eat over breakfast in bed (4%), according to data from OpenTable. In good news for overstretched moms, 18% said they booked their Mother’s Day meal this year, compared to 39% last year. So 86 those burnt pancakes, Junior.
NEWS FLASH
🤠 Yee-haw: Proto-Town is a 1.2k-acre campus located in an Austin, Texas, suburb where tech founders live in a ranch house or surrounding trailers and work on their startups. It has a robotics facility and a drone-building site, and residents often get around on dirt bikes. Co-founder Josh Farahzad has described it as having a “frat-house atmosphere,” but instead of partying, people work a lot.
🐈 Cat-approved: Ikea first attempted inflatable furniture in the ‘90s, but it didn’t go well. Now, it’s trying again with a $200 inflatable armchair heavily R&D’d by designer Mikael Axelsson. It weighs a breezy 18 pounds, comes tidily flat-packed, and was described by Wired’s Jeremy White as “a marvel” with “a level of comfort you don’t expect from something you inflate with a foot pump.” It has also been tested with cats and their sharp little claws.
🏠 Homebuying: Now inaccessible in a new way. A San Francisco homeowner created a LinkedIn page to sell his 13-acre ranch home, which he purchased in 2019 for $4.75m. The catch? The owner wants to exchange the property for Anthropic equity, saying the trade will offer the right buyer a great way to diversify their assets (plus 20% of the stock’s upside). We’ll watch this transaction go down from the sidelines, with neither Anthropic shares nor a Bay Area ranch. Sigh.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
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To err is human: VC Ben Horwitz vibe-coded a plugin that adds typos to AI-generated emails. It’s called “Sinceerly,” but — and perhaps this is the best part — Futurism found it too buggy to use. Back to self-sabotage it is.
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Your HOA will love it: Spirit Halloween released a 6-foot-8-inch animatronic Xenomorph on April 26 in honor of Alien Day (LV-426 is where the aliens in the sci-fi franchise were discovered). For $450, you could really freak out your neighbors.
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Get moving: Spotify is often the first step of a workout, and now even more so — the company is partnering with Peloton to bring 1.4k+ fitness classes to Premium users.
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No go: China blocked Meta’s $2B acquisition of Chinese-founded AI startup Manus, a setback for Meta’s push into AI and a sticky situation: Manus and its execs had already been folded into Meta’s operation.
BLOOM ON LINKEDIN
LinkedIn = Launchpad for growth
How exactly did Mindstream bloom like a magical beanstalk and go from zero to 150k+ readers within a year?
You guessed it: by leveraging the tools and community on LinkedIn. Here’s our full guide with co-founder Adam Biddlecombe, along with two other clean-cut essentials (the LinkedIn Profile Playbook + a 12-in-1 cheat sheet).
You don’t even need to say “thank you” — we can feel the gratitude from here.
THE BIG IDEA
New level of ‘test tube baby’ unlocked
“This is not a good thing. Other than opening jars, sperm is the only thing women need us for!!”
That was the reaction of one online user to the news that Utah-based Paterna Biosciences has successfully grown human sperm in a lab — a technique known as in vitro spermatogenesis — marking a breakthrough that’s been ~100 years in the making, per Wired.
- Others have tried: French biotech startup Kallistem claimed to have figured it out in 2015, but was unable to prove its sperm was capable of fertilizing eggs.
While Paterna’s findings have yet to be independently verified, its lab-grown sperm has already been used to create embryos in early testing, validating its viability.
So… she don’t need no man?
Well, to make a baby, she actually still do.
Sperm is produced from specific stem cells found in testicular tissue; IVS still requires those stem cells, meaning someone with balls is still part of the process.
But getting those stem cells into a petri dish is the easy part. The hard part that’s stifled past attempts is getting them to become sperm.
- Over ~65 days, sperm-producing stem cells journey through the testicles to eventually become the tailed swimmers you probably picture them as.
- But each step of that journey involves “very strict control mechanisms,” Paterna CEO and co-founder Alexander Pastuszak told Wired.
Using computational biology to determine the molecular signals involved and after testing several combinations, Paterna has figured out the “instructions that are needed to teach these stem cells to become mature, normal sperm.”
Why it is “a good thing”
Male factors account for ~50% of infertility cases, and ~10%-15% of infertile men produce no sperm at all. But they do still have the sperm-producing stem cells to create it, meaning the tech could help these men, who have few other options, become biological fathers.
One sperm retrieval specialist who spoke to Wired says it could also potentially help prepubescent cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, since those stem cells are present at birth.
Plus, infertility care has largely focused on treatments for women, despite both genders being about equally affected by it. Advancements like this could lighten the physical and emotional load for women.
The company plans to conduct more testing to make sure it’s safe and effective before turning their science project into a human baby, but says trials for such sperm-derived pregnancies could begin as soon as next year.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Talk about a comeback story: This entrepreneur makes $250k per month across 13 businesses after losing everything to AI.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Share of Americans who say they’ve pregamed before going out in the last three months to avoid overpaying for drinks, according to a survey by Zappi. With the average cocktail priced at nearly $14 and inflation only expected to rise, it’s no surprise that adults are returning to their broke-college-student ways — which, according to The Wall Street Journal, doesn’t just include pregaming, but sharing tips on how to sneak bevvies into concerts, like the Backstreet Boys, on Reddit… Old habits die hard.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 2003, Apple debuted the iTunes Music Store, where each song cost 99 cents.
🎸 Music: See set lists from concerts around the world.
🎫 That’s cool: A collection of transit tickets from around the world.
📰 Newsletter: The CEO Report delivers the insights top leaders rely on.
🐾 Aww: When your BFF comes over.
SHOWER THOUGHT
You can never miss your turn on a roundabout because it's always coming up ahead. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Man, science is cool" Friedman.
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