• ☝️ You’re looking at a series of hyper-realistic animal portraits created by Spanish artist Andoni Bastarrika, who used a combination of beach sand, colored stone powder, and other tools when necessary.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed up across the board (S&P: +0.3%; Dow: +0.2%; Nasdaq: +1.0%).
• 📉 Cash App parent company Block's stock fell by ~15% yesterday, after a report from Hindenburg Research that accused the company of facilitating fraud.
• ⬇️ Weekly jobless claims dropped to a three-week low of 191,000.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• ⚔️🐶 John Wick: Chapter 4 opens nationwide this weekend.
• 🖼 A Jackson Pollock painting was found in Bulgaria earlier this week during a police raid of art smugglers; the previously unknown work is estimated to be worth over $50 million.
• 🏀 The Men’s Sweet Sixteen tipped off yesterday; No. 3 Kansas State, No. 4 UConn, No. 9 Florida Atlantic, and No. 3 Gonzaga all won and will move onto the Elite Eight; the other four games are tonight.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🤖 OpenAI said it has added support for plug-ins to ChatGPT, giving the chatbot access to live data from the internet for the first time; before now, ChatGPT could only pull information from its training data, which ends in 2021. | Character.AI, a chatbot startup founded by former Google employees, raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation.
• 🌐 Bob Metcalfe, a researcher for the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, won the 2022 Turing Award for his invention of Ethernet; the award is often called the “Nobel Prize of computing.”
• 🧠 Animals like jellyfish, which lack a centralized structure that can be recognized as a brain, are still able to form memories and perform some of the same learning functions normally associated with brains, per a new study published in PNAS.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🌌 The Northern Lights are projected to appear in the skies over some northern US states tonight.
• 👁️ Federal health officials are investigating a recent outbreak of drug-resistant infections across 16 states that have been linked to eye drops; at least three people have died and 68 others have been infected, with some reporting vision loss.
• 🏳️🐝 Utah has a new state flag: Gov. Spencer Cox signed legislation this week approving a new design, which features a beehive in front of mountains; it’ll take effect in March 2024.

CLICKBAIT

• 👈 Are left handed people more creative? Brain scans reveal why these individuals might be wired differently.

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