💬 QUOTED: “We are building from scratch, we had no reference whatsoever.”

With $17,000 and a bit of sweat equity, a team of four college students went toe-to-toe against some of the biggest defense contractors in the world – and came out on top.

In an antidrone technology competition held by the Canadian military earlier this year that featured Boeing, Italian defense giant Lombardo, and US conglomerate Teledyne, the University of Toronto engineering students took second place (out of 15 entrants) after designing a system with modified car speakers that uses soundwaves to disrupt drones’ navigation systems, sending them veering off course or crashing to the ground.

• The contest’s winner was a laser weapon from AIM Defence, a small Australian company.

The students’ next step? Commercializing their tech under the company name Prandtl Dynamics (after Ludwig Prandtl, the German aerospace pioneer). But this could pose some challenges. Only two seed-capital investments, worth a total of $14.2 million, were made globally in defense startups last year, according to PitchBook.

🧬🐺 STAT OF THE DAY: Someone call Ben Stiller, because history could soon be coming back to life. Texas-based startup Colossal Biosciences last week issued a press release saying it has successfully sequenced ~99.9% of the genome of the extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, with just 45 gaps left to close in the coming months. Colossal also revealed its scientists were able to isolate long strands of RNA molecules from a 110-year-old thylacine skull that was skinned and preserved in ethanol. The startup says the breakthroughs represent key steps towards its goal of editing the genome of the thylacine’s closest living relative – a small marsupial called the fat-tailed dunnart – to bring the animal back from extinction.

🤔 DID YOU KNOW? A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), and WALL-E (2008) were all brainstormed by four Pixar executives over a single 1994 lunch.

📰 WORTH A READ: One man's journey from state prison to a revered San Francisco restaurant → (SFGATE)