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Good morning and welcome to Friday.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.58 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.34 minutes.)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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🚌 “Hop In, We’re Headed to School”
Image: Giphy
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🎁 DONUT Headline: To put it mildly, school districts are facing some challenges this fall. You can now add bus driver shortages to that list.
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Nearly 80% of school districts said they were having trouble finding bus drivers in March, according to a survey from student rideshare service HopSkipDrive.
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Pittsburgh Public Schools told more than 800 students that they'll have to walk to school because they don't have the bus capacity to drive them, and delayed the start of the academic year by two weeks to buy time and find 400 more drivers.
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One Delaware school district is offering to pay parents $700 per child to take over pickup and dropoff duties for the school year (i.e, 3 kids = $2,100).
🏫 This shortage extends to teachers, too… A Frontline Education survey from April suggests two-thirds of school districts are facing teacher shortages, a record-high since the company began collecting data in 2015.
🔭 Zoom out: Things like low pay, a challenging school environment, and weak professional development support and recognition existed pre-pandemic – and COVID obviously hasn’t helped.
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About half of bus drivers are over the age of 65, and thus at increased risk of COVID.
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Other drivers were poached by logistics companies needing to handle a surge in deliveries.
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New survey data from the nonprofit RAND Corporation suggests one out of four teachers is considering quitting after this school year, a jump from 1 out of every 6 pre-pandemic.
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🐜 Work, Work, Work, Work, Work
Image: Giphy
📖 The backstory… Everyone already knows ants are exceptionally strong. But did you know:
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A few ants spaced well apart behave like individuals. But pack enough of them closely together and they act more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties.
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For those without a visual, picture this: you can pour fire ants from a teapot, or in certain situations ants can literally link together to build towers or floating rafts.
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Most recently, a 2020 paper found the social dynamics of how division of labor emerges in an ant colony is similar to how political polarization develops in human social networks.
Pretty cool, right? Oh, and we almost forgot: ants have architectural proficiency that rivals Frank Lloyd Wright.
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"It's been a mystery in both engineering and in ant ecology how ants build these [anthills] that persist for decades," said study co-author and Caltech biological engineer Joe Parker. 👇
Image: Behance
⏩ Almost there… This all leads to the aforementioned recent study, where Parker and co-author José Andrade, a Caltech mechanical engineer, set out to find if ants instinctively “knew” how to build the structure shown above.
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"We didn't interview any ants to ask if they know what they're doing, but we did start with the hypothesis that they dig in a deliberate way," said Andrade. The hypothesis?... “Maybe ants were playing Jenga.”
🔬 Experiment time… The team used X-ray imaging to recreate the anthill and track the ants to determine how the structure evolved over time and how the work got done.
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They discovered that as the ants removed grains of soil to dig their tunnels, the force chains acting upon the structure rearranged themselves from a randomized distribution to form a kind of liner around the outside of a tunnel.
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This redistribution of forces strengthens the tunnel's existing walls and relieves pressure exerted by grains at the tunnel's end, making it easier for the ants to remove those grains to extend the tunnel even further.
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In plain English, the ants instinctively know how to efficiently build the anthill, and can somehow sense the line between a structure that’s strong and a structure that will collapse.
And here’s the kicker: Ants tap the individual grains to assess the mechanical forces being exerted upon them before removing them.
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So the next time you’re playing Jenga and get cocky, just remember — every single ant on the planet would OWN you nine ways to Sunday. 😉
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
Image: Joe Skipper/Reuters
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☝️ Blue Origin successfully launched its New Shepard rocket for the fourth time this year on a ten-minute cargo mission carrying experiments for NASA and others.
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🇦🇫 At least 13 U.S. service members and 90 Afghans were killed in two explosions outside Kabul's airport Thursday morning; Islamic State affiliate ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the attack. It's believed to be the single deadliest incident for American forces in Afghanistan in a decade. (From the Left | From the Right)
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🏢 Federal investigators provided evidence of "extensive corrosion and overcrowded concrete reinforcement" in the Surfside condo complex that collapsed in June.
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📰 Yesterday was a big day for the media industry: Forbes announced plans to go public via SPAC at a valuation of $630M and German media giant Axel Springer acquired politics publisher Politico for rumored $1B.
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♨️ A tourist was sentenced to a week in jail for walking on a geyser at Yellowstone.
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🧬 Scientists discovered a previously unknown lineage of humans after analyzing the DNA from the 7,200-year-old remains of what is believed to have been a teenage girl.
+Bonus: Ever wanted to fly like an eagle? Now you can.
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🔥💸 Sponsored by Matcha.com 🍵🔥
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Everyone is Talking About This Winner...
We’re still riding high from the DONUT Pet Olympics, so naturally we’ve been staging fake match-ups. This week in beverages, it’s matcha vs. coffee.
🏅Our money is on Matcha.com taking the gold ! Here’s 5 reasons why:
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Matcha has caffeine, like coffee, but your body processes it slowly for longer lasting energy. No jitters or anxiety. #ThankYouScience.
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Matcha acts as a probiotic rather than gut irritant (like coffee).
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Your diet will thank you. Matcha is low calorie and works with virtually every diet. It won’t spike insulin since there is no added sugar (unlike those three tablespoons you add every day).
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Amino Acids galore. Matcha has some of the strongest stress-reducing properties.
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Six-Stage Purity and Potency. Matcha.com vets ALL matcha offerings regularly, and they have some of the most rigorous international food-safety certifications.
Coffee who? Let’s give our gold medalist a round of applause ! 👏 👏
Oh, and Labor Day happens to be their biggest sale of the year: use the code DONUT at checkout for 25% off anything in store.
Ditch the coffee and try matcha today.
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… “I was panicking because I had access to something big. Their security is awful.” –John Binns, a 21-year-old American who is claiming responsibility for the recent T-Mobile security breach, told the WSJ.
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Binns, who is living in Turkey, said he managed to gain access to T-Mobile’s system - and the personal info of more than 54 million customers - after discovering an unprotected router exposed on the internet last month using a simple tool available to the public.
🔢 Stat of the Day… State and local governments have only distributed 11% of the $46.5 billion in rental assistance authorized by Congress, according to the Treasury Department.
📖 Worth Your Time… Apple's Double Agent. A sneak preview: “He spent years inside the iPhone leaks and jailbreak community. He was also spying for Apple.”
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
🏈🏀 I Know What You Did Last Summer 💸📝
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Image: NCAA
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🎁 DONUT Headline: The college football season kicks off tomorrow, officially ending an offseason that brought a whirlwind of change to the sport, and college athletics as a whole.
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🥇 First things first… It’s nice to know some things never change. Alabama, Oklahoma, Clemson, Ohio State, and Georgia sit atop the AP Preseason Poll. (See the rest of the Top 25.)
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The new football season brings with it new COVID-19 procedures. Last season, there were 118 FBS games canceled or postponed due to the virus.
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This year, there will be no rescheduling of games. Nearly all conferences have said teams will be forced to forfeit if they can’t field a team due to COVID-19 issues.
🧞 Cue the music… Everyone involved in the upcoming fall season – student-athletes, coaches, fans, universities, even the NCAA itself – is entering a whole new world.
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NIL rules: College athletes have been able to make money off their own name, image, and likeness (NIL) since July 1. According to marketing platform Opendorse, a D1 athlete earned $471 on average over the first month of eligibility, with 88% of transactions - and 46% of the funds - coming from social media.
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Realignment: Texas and Oklahoma last month agreed to leave the Big 12 for the SEC by 2025. In response, the Big Ten, Pac-12, and ACC announced an alliance that will “bring [them] together on a collaborative approach surrounding the future evolution of college athletics and scheduling.”
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Transfer rules: In April, the NCAA announced new guidelines allowing all athletes to transfer once and become immediately eligible, introducing college sports’ version of free agency.
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Other pathways to the pros: New leagues have emerged looking to compete directly with the NCAA for top athletes, including Overtime Elite – a basketball league for 16- to 18-year-olds that pays a minimum of $100K per season – and the NBA’s G League.
🔭 Looking ahead… A plan to expand the College Football Playoff from four to 12 teams is in the pipeline.
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🤖 Remote Health Reimagined
Image: Hanson Robotics
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🎁 DONUT Headline: Hong Kong-based engineering company Hanson Robotics unveiled its newest creation, a humanoid nurse robot called Grace.
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In 2016, Hanson Robotics grabbed global headlines with the release of Sophia, an uncanny humanoid robot capable of simulating a staggering range of human expressions, including joy, grief, contemplation, and frustration.
Now, the company has developed Grace, an android companion for both doctors and patients.
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Equipped with sensors that can detect a patient’s temperature and pulse, she/they/it (??) was designed to help doctors diagnose illness and deliver treatments.
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Capable of speaking English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, Grace specializes in senior care and can socialize and even conduct talk therapy with patients.
“Using AI and robotics in this context can help gather important data for healthcare providers to assess the wellbeing of the patient,” says Hanson Robotics founder and CEO David Hanson.
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The company plans to mass produce the robots beginning later this year.
Keep reading.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
🐝 Fuzzy Friends Friday: Bee-FFs
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Image: Good News Network
Lacey Shillinglaw and her new best friend Betty do everything together. From grocery shopping to bowling games to nightly sleepovers, they've been inseparable since meeting two weeks ago.
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“I’m so happy and I just love spending my time with her,” said Lacey “She’s so fluffy and I love our friendship.”
Wait… fluffy?
Just then, Betty buzzes around her bestie, landing on Lacey’s purple hair to settle in for the next few hours.
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Betty is a large bumblebee – one that Lacey rescued injured from the road.
Though Lacey has left the windows open and brought Betty out to the garden to encourage her return to the wild, the bee won’t budge.
Keep reading.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
🔠 To The Letter
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What letter is not included in the name of any U.S. state?
A) Z
B) X
C) J
D) Q
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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🍩 Share The DONUT
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Access exclusive rewards and even an all-expenses-paid round trip to Austin, TX, just for sharing this newsletter.
Simply:
1. Copy your unique referral link.👇
2. Post said link on social media, drop it in your group chat, spell it out in your alphabet soup, etc.
3. Watch the rewards roll in.
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Ambassador Rewards and Progress → |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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D) Q
If you're like some of us and guessed 'J' or 'Z' you'd be close – and probably don't live in New Jersey or Arizona.
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
–Lao Tzu (b. 571 B.C.)
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