🏢💰The pandemic’s most expensive office purchase goes to…

Image: Tenor

🚗 Driving the move…“We know that our employees, in order to really be happy and productive, need to collaborate,” William Floyd, Google’s director of public policy and government affairs, told the WSJ. “Because of that need to collaborate, we’ve been investing more and more in office space.”

🗺️ Zoom out: Tech companies are gobbling up more real estate, even as their own employees and the workforce shifts to a more remote/hybrid work model.

• Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft together occupy around 589 million square feet of U.S. real estate, the WSJ reports. That’s more than all of the office space in New York City, or the equivalent to about 220 Empire State Buildings.
• In 2020 alone, these five tech giants expanded their real-estate footprint by more than a quarter, their fastest rate over the past decade.

📅 Looking ahead... “Pre-Delta, we saw so much rebound quickly … I think we could see people come back [to the office], but it'll be in a different type of building. We'll see a lot more touchless technology ... And we could see a situation where every employee has a little bit more space,” according to Aidan Hume, SVP of commercial real estate at Cambridge Savings Bank.

+What to watch: Warehouses, factories, and apartments are shaping up to be post-pandemic winners in the commercial real estate space.

• Values of warehouses and factory space jumped 17% this past month, according to real estate tracker Green Street. This particular sector is 41% above pre-pandemic levels — the best performance of any commercial niche.
• Since January 2021, the national median rent has increased 13.8 percent (#vanlife, here we come). For context, rent growth from January to August averaged 3.6 percent from 2017-2019.

🎁 The Treasury Department blacklisted a Russian cryptocurrency exchange named SUEX yesterday for allegedly helping launder ransomware payments, marking the first sanctions ever issued against an exchange.

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, flanked by wife Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau, delivering his victory speech; Image: Andrej Ivanov/AFP

• Preliminary results show the Liberals leading in 158 electoral districts - short of the 170 needed for a majority in Parliament - compared to 119 seats for the second-place Conservative Party (based on 98% of polls reporting).

📜 Background… Canadians do not vote for a prime minister. Instead, they vote for a member of Parliament (MP), who belongs to a federal party and represents their local district in the House of Commons.

• Under Canada’s parliamentary system, the prime minister must retain the confidence of a majority of MPs to continue governing.
• In practice, the PM is typically the leader of the party with the most MPs in the House of Commons, whether they make up a majority or just a plurality.

🤔 Why was the election called ?... While he never explicitly said so in public, experts and analysts agree Trudeau called the vote so his Liberal Party could try to regain a parliamentary majority they lost in 2019.

• In a majority government, the ruling party can quickly pass legislation through the House with little or no dissent, compared to a minority government where the ruling party can only pass legislation if it cooperates with opposition parties.

👁️ Looking ahead…The individual results from Monday's federal election will be finalized later today.

• They are widely considered a setback for Trudeau & Co., who will have to continue relying on the support of other political parties to implement their legislative agenda going forward.

🎁 The 2022 Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings were published yesterday.

🚰 I’ll Drink To That

The Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University; Image: IIT(BHU)

Hexavalent chromium is a heavy metal ion that can cause several types of health problems in humans, including various types of cancers, kidney and liver malfunctioning, infertility, and more.

• According to India’s Ministry of Water Resources, 239 million people across 153 districts in 21 states drink water containing high levels of toxic metals – nearly one-fifth of the country’s population.

🦠 Bacteria breakthrough… Dr Vishal Mishra and his PhD student Veer Singh discovered a new strain of bacteria that is able to absorb and tolerate high levels of hexavalent chromium and showed a fast growth rate in pools of water containing the heavy metal.

• Treating bacteria-laden wastewater is much less expensive and toxic than dealing with heavy metals, since it doesn’t involve costly equipment or chemicals.
• Dr. Mishra said the newly identified bacterial strain is “very advantageous” because there is no need to separate the hexavalent chromium after removing the bacteria from the wastewater.

Caterina (left) and Melissa (right) with their mothers; Image: Facebook

Caterina Alagna and Melissa Fodera were born fifteen minutes apart on New Years Eve, 1998.

• In the midst of New Years celebrations, the infants were quickly bathed and sent on their way, the nurses unaware of a major mixup.

It wasn’t until three years later that Melissa’s mother ran into Caterina at the girls’ school and just couldn’t shake how much she looked like her own children.

⏩ Then, the wheels started turning… Fifteen days and a DNA test later, the families were shocked to discover that the girls were indeed swapped at birth.

• The families decided it was best to raise the girls together, even moving into the same home for a time to help them adjust.
• Now 23-years-old, the girls “are more like twins than sisters. There is a kind of love which binds the two families.”

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, what percentage of the world's population has black or brown hair ?

A) 50%
B) 66%
C) 75%
D) 90%

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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D) 90%

It's estimated that 90% of the global population has black or brown hair. Hair color depends on the type and amount of melanin present, which is determined by a wide range of different genes.