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Good morning and welcome to Tuesday.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 3.83 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.14 minutes.)
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"Judge a person by their questions rather than their answers."
–Voltaire (1694-1778)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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🚫📶 Facebook and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
 Image: Giphy
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🎁 Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, & Oculus VR were all completely down for more than six hours yesterday.
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Inside Facebook, the outage broke nearly all of the internal systems employees use to communicate and work, effectively creating a “snow day”… except for the engineers dispatched to the company’s data centers to try and fix the problem, of course.
🤔 What happened ?… While the root cause isn’t immediately clear, the issue appears to be related to a misconfiguration of Facebook’s DNS (domain name system) records.
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To provide a rough analogy, the DNS looks up the website’s phone number in the phonebook and then gives it to the computer to call – so what happened yesterday was the equivalent of ripping the page containing Facebook’s phone number from the phonebook.
📉 Zoom out: The outage came one day after the airing of a 60 Minutes interview with the whistleblower who leaked private internal research to both The Wall Street Journal and Congress revealing that Facebook executives prioritized user engagement over safety. The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, testifies before Congress today.
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The company’s shares were down ~5% yesterday amid a broader tech selloff, the stock's worst performance all year.
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🧠 Hold Your Head Up
 Sarah using a magnet to download her brain activity from an implant; Image: Ruth Fremson/NYT
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🎁 A patient named Sarah who suffered for years with severe and untreatable depression found her condition was cured with an experimental brain implant originally developed to help people with epilepsy.
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Results from the proof-of-concept trial were published yesterday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Medicine.
⚡ How it works… Researchers at UC San Francisco surgically implanted a battery-operated, matchbook-sized device in Sarah’s brain.
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This “pacemaker for the brain” is calibrated to detect the neural activity pattern that occurs when she's becoming depressed and deliver pulses of electrical stimulation to stave off those patterns.
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Just twelve days after Sarah’s device became operational, her score on a standard depression scale dropped from 33 to 14, and several months later it fell below 10 (essentially signaling remission).
📝 The bottom line… The highly-personalized treatment still requires years of research to develop into anything that might be useful to the wider public, but it offers some hope for those currently experiencing treatment-resistant depression.
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
 Image: Ringo H.W. Chiu/APe
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☝️ The oil spill off the coast of Southern California was tentatively identified as coming from a ruptured underwater pipeline; the CEO of Amplify Energy, whose equipment was involved, said yesterday it appears active leakage has ended.
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🌡️ The South Pole had its most severe cold season on record.
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🏢 Ozy Media CEO Carlos Watson is planning to relaunch the company, but didn't give many details.
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🎤 Billie Eilish will become the Glastonbury festival's youngest solo headliner in its history when she performs there in 2022.
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🇰🇵🇰🇷 North Korea & South Korea reactivated the hotlines that had gone cold for several months and twice-daily communication between the powers has resumed.
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🏁🏆 Bubba Wallace became the first Black driver to win a NASCAR Cup Series race since 1963.
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… "I’ve heard about space for a long time now. I’m taking the opportunity to see it for myself." –William Shatner, the 90-year-old actor who previously played Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, will become the oldest person to fly to the final frontier when he boards a Blue Origin tourist spaceflight next Tuesday.
🔢 Stat of the Day: Americans check their phones 96 times per day – or once every ten minutes – according to new research by global tech care company Asurion.
📖 Worth Your Time… Chernobyl — How It Happened
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
📝 The Pandora Papers
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 Image: Doug Chayka
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🎁 A new trove of leaked financial documents known as the "Pandora Papers" detail how hundreds of billionaires, world leaders, and celebrities from around the world use offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes on assets collectively worth trillions of dollars.
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Together they represent one of the biggest leaks of financial information in history, totaling nearly 3 terabytes worth of data (~12 million files).
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Due to the enormous amount of material, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) enlisted the help of 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries to craft Sunday’s report.
🤿 A deeper dive… The Pandora Papers are a sequel to the 2016 Panama Papers, which contained records leaked from a defunct offshore law firm.
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In a major step up from previous disclosures, Sunday’s report drew upon records from 14 offshore financial services providers.
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They detail how more than 330 politicians and 130 Forbes billionaires - as well as celebrities, drug dealers, royal family members, and leaders of religious groups - use offshore havens to buy property and hide assets from tax enforcement agencies.
🇺🇸 Closer to home... The ICIJ also researched and analyzed how these individuals use U.S. trusts to hide their investments.
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They identified more than 200 such trusts settled, or created, in the U.S from 2000 to 2019, holding assets worth a total of more than $1 billion.
👁️ Looking ahead… It’s unclear what impact these new financial revelations will have.
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A State Department spokesperson said yesterday that the federal government is currently reviewing the findings of the leaked documents, but is not in a position to comment on specifics.
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The governments of at least eight countries - Pakistan, Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Australia, Panama, & the Czech Republic - announced they will investigate those named in the Pandora Papers.
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🗳️ Once Upon A Time In Hollywood...
 Image: Giphy
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🎁 More than 98% of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) members voted to authorize an industry-wide strike, the first authorization of a nationwide strike in the union’s history.
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🎥 Why it’s a big deal: The vote means 60,000 of Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes workers, including camera operators, script coordinators, and makeup artists, could soon go on strike, halting much of movie and TV production. It'd be the first strike among behind-the-scenes workers since 1945 and far bigger than the 2007–2008 strike of 12,000 screenwriters.
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More than 115 members of Congress signed a letter last week urging the warring parties to “reach a consensus agreement” because “a strike would dramatically disrupt the industry, the economy, and the communities” the legislators represent.
📜 The backstory… The IATSE called for the vote Sept. 20, after conversations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) – which represents big studios and streaming companies – broke down. The threat of a major strike could help IATSE move the needle on:
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More pay and benefits: The union is seeking a three-year agreement that would give behind-the-scenes workers higher pay, meal breaks, improved contributions to health and pension plans, and a bigger cut of profits from streaming productions.
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Shorter workdays: 12-14 hour workdays aren’t uncommon for behind-the-scenes crew in the entertainment industry, with as little as eight hours before the next shift. New terms would require at least ten-hour “turnarounds” on back-to-back days and 54 hours on weekends.
👁️ Looking ahead… “I hope that the studios will see and understand the resolve of our members,” Matthew Loeb, president of IATSE, said in a statement yesterday. “The ball is in their court. If they want to avoid a strike, they will return to the bargaining table and make us a reasonable offer.”
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🔬 Artificial Intelligence
 Image: UCSF
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🎁 A team of scientists invented the world’s first artificial kidney, which they hope will eventually replace dialysis.
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Kidney disease is one of the top ten leading causes of death globally, outpacing both breast cancer and prostate cancer.
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Although kidney transplants are one possible treatment, hospitals always struggle to keep up with demand – plus, there’s a risk the patient's body might reject the organ.
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That leaves dialysis, which can be a complicated and burdensome process for the patient.
💡 Is there any other option ?... A public-private partnership between the Department of Health and Human Services and the American Society of Nephrology, called the Kidney Project, may have come up with a solution.
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Their implantable bioartificial kidney is engineered to sustainably support a culture of human kidney cells without provoking an immune response.
👁️ Looking ahead… “The vision for the artificial kidney is to provide patients with complete mobility and better physiological outcomes than dialysis,” said Dr. Shuvo Roy, a faculty member at UC San Francisco who led the project.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
🎂 Yulelogs’ Birthday Bash
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 Images: SLT Seal Sanctuary
Yulelogs the seal was rescued as a pup off the coast of England in 1989. Even after he was rehabilitated and eventually released back into the wild, Yulelogs ended up back in captivity – simply because he loved and relied on humans too much.
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Thirty-one years later, Yulelogs is an energetic and happy old man who loves his training sessions, and is a fan favorite at the UK’s Sea Life Trust Seal Sanctuary.
🎂 Birthday boy... It was Yulelogs' birthday last week. To celebrate, sanctuary employees made an “ice cake" topped with fish tails instead of candles.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
📺 Keep A Close Watch
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According to Nielsen, Americans watched how many minutes of The Office in 2020?
A) 9 billion
B) 24 billion
C) 41 billion
D) 57 billion
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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D) 57 billion
The NBC sitcom was streamed more than any other show in 2020, far ahead of the number two finisher (ABC's Grey’s Anatomy, with 39.5 billion minutes).
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All ten of the most-streamed series last year belonged to Netflix, though it's unlikely that will be the case for 2021 after The Office shifted to Peacock.
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