🥊 Rocky VI, But Make It About Space

Image: Tenor

• A Russian actress and director arrived at the ISS yesterday to begin a 12-day mission to film The Challenge, a movie about a female surgeon dispatched to the ISS on an emergency mission to save an ailing cosmonaut.

📜 The backstory… In May 2020, NASA announced its intention to work with Tom Cruise and SpaceX to film an action-adventure movie in space. Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, then announced its moviemaking ambition.

💰 Zoom out: Roscosmos has been dogged by delays, accidents, and corruption scandals in recent years, and is falling behind the U.S. and Beijing in the global space race.

• With its government funding decreasing and SpaceX’s successful launches costing Russia its monopoly for journeys to the orbital station, the agency is reviving its space tourism program to diversify revenue – and would benefit greatly from positive PR.

+What about Tom Cruise ?... Details are few and far between, but here’s what we know: the movie will be directed by Doug Liman, has a preliminary budget of $200 million, and probably involves Tom Cruise doing stunts in space… so it’s got our $10.50.

🎁 An independent study published yesterday found that priests, church employees, and volunteers within the French Catholic Church sexually abused an estimated hundreds of thousands of minors since 1950.

New Home, Who Dis ?

The housing market is booming – and whether you’re purchasing your first home, moving into a new apartment, or upgrading to a bigger place with the kiddos, how you decorate it says a lot about you.

👂 Tell me more… When it comes to designing your interior space, there are two options:

1. Hire a professional
2. Trick it out yourself (or just call your mom)

For those who choose #2, we have you and your mom’s secret weapon: Bellacor.

• With more than 200,000 choices of lighting, furniture, and decor from designer-preferred brands, a price-match guarantee, and free shipping on orders over $25, Bellacor delivers the premier consumer online shopping experience for products, styles, and price points within each category.
• And here’s the dirty little secret: remember how we said Bellacor stocks designer-preferred brands ? That means you’re buying the same brands the pros do.

🏷 Wait, this gets even better: Bellacor is currently in the midst of Bellacor Days, its blowout sale where you can save up to 80% off select items.

There’s never been a better time to redecorate living spaces/homes, aka the place where we now spend almost all of our time – and you’ll be hard-pressed to find better deals on quality stuff.

Build the perfect interior with Bellacor.

Jabin Botsford/Getty Images

📜 Background… Haugen, who spent two years working on FB’s civic misinformation team, shared a trove of internal research and communications indicating the company was aware of the ills of its platforms and lied to the public and its own investors about that knowledge.

• These documents formed the foundation of the WSJ’s Facebook Files, which we covered two weeks ago. A few days later, Facebook canceled plans to develop an Instagram app for kids under the age of 13.

🤿 A deeper dive… Yesterday’s Senate subcommittee hearing largely focused on the company's impact on children and protecting kids who use online platforms.

• Haugen told lawmakers that Facebook's Instagram app is often mentally damaging to teenage girls and can inspire them to develop eating disorders, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts.
• She also said that when given the choice, Facebook leaders often chose a path that preserved profits over the safety of its users, and blamed it on a “metrics-driven” corporate culture built by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In a statement, Facebook said it disagreed with Haugen’s characterization of the topics she testified about and that she did not work on child safety or Instagram during her <2 years at the company. Zuckerberg also released a statement.

👁️ Looking ahead… It's unclear what, if any, action will be taken legislatively, or if Zuckerberg will be called to testify in front of Congress (a request echoed by several lawmakers during the hearing).

🏆 Eyes On The Prize 🏆

Their work, which was conducted independently of each other in the late 1990s and 2000s, describes the mechanics of how humans perceive hot, cold, touch, and pressure through nerve impulses.

👁️ Looking ahead… The Nobel committee said the discoveries will be vital to the development of non-opioid painkillers and treatments for “a wide range of disease conditions, including chronic pain.”

+Extra extra… The Nobel season will continue through next Monday. The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded yesterday to three scientists "for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems," such as the Earth’s climate.

Images: USA Today

A cycle of organ transplants last week linked three different families divided across rival countries.

🎠 Take a ride on the kidney-go-round… The donation cycle began with a woman in the United Arab Emirates donating her kidney to a complete stranger – an Israeli Arab woman who was a perfect match.

• Moved by the UAE woman’s generosity, the Israeli recipient’s husband then donated his kidney to another stranger - an Israeli mother - whose daughter in turn donated her kidney to the original UAE donor’s sick mother.

Got all that ?? 😉

Water boils at what temperature (in Fahrenheit)?

A) 100º
B) 212º
C) 333º
D) 451º

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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B) 212º

The boiling point of water is 100 degrees Celsius, which translates to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.