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Good morning and welcome to Monday.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.42 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.40 minutes.)
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"Everyone must choose one of two pains: The pain of discipline or the pain of regret."
–Jim Rohn (1930-2009)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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Tragedy On the Set of ‘Rust’
 Image: Jim Weber, The New Mexican
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🎁 News broke late Thursday night that actor Alec Baldwin, while filming a Western titled Rust, had discharged a prop gun on set in New Mexico, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza.
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📝 More details emerged over the weekend…
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A camera crew for the movie walked off the job hours before the shooting to protest conditions and production issues that included concerns about gun safety. Earlier in the week, Baldwin’s stunt double accidentally fired two live rounds after being told the gun was ‘cold.’
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An assistant director, Dave Halls, grabbed the prop gun off a cart and handed it to Baldwin right before the shooting, incorrectly yelling “cold gun.” When Baldwin pulled the trigger, he unwittingly killed Hutchins and wounded Souza, who was standing behind her inside a wooden, chapel-like building.
📅 Zoom out: To make scenes more realistic, movies sometimes use real weapons loaded with blanks, which are gunpowder charges without a bullet intended to produce a flash and a bang. Both live rounds and blanks have been fatal on set in the past.
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In 1984, actor Jon-Erik Hexum died on the set of Cover Up, and in 1993, Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee’s son, died during the filming of The Crow because a bullet was in a gun that was supposed to contain a blank.
👁 Looking ahead… Production has been halted on the movie and police are investigating the incident. No charges have been filed yet.
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🐘 Are Elephants Losing Their Tusks ?
 Image: Elephant Voices
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🎁 Severe ivory poaching in parts of Mozambique has led to the evolution of tuskless elephants, a new study published in Science suggests.
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- Quick context: Just like eye color in humans, tusklessness in elephants is genetic. In well-protected populations, it can be as low as 2%, the NY Times reports.
🤔 Why it’s important: While we usually think of natural selection as something that happens over a period of hundreds (or thousands) of years, elephant genetics in the region changed over a period of ~15 years – and it was almost exclusively caused by humans.
📙 The story… Mozambique underwent a bloody civil war from 1977 to 1992, during which fighters on both sides slaughtered elephants for ivory to finance war efforts. Around 90 percent of elephants in what’s now Gorongosa National Park were killed.
- The survivors were likely to share a key characteristic: tusklessness. After the war, half the females were naturally tuskless; before the war that number was under 20%.
- The reason is pretty clear, too, at least according to models put together by the researchers. Tuskless elephants were 5x more likely to survive the war than tusked elephants.
- Another interesting find: Tusklessness seems to be a dominant trait carried by females that’s lethal to males. In other words, if a female elephant has a son, there’s a 50-50 chance he’ll have tusks – but if he lacks tusks, he’ll most likely die before birth.
🌍 Zoom out: Elephant populations in Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya have also seen a disproportionately large number of tuskless females after intense poaching.
👁️ Looking ahead… Researchers are now studying what more tuskless elephants mean for the species. Tusks allow the animals to dig for water, strip bark for food, and joust with other elephants.
- A preliminary analysis suggests the Gorongosa elephants are shifting their diet since they can’t peel bark from trees.
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
 Image: Zack Clothier/Natural History Museum
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☝️ One of the pics from the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Here’s the rest.
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💰 The U.S. budget deficit for the 2021 fiscal year was $2.77 trillion, the second-highest on record (2020 beat it by $360 billion).
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🎤 BTS signed a distribution and marketing deal with Universal Music Group, ending its agreement with Sony's Columbia Records.
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🏦 Evergrande made an overdue ~$80 million bond interest payment days before the end of its grace period, the state-run Securities Times reported Friday.
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💉 Vaccines: Pfizer said its vaccine is almost 91% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID infections in 5- to 11-year-olds; on the same day, an FDA panel released an analysis ahead of its Tuesday meeting concluding the protection offered to children between the ages of 5 and 11 “would clearly outweigh” the risk of myocarditis, a heart-related side effect, that the vaccine appears to cause.
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⚖️ Following a petition from the DOJ, the Supreme Court on Friday agreed to review a controversial Texas abortion law on November 1 but refused to block its enforcement. (From the Left | From the Right | The 360° View on Texas’ law)
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… “This is the biggest blow against drug trafficking in our country this century… [It’s] only comparable to the fall of Pablo Escobar in the 1990s.” – Colombian president Iván Duque on the capture of drug lord Dairo Antonio Úsuga in a jungle raid.
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It’s TBD on whether the irony about dealing a blow to a blow dealer was intended.
🔢 Stat of the Day: Domestic box office sales (the U.S. and Canada) reached $2.84B as of mid-October, outpacing 2020's entire total of $2.2B. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though: they're still 70% below 2019's total of $11.4B.
📖 Worth Your Time… My Father, the Hitman
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
🦠 Coronavirus Research in Wuhan
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 Image: Yomiuri Shimbun/AP
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🎁 In a letter sent to House Republicans last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealed that experiments funded through U.S. nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018 had the “unexpected result” of creating a coronavirus that was more infectious in mice.
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🤔 Why it matters: Over the past months, some congressional Republicans have accused top U.S. health officials of misleading lawmakers by testifying that the NIH doesn’t fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, where the COVID-19 pandemic originated.
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Gain-of-function (GOF) research is research that genetically alters an organism – in this case, a virus – in a way that enhances its biological functions, such as transmissibility or the types of hosts it can infect. In virology, it’s usually employed to better understand current and future pandemics.
🤿 A deeper dive… In the letter to Congress – which doesn’t explicitly mention GOF research – the NIH said it approved funding for EcoHealth’s project since it didn’t involve “enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential,” as the coronaviruses in the experiment weren’t known to infect humans.
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But, as an additional layer of oversight, the NIH said it added language to the terms of the grant requiring EcoHealth to inform them “immediately” if their experiments produced certain unexpected results, like an increase in virus growth (which ended up happening).
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According to the NIH, EcoHealth “failed to report this finding right away.” However, EcoHealth claims it reported the data “as soon as we were made aware” in April 2018 and that after reviewing the data, the NIH “did not indicate that secondary review of our research was required.”
💬 Important to note: “The naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.” –NIH Director Francis Collins.
📝 The bottom line… Nearly two years after the first reported case, the origins of COVID-19 remain a mystery.
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There’s still no smoking gun in favor of either of the two main theories — that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in animals before spreading to people, or that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – but this news has reignited the debate.
+Bonus: This month, Science magazine convened a roundtable featuring scientists from both sides of the issue.
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🗓 This Weekend in Sports & Entertainment
We’re trying something new this week where we recap a few key storylines from the weekend.
🏈 Over the top: Unranked Illinois defeated No. 7 Penn State 20-18 on Saturday in a game featuring a record nine – yes, nine – overtime periods (Note: The NCAA transitioned to new rules this year where teams alternate two-point attempts starting with the 3rd OT). Here's what else happened in college football.
🍿 Dune is doin’ pretty good: Timothée Chalamet-led Dune brought in over $40 million at the North American box office this past weekend, a record-high for a film debuting simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max. It’s the first chapter in an expected two-part saga, though Warner Bros. has not yet greenlit the sequel.
⚾ The stage is set: The 2021 World Series will feature two former National League rivals – the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves. The ’Stros are in the World Series for the third time in five years (including a cheating scandal in 2017) while the Braves are in their first World Series since ‘99. Also, Taco Bell’s Steal a Base, Steal a Taco promotion is back.
+Bonus: The NBA published its list of the 75 greatest basketball players of all time to mark its 75th anniversary.
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🔭 The Week Ahead
Get ready for a lot more Facebook news: Seventeen news orgs have combined to release The Facebook Papers, a series of stories based on the thousands of pages of internal company documents obtained by Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower.
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Monday: National Greasy Foods Day
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Tuesday: FDA advisory panel will discuss whether to recommend Pfizer’s vaccine for 5-11 year olds; the World Series starts
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Wednesday: Rent the Runway starts trading on the Nasdaq
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Thursday: Q3 GDP numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis
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Friday: President Biden meets with Pope Francis at the Vatican
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🚗 On The Fly
 Image: Xpeng
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🎁 HT Aero, an affiliate of Chinese EV-maker Xpeng, unveiled a new flying car that can also drive on roads.
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The company said the vehicle will have a lightweight design and a rotor that folds away, allowing seamless transition between air and ground travel.
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The announcement comes less than a week after HT Aero raised more than $500 million from outside investors to put towards research and development.
👁️ Looking ahead: HT Aero is planning for an official rollout of the flying and driving vehicle in 2024.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
👑 Pageant Queen Pays It Forward
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 Images: Google
After winning the Miss America Pageant 1958, Marilyn Van Derbur spent the next sixty-three years as a TV host and public figure.
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Even with a successful career under her belt, to this day she cherishes her one-of-a-kind sparkling Miss America crown and jeweled bracelet more than anything else.
🏆 Eyes on the prize… Now, in an effort to raise funds for teachers in her home state of Colorado, Marilyn is auctioning off her prized possessions.
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Opening the bid at $20,000 for the set, Marilyn ensured 100% of the money raised will “go directly to teachers, for whatever use in their lives they see fit."
+Correction: On Friday, we mistakenly wrote that Julius Caesar the turtle took a flight from Europe to Spain. We meant to say he was on a flight across Europe to Spain. Thanks to Amy R. for being the first to point this out !
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
👻 Spooky Season
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What is the most popular Halloween costume this year ? (Per Google Trends data)
A) Pirate
B) Witch
C) Spider-Man
D) Dinosaur
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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🍩 We think you should 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. 
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Ambassador Rewards and Progress → |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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B) Witch
The top-ranked costume in America this year is a witch, according to Google Data trends on Frightgeist.
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