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Good morning and welcome to National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.15 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.47 minutes.)
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be."
–Maya Angelou (1928-2014)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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A Look at the U.S. and China
 Image: UCSD
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🎁 On Friday, ride-hailing giant Didi became the first Chinese company to announce plans to delist from U.S. stock exchanges after the SEC unveiled new rules requiring all Chinese firms to submit to audits or be delisted within three years.
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While the firm was reportedly planning to delist anyways, Chinese law prohibits companies from undergoing such audit reviews. Beijing is also preparing new rules that will make it more difficult and costly for the country’s tech startups to list outside of China.
💰 Why it’s a big deal… Nearly 250 Chinese firms are listed on U.S. markets, representing over $2 trillion in market cap. They could all be forced to leave by 2024 in the absence of any future solution between Washington and Beijing.
🇺🇸🇨🇳 Zoom out: Yesterday, the U.S. announced a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in protest of ongoing human rights abuses carried out by the Chinese Communist Party. The move doesn’t prevent American athletes from competing, but means no U.S. officials will be present.
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The State Department has determined the CCP's actions against Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, which include mass internment, forced labor and forced sterilization, constitute "genocide and crimes against humanity."
+While we’re here: China is looking to establish its first permanent military presence on the Atlantic Ocean in Equatorial Guinea, a small Central African country, per the WSJ.
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Finding A Home on Garbage Island
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🎁 Scientists have documented coastal plants and animals clinging to around 90% of the plastic trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to a report published in Nature last week.
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🤔 What’s going on?... Scientists have known plants and animals could catch rides out to sea on logs and seawood. But those materials would quickly disintegrate and become a one-way ticket to nowhere.
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In this instance, the coastal marine species sailing the high seas aren’t just surviving – they’re thriving. Researchers observed that a diverse number of species have created their own self-sustaining ecosystem not unlike Margaritaville in that it sometimes involves reproducing while floating around on an island twice the size of Texas.
❓ Zoom out: Every year, at least 14 million tons of plastic garbage enter the world’s oceans, and a big question mark still remaining is the possible ecological impact plastic-clinging species could have if they land in a non-native ecosystem.
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Following the 2011 Japan tsunami, nearly 300 species landed on the shores of the Pacific Northwest aboard floating debris, according to a peer-reviewed article published in Science.
+There is a bright spot: The Ocean Cleanup has developed a device that successfully removed 20,000 pounds of trash from the Patch on its latest test run. Once deployed, organization founder Boyan Slat says ten of these devices have the potential to clean up half of the Patch in five years. The group has the goal of removing 90 percent of floating ocean plastic by 2040.
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They Don’t Call It “The Hot Stove” For Nothing
 Image: Shutterstock
💰 By the numbers...
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Thirty-seven-year-old Max Scherzer became the highest-paid MLB player ever by average annual contract value, signing a three-year contract with the Mets worth an average of $43 million per year.
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Free agents collectively signed deals worth $1.4 billion on December 1, a single-day record.
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Six players have been signed to deals of $100 million or more, the most in any season other than 2016 (seven deals). Big names like Carlos Correa, Kris Bryant, Trevor Story, and Freddie Freeman are still on the market.
⚾️ Zoom out: Last week, the MLB entered its first lockout in 27 years after owners and players failed to agree on an updated collective bargaining agreement. It’s the ninth work stoppage in league history, and may extend into the 2022 season if the two sides can’t come to an agreement.
+While we’re here: Part of baseball’s 2022 Hall of Fame class was announced over the weekend. Six players have made the cut so far, including Buck O’Neill and Gil Hodges.
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
Biden Meets Putin (Again)
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 Biden & Putin at their initial meeting in June; Image: Peter Klaunzer/Getty
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🎁 President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin are set to hold a video call today at an undisclosed time. It’ll be the second time the two have spoken face-to-face as leaders following a June summit in Geneva.
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A Kremlin spokesperson said the two main items on the agenda are Ukraine and progress on bilateral agreements made in Geneva. The White House said other topics expected to come up include "strategic stability, cyber, and regional issues."
💬 What they’re saying: “President Biden will underscore U.S. concerns with Russian military activities on the border with Ukraine and reaffirm the United States’ support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” read a White House statement.
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“Of course [the agenda] is bilateral relations, which remain in quite a lamentable state,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “And then it's the questions that loom large on the agenda. Primarily tension around Ukraine, the theme of NATO advancement towards our borders, and President Putin's initiative about security guarantees."
🪖 Zoom out: Late last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed to have audio recordings of a group of Ukrainians and Russians plotting a coup to unseat him, but his government hasn’t provided any further details since.
Today’s meeting comes days after a U.S. intelligence document obtained by WaPo showed Russia is preparing for a military offensive that could begin as soon as early next year.
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The new intelligence predicts Moscow will ultimately deploy ~175,000 troops, half of which are already positioned along various points near Ukraine’s border.
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… "It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience." – Denmark Ikea store manager Peter Elmose to Insider. Around 30 employees and customers were snowed-in recently and spent the night in model beds spread across his location.
🔢 Stat of the Day: NASA announced its new class of 10 astronaut candidates yesterday. Those 10 were chosen out of more than 12,000 applicants, a mere .083% acceptance rate.
📖 Worth a Read… 50 Years On, the Unsolved D. B. Cooper Skyjacking Is the Stuff of Legends
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
 Image: The Unicode Consortium
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☝️ This year’s most frequently used emojis, according to the Unicode Consortium.
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🚘 The SEC has opened an investigation into Tesla over a whistleblower complaint alleging the company failed to disclose fire risks associated with its solar panel equipment over several years.
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🏇 Medina Spirit, the three-year-old horse whose Kentucky Derby win was called into question after a positive drug test, died yesterday after collapsing during a workout in California.
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🌮 Jack in the Box is buying Del Taco for $575M.
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✌️ Drake has withdrawn his two Grammy nominations, per Variety; the reason for withdrawing hasn’t been specified.
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🗽 New York City will require COVID vaccines for all private-sector workers without a test option starting December 27. (From the Left | From the Right)
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🏛️ Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) will resign from Congress to become CEO of former President Trump’s new social media company starting next month; the company also disclosed that it’s the subject of a probe by the SEC and another financial regulator, FINRA. (From the Left | From the Right)
+Bonus: Stanford University launched the first class taught entirely in VR.
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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The Bots and the Bees
 C-shaped parent xenobots collect and compress loose stem cells into piles that can mature into offspring.
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🎁 The American scientists who last year created the first living robots have now developed a version that can reproduce, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS.
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🐸 Background… The living robots, called xenobots, are created from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) and are less than one millimeter wide.
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To make the xenobots, researchers scraped living stem cells from frog embryos and left them to incubate – and that’s it. There's no manipulation of genes involved.
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They were first unveiled last year after experiments showed they could be ‘programmed’ to move, work together in groups, and self-heal.
👁️ Looking ahead… The xenobots don’t have any practical applications for now, but researchers believe they could eventually be used to carry out a wide range of tasks inside the human body and in the environment.
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🤗 Dose of Positive
☎️ Wrong Number Turned Right
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 Image: ABC25
What's more frustrating – accidentally calling a wrong number repeatedly, or being the number constantly called?
- Senior Gladys Hankerson of Florida calls her sister as often as she possibly can, but with her fragile fingers, every now and then she types the area code ‘401’ instead of ‘410.’
📞 Call me maybe… On the other side of that incorrect area code is Mike Moffitt of Rhode Island. After being called multiple times by Gladys, Mike finally asked who she was and why exactly she kept calling.
- The two struck up a conversation and have talked regularly for twenty years since. Over Thanksgiving weekend, they finally met in-person for the first time when Mike surprised her at her Florida home.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
Rear-Wheel Drive
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Which of these animals can breathe through their butt?
A) Bats
B) Foxes
C) Turtles
D) Bears
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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Ambassador Rewards and Progress → |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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C) Turtles
In North America, painted turtles hibernate underwater for the winter after lowering their body temperatures and slowing their metabolism by 95 percent, but they still need some oxygen to survive.
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To remedy that, the turtles use a process called cloacal respiration where blood vessels located in their butt take up small amounts of oxygen directly from the water.
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