Good morning and welcome to Thursday. On today’s docket:

• The Supreme Court has some big news
• Super Bowl ads aren’t getting any cheaper
• And can you write a #1 hit in gibberish?

⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today's news takes 3.37 minutes to read. Then it’s the fun stuff.

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

–Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

⚖️ Justice Stephen Breyer will step down from the Supreme Court when the current term ends, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer confirmed yesterday. Breyer, 83, was appointed to the high court by President Clinton in 1994 and is currently its oldest member.

• A moderate liberal, he "wrote many of the court's legally important but less glamorous decisions and sought, behind the scenes, to build consensus for centrist decisions on a conservative court," NPR reports.
• Breyer's departure is expected over the summer and won’t change the Court’s 6-3 conservative advantage, as his replacement will be nominated by President Biden and almost certainly confirmed by the Democrat-led Senate.
• Democrats will likely act quickly to ensure the nominee is in place when the Court's new term begins on October 3. Biden previously promised on the campaign trail to nominate a Black woman to the Court.

+Fun fact: Breyer’s 87-9 confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1994 was the last one with fewer than 10 dissenting votes.

+Crystal ball: See the short-list of replacement candidates.

+Go deeper: From the Left | From the Right

🐸 Scientists at Tufts University managed to successfully trigger the regrowth of legs in adult frogs, according to a study published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, describing it as a "step closer to the goal of regenerative medicine."

• The leg regrowth was aided by a silicone wearable bioreactor called a BioDome, which was used to administer a special five-drug cocktail within the first 24 hours of amputation.
• After 18 months, the regenerated limb was almost fully functional, growing several toes but lacking the webbing between them.
• The team said the fact that only a brief exposure to the drugs resulted in a months-long regrowing process suggests that frogs – and perhaps other animals – have dormant regenerative capabilities that can be triggered into action.
• "I think the way to really achieve regenerative medicine is to exploit the collective intelligence of the body's cells. They already know how to build all of these organs. They did it during embryonic development. All that information is still there," study author Michael Levin told CNN.

+First time’s the charm?... The cocktail was the team’s first try at synthesizing the right combination of ingredients and doses.

🏦 The Federal Reserve held short-term interest rates near zero following the conclusion of its two-day meeting yesterday, but signaled it intends to increase rates starting in mid-March to combat rising inflation.

• It would be the first such increase since December 2018. Economists project the central bank will raise short-term interest rates by a quarter-percentage point at least four times this year.
• The Fed cut short-term rates to near zero and started buying bonds to lower long-term rates in early 2020 as the pandemic began to impact the US economy.
• The central bank previously said it'll wait to raise short-term rates until its bond-buying measures wind down entirely in March.
• Officials spent much of this week’s meeting debating how and when to shrink its $9 trillion balance sheet, which has nearly doubled since the pandemic began.

+Market update: Stocks fell slightly following the Fed’s announcement to close at roughly even for the day.

Everyone loves a good bonfire. Between sharing stories and roasting marshmallows, it’s a great way to make memories with the family.

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🚀🌕 An old SpaceX rocket is set to crash into the Moon in less than two months, according to astronomer Bill Gray. It would be the first time in history a piece of space hardware unintentionally strikes the Moon.

• In a blog post, Gray said the space junk had "made a close lunar flyby on January 5" but is set for "a certain impact at March 4."
• The Falcon 9 booster was launched in February 2015 as part of the company’s first interstellar mission to send a climate observation satellite ~930,000 miles away.
• But the rocket didn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth after the long burn, so it's been hurtling around space in a “chaotic orbit” ever since.
• Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told ABC News the collision is nothing to worry about: “We used to do it deliberately back in the days of Project Apollo to actually do scientific experiments… and that didn't do any damage to the moon.”

+More lunar news: Japanese firm ispace announced plans to launch a private Moon lander by the end of this year. If successful, it would be the first intact lunar landing by a Japanese spacecraft.

+Go deeper: Space Junk Keeps Piling Up

💬 Quoted… “[Prince Andrew] hereby demands a trial by jury on all causes of action asserted in the complaint."

• Context: The Duke of York formally responded to a lawsuit accusing him of sexually abusing a teen decades ago by broadly denying the allegations.

📊 Stat of the day… The average price for a 30-second Super Bowl ad slot this year is $6.5 million, up more than 18%.

🤯 Did you know?… The US stock market – specifically, the S&P 500 – has turned $1 into ~$750,000 over the last 150 years. 

• For context, today’s prices are ~23x higher than they were back then.

📖 Worth a read… ​​The finely pressed, death-defying world of extreme ironing → (MEL Magazine)

• 👆 A winter storm with the intensity of a hurricane is expected to hit major Northeastern cities this weekend.
• 👸❄️ Mattel won back the rights to produce toys based on Disney princesses and Frozen characters from rival Hasbro, who first took them over from Mattel back in 2016.
• 📺 Amy Schneider's historic Jeopardy! run has ended; she racked up 40 wins (the second-longest streak in show history) and won almost $1.4 million in prize money. 
• 📈 Tesla reported a record quarterly profit and its first back-to-back profitable years since being founded in 2003.
• 🔫 San Jose, CA, became the first major US city to require gun owners to pay an annual fee and carry liability insurance; pro-2nd Amendment organizations have pledged to sue in response to the new rules. (From the Left | From the Right)

+Update from yesterday: Neil Young’s music has now been removed from Spotify.

Under any circumstances – “The government has no business controlling what a woman does with her body, especially when such a decision will so drastically alter the course of her life and those closest to her.”

Under most circumstances – “There are so many women who find themselves in unimaginable and difficult situations where I think they should be able to decide for themselves what to do. I also think it should be kept between a patient and their health care provider.”

Under rare circumstances – “I feel it should be allowed under limited circumstances. Rape, probable death of the mother, birth defects that would most likely kill the child or cause them to have a terrible burdensome life.”

Under no circumstances – “The science is clear. Life begins at conception. A woman's right to bodily autonomy does not give her the right to have autonomy over someone else's life.”

Unsure/Other – “When I was younger, I was for abortions – “My body, my choice.” As I have grown older, my mind has changed. Now, I think abortion should only be allowed before a heart beat.”

+Sample Size: We received 5,781 responses. 👏🥳 Some may have been lightly edited for grammar or clarity.

When was the last time you checked your pesky spam folder?

📧 One person's junk... Laura Spears of Oakland County, MI, went searching for a missing email last week and instead found a message from the official state lottery website telling her she had won three million dollars.

• "I couldn't believe what I was reading," Laura shared with CNN. "So I logged in to my Lottery account to confirm the message in the email. It's all still so shocking to me that I really won!" 

She plans to share some money with her friends and family, and put the rest towards an early retirement. 

Laura also made sure to add the Michigan Lottery to her saved contacts – just in case. 😉

🎶 The year was 1974, and "Prisencolinensinainciusol”, a song by Italian musician and director Adrian Celentano with all-English lyrics, was sitting atop the charts in Italy. In fact, it was so popular that the song was also #1 in France, Germany, and Belgium.

Shoot… did we say it was in English? Well, that’s not actually correct.

The song was 100% gibberish, hogwash, nonsense – whatever you want to call it – but written to mimic the way English sounds to non-English speakers. You may have even encountered it before; the song is quite popular. It’s been featured in a Captain Morgan commercial, remixed by Benny Benassi (it actually slaps), and meme’d from here until kingdom come.

If you haven’t heard it before, give the song a listen. (And then hurry back – the story doesn’t end there.)

🤔 💬 The rest of the story… It’s been said that Celentano wanted to prove Italians would like any American song. And that could check out. Not much work went into writing the lyrics – they’re so nonsensical that my guy just went into the booth and dropped a freestyle over a looped beat.

But according to Celentano himself, the inspiration came from a different place.

• “[B]ecause I like American slang — which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian — I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate," he told podcast host Guy Raz through an interpreter.
• "And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything… I brought to light the fact that people don't communicate."

So the next time you make up lyrics singing along to a song you like (don’t lie, we’ve all been there), just imagine you’re breaking down communication barriers like Adrian Celentano.

Sometimes even nonsense can make a great point.

Who's the most-followed individual on Instagram?

A) Kylie Jenner

B) Cristiano Ronaldo

C) Selena Gomez

D) Dwayne Johnson

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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B) Cristiano Ronaldo

The Portuguese soccer player has 395 million followers, handily beating out second-place Kylie Jenner (305 million).

• Instagram itself is the most popular account overall, with 465 million followers.