Good morning. Welcome to February and Happy Lunar New Year! For well over 1 billion people, today marks the end of the Year of the Ox and the start of the Year of the Tiger.

On the docket:

• The Partygate report is partially out
• Average rent went up last year... way up in some areas
• And did you know the riveting history of blue jeans?

⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today's news takes 3.81 minutes to read. Then it’s the fun stuff.

"If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you."

–T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

📱 The New York Times purchased Wordle for an undisclosed amount “in the low seven figures” from creator Josh Wardle, the news org announced yesterday.

• Wardle, a software engineer living in Brooklyn, first published the hit word game on a no-frills, ad-free website in October.
• By November 1, Wordle had 90 active users – a number that soon grew to 300,000 by mid-January. Millions of people are now playing the puzzle each day, according to the Times.
• The news org said no changes would be made to Wordle gameplay – in which players have six guesses to find a secret five-letter word – but didn’t disclose whether it plans to make money by selling ads within the game.
• The Times charges $5 a month for access to its games, including its flagship crossword puzzle, Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, Tiles, and Vertex. The company said it reached 1 million game subscriptions last month and that its games were played over 500 million times in total last year.

+Zoom out: Earlier this month, the Times agreed to acquire sports-media company The Athletic for $550 million.

+Brain game: The psychology behind what makes Wordle so addicting.

🇮🇪 In a surprise turn of events, the Russian government has backed down from a plan to conduct military exercises next week in international waters off Ireland’s coast in response to protests from local fishing groups and the Irish government.

• "I'm shocked, really," the head of an Irish fishing organization told CNN shortly after the news broke. "I didn't think that little old us... would have an impact on international diplomacy."
• According to the US military, Russia and its proxies are attempting to create discord and confusion far from Ukraine as a distraction tactic. Last week, a Russian surveillance aircraft flew by hundreds of US soldiers stationed in Syria, and two Russian warships are currently closing in on an American aircraft carrier conducting exercises in the Red Sea.
• The US and its European allies accused Moscow of trying to destabilize Ukraine at a UN Security Council meeting yesterday, which Russian officials vehemently denied.
• Moscow has deployed over 100,000 troops to locations surrounding Ukraine on three sides, including the southern peninsula of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014 under similar circumstances.
• The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is nearing completion of a bipartisan bill that would implement “the mother of all sanctions” targeting major Russian banks and its citizens’ savings and pensions, among other things, if Moscow should invade Ukraine.

📝 The initial findings of a report into lockdown parties held by the UK government over the past two years found “failures of leadership and judgment” from PM Boris Johnson and others in his cabinet.

• Compiled by senior civil servant Sue Gray, the report wasn’t published in full since the most serious allegations are still being investigated by police.
• The Gray report outlined 16 social events that took place in government areas since early 2020, and said a dozen of those events are currently under investigation – including one that took place in the PM’s apartment and three that Johnson himself attended.
• After the report was made public, Johnson took the stand and apologized in a contentious two-hour Parliament session where some lawmakers within the PM’s own Conservative party called for him to resign, while others urged patience as the police do their work.
• If at least 54 Conservative MPs side against Johnson, he’ll face a vote of no-confidence in the full Parliament – and if he loses that, he’ll be ousted as prime minister.
• The most recent YouGov polling shows nearly two-thirds of Brits think Johnson should resign (62%).

+Go deeper: Labour Perspective | Conservative Perspective

😪 Getting a good night’s sleep improves our quality of life in many ways:

• Relieves stress and helps our mood.
• Makes us less likely to get sick.
• Improves mental clarity and decision-making.
• Allows us to get along better with others.
• Lowers risk of serious health issues.

🙌 Off to dreamland… If you have trouble getting enough sleep, boy-oh-boy do we have a delicious solution for you.

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Simply mix one scoop with water at night and enjoy a hot beverage packed with high-quality ingredients that restores your sleep cycle and improves your sleep quality.😴

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Get the sleep (and productivity!) you deserve

💉 The FDA gave full approval to Moderna’s vaccine for use in adults 18+, making it the second fully approved shot after Pfizer/BioNTech. Going forward, Moderna’s two-dose vaccine will be marketed as Spikevax. Here’s a quick recap of other virus-related news:

• Case counts and hospitalizations continue to decrease across the US, according to the latest data, though daily deaths remain above previous delta peaks.
• The 7-day moving average of hospitalizations has fallen for the past ~10 days and dropped below 144,000 on Sunday for the first time in nearly three weeks. The 7-day moving average of deaths fell slightly over the weekend to 2,265.
• Novavax, a Maryland-based biotech company, asked the FDA for emergency use authorization of its vaccine yesterday. Its two-dose version, which has been approved by the WHO and several countries, uses a more traditional protein-based technology compared with other authorized vaccines in the US.
• In a study published in the journal Cell, scientists identified four risk factors as potentially making someone at greater risk of developing long Covid, including Type 2 diabetes and reactivated Epstein-Barr virus.
• The CDC raised travel advisories to their highest levels for a dozen countries on Monday due to recent spikes in cases.

+Omicron 2.0 or just fearmongering?... A Danish study identified a new omicron subvariant that has rapidly become dominant in Denmark and is reportedly more contagious but less likely to be spread by vaccinated people.

💬 Quoted… "The so-called J-shaped curve of the cardiovascular disease-alcohol consumption relationship suggesting health benefits from low to moderate alcohol consumption is the biggest myth since we were told smoking was good for us."

• Context: A new peer-reviewed observational study examining over 330,000 UK alcohol consumers suggests all previous research saying that any amount of alcohol is better for your health than no alcohol at all is just flat-out wrong.

🎰 Long-shot of the day… One bettor turned a $20 site credit into a $579,020 payout after correctly guessing the scores of both NFL games in a parlay bet this weekend.

🤯 Did you know?… During the height of the Cold War, the CIA developed a top-secret ‘heart attack gun’ for assassinations that was inspired by a KGB weapon used to kill two Ukrainian anti-communists.

• The weapon shot a poison dart which completely disintegrated upon impact, leaving no trace except a tiny red dot on the skin.
• As you might expect, the official cause of death was nearly always listed as a heart attack, since the poison was designed to denature quickly and avoid detection by autopsy.

📖 Worth a peek… ​​Money Can Buy Happiness After All, According to a New Study → (Visual Capitalist)

• 👆 Swiss watchmaker Jacob & Co. created a $1.5M Bugatti Chiron watch with a tiny 16-cylinder engine inside.
• 🎮 Sony agreed to acquire video game developer Bungie – makers of Destiny and Halo up until 2010 – for $3.6 billion.
• 📈 Average US rent prices rose 14% last year to $1,877 a month, with cities like Austin, NYC, and Miami notching increases of as much as 40%, according to real estate firm Redfin.
• 💉 Moderna administered the first doses of its experimental HIV vaccine last week as part of human clinical trials.
• 👶 Rihanna and A$AP Rocky are expecting a baby.

+Markets: Despite strong gains on Monday (S&P: +1.9% | Dow: +1.2% | Nasdaq: +3.4%) US stocks closed out their worst month since March 2020.

+Update from yesterday: Joe Rogan posted a nearly 10-minute video to Instagram responding to the Spotify situation.

A whopping 91% of plastic can't be recycled, often ending up in landfills or polluting our oceans. But NY-based startup ByFusion is on a mission to change that. 

🧱 Building blocks of the future... ByFusion has successfully created "ByBlocks", which are simple 16x8x8 bricks made of plastic that are nearly as strong as cement. 

• They can be used to build bus stops, fences, retaining walls, curtain walls, and more.

♻️ The impact: Each of the company's locations has the potential to recycle 450 tons of plastic every year. 

The idea for this story came to us at a coffee shop in Ann Arbor, MI, last week. While on vacation, a couple of our team members observed that 20 out of the 27 people sitting around us were wearing blue jeans (including us).

Jeans are a $100+ billion global industry and worn by millions of people every day. But not a single member of our table knew how they originated. So we placed a bet – would anyone else in the shop know?

• Full disclosure: We didn't approach anyone with headphones in or in the middle of something (we're not monsters). So we only got 11 answers, and most of them were some variation of "no, but that'd be kinda cool to learn about."

👖 Thus, our story begins… with a twill cotton fabric originating in the 1500s. According to economics professor Michael C. Howard, denim was produced in France, Italy, and India during that time to make durable work trousers and overalls.

But the modern-day jeans we know weren't introduced in the US until the mid-1800s, when two men – one whose name has more-or-less faded into obscurity and one whose name we still know to this day – linked up to form a partnership during the Gold Rush in the American West.

The two men in question? Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss.

💡 The groundbreaking discovery… Jacob Davis was a tailor in Reno, Nevada. One day in 1871, "[a] miner's wife came up to Davis and asked him to come up with pants that could withstand some abuse," American History Museum curator Nancy Davis (no relation) told the Smithsonian.

Davis then looked at the metal fasteners he used on harnesses and other objects, and decided to place copper rivets at the places where pants usually ripped: the pockets and the crotch.

That worked like a charm. Local miners were lining up to purchase these rivet-strengthened pants, and Davis wanted to make sure no one stole his idea.

He couldn't afford the $68 necessary to obtain a patent, so he approached Levi Strauss, a dry-goods store owner who had sold him the durable "duck cloth" canvas for the pants in the first place, about a partnership.

Strauss agreed, and on May 20, 1873, the two were granted a patent for the first "official" blue jean, solidifying their early hold on a brand-new workwear category of their creation: riveted pants. The pants were dyed indigo, which is where "blue jeans" came from.

Jeans stayed extremely popular as sensible workwear until becoming more mainstream in the 1920s and 1930s (even appearing on the cover of Vogue), eventually becoming so popular as to lead 74% of a random coffee shop to adorn themselves in the pants on a given day.

And to think it all started with a tiny little rivet.

According to the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian religions, Adam and Eve's first two children were Cain and Abel. What's the name of their third child?

A) Isaac

B) Seth

C) Abraham

D) Joshua

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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B) Seth

In all three religions, Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve who was born after Abel was murdered by Cain.