Good morning and welcome to Thursday. We've got a jam-packed newsletter for you today, so let's get right to it.

Some things you'll know after reading this email:

•  ❄️🕵️‍♀️ How Disney's animation unit helped solve a cold case
• 🦠🌏 The Black Death's exact point of origin
• 🏦📈 What happens after the Fed's interest-rate hike

... and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today's news takes 4.72 minutes to read.

"Success is built sequentially. It's one thing at a time."

–Gary W. Keller (b.1957)

The Federal Reserve approved a 0.75% increase in interest rates on Wednesday, the largest single bump since 1994. The benchmark funds rate is now 1.5–1.75%, the highest it's been at any point during the pandemic, after starting the year at near-zero.

🏦 More deets... Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank expects to raise rates by another 0.5–0.75% after its next meeting in July in an effort to tame inflation, which increased at its highest annual rate in over four decades last month.

• The decision to continue raising interest rates affects borrowing costs throughout the entire US economy. You can expect to see higher rates on mortgages, credit cards, student loans, saving accounts, corporate debt and more; how much those rates increase will depend on how investors, businesses and households respond.
• Case in point: the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate has risen over three-quarters of a percentage point since last week, reaching 6.28% on Tuesday after starting the year at 3.25%, per Mortgage News Daily.

👀 Looking ahead... The Fed is expected to raise rates four more times, forecasting a range of 3.25% to 3.5% by the end of the year, which would be highest since 2008.

🧠 In the know: Higher interest rates usually lead to slower (or negative) growth for stocks because it reduces the value investors place on their future earnings. Generally speaking, fixed-income assets like bonds gain a boost in attractiveness compared to riskier assets like stocks.

+Dig deeper: What exactly is the role of the Federal Reserve?

Elon Musk will address Twitter employees for the first time at a virtual all-hands meeting later today, during which he’ll field questions from the company he’s in the process of buying, per CEO Parag Agwal.

💰🐦 Let's back up... In late April, Twitter agreed to Musk’s proposal to take the company private at $54.20 per share (aka $44 billion) after he declined their offer for a board seat.

• Weeks later, Musk said the deal was on hold over concerns about the company inaccurately reporting the number of spam accounts on its platform; most recently, Musk earlier this month threatened to pull out of the transaction entirely.
• Twitter’s board responded by saying it planned to enforce the merger. Days later, the company also agreed to give Musk access to the its “firehose” of data, meaning all 500+ million daily tweets and basic info about the accounts and devices they tweet from.

📸 The big picture: Musk has said in tweets, regulatory filings and interviews that he would make a number of changes to Twitter upon buying it, including offering longer character limits, creating an edit button, and reversing all permanent user bans (including the one on former President Trump).

🇺🇦 The battle for eastern Ukraine rages on. Fighting reportedly remains fierce in Severodonetsk, the epicenter of conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Russian forces are believed to control about 80% of the city, which was fully cut off from the outside earlier this week after its last bridge was destroyed. Ukraine’s military is suffering up to 1,000 casualties per day in Donbas, a top official said yesterday, which is a roughly five-fold increase compared to two weeks ago.

🗣️ French, Chinese leaders suggest peace talks. Chinese President Xi Jinping re-emphasized support for Moscow yesterday in a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but said both parties should push for an “appropriate settlement” of the ongoing conflict. Newly reelected French President Emmanuel Macron said yesterday that while he hopes Ukraine wins the fighting, “at some point the gunfire will have to cease and talks will have to resume.”

💰🪖 US and allies commit to more support for Ukraine. President Biden announced $1 billion in new military assistance for Ukraine yesterday, along with $225 million in humanitarian aid. In addition, NATO members and other US allies pledged new weapons and military systems to Ukraine at a meeting held in Brussels.

🍎 You’re not alone, and there are many reasons why…

It can be about money; maybe your personal and career goals changed and no longer align. Or sometimes, our dream job just isn’t what we thought it would be.😕

Whatever your reason is, change is scary. And the longer you wait, the riskier that change feels. So instead of taking the plunge, we continue working jobs we don’t love and wonder "what if" instead.😬

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Find your forever job today with Prowess Project.

A group of European researchers has purportedly discovered the origin of the Black Death (aka bubonic plague), one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, according to a new peer-reviewed study published in Nature.

🦠 Background: The Black Death is caused by a bacterium carried by fleas living on rodents in every country except Australia, though the disease is considered harmless nowadays due to improved hygiene and antibiotics.

• It was responsible for an outbreak in the mid-14th century that killed an estimated 30% of Europe’s entire population, including ~70% of England's, though the source of that outbreak has remained unknown… until now.

🪦🪦 Here’s how it went down… Several years ago, scientists came across records from two 14th-century cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan with an unusually high number of tombstones, all roughly dated to a decade before the start of the Black Death pandemic. Ten explicitly referenced a pestilence.

• To determine whether the plague could've been the cause of death, researchers tracked down several remains from the cemetery, which had been moved to Russia.
• After sequencing DNA from seven people whose remains were recovered, they discovered three of them had been infected with a direct ancestor of the Black Death.
• The region occupied a prominent position along the ancient Silk Road trading routes, which most likely facilitated the spread of the disease.

• ☝️ The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission just published the largest, most accurate, most detailed maps of the Milky Way galaxy ever made; the different maps each represent Gaia’s four key types of measurements: 1) radial velocity; 2) radial velocity and proper motion; 3) interstellar dust; 4) chemical composition.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🏘️📈 Total US home equity increased almost 20% in the first quarter to an all-time high of $27.8 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.
• 🚜 Caterpillar is moving its global HQ from Peoria, IL, to Dallas, TX.
• 🤖🚘 Automakers reported nearly 400 crashes of vehicles with Level 2 autonomous driving systems from July 2021 to May 2022, including 273 involving Teslas, according to statistics released Wednesday by US safety regulators. (Background from the DONUT)

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🔺🟥🔴 Netflix is recruiting for a new reality TV show inspired by Squid Game; 456 contestants from around the world will play games for the chance at $4.56 million, the biggest cash prize in TV history. (And presumably, the stakes won’t be life or death.)
• 🍿 Top Gun: Maverick officially passed Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as the highest-grossing movie in the US this year; with $401+ million in ticket sales, it’s now the No. 2 domestic film of the pandemic era behind Spiderman: No Way Home ($573 million).
• 🏒 Stanley Cup Finals: The Colorado Avalanche defeated the Tampa Bay Lightning 4-3 in overtime last night, taking a 1-0 series lead.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🛸🔭 China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by state-run media that appears to have since been deleted.
• 🐘 Using a 13,000-year-old tusk, US researchers were able to detail the life and grisly death of Fred the mastodon, who lived in the Great Lakes area and died in battle with a fellow mastodon, per a new peer-reviewed study.
• 🦭 Seals use their whiskers to sense vibrations underwater and track their prey in the deep ocean, according to new peer-reviewed research.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🌏 Visualizing the coming shift in global economic power.
• 🌐 Firefox rolled out Total Cookie Protection by default to all Firefox users worldwide on Tuesday; it confines cookies to the site where they were created, preventing companies from using the cookies to track users across sites.
• 🇺🇸📈 US abortions increased between 2017 and 2020, ending a decades-long declining trend, according to new research from abortion rights policy group the Guttmacher Institute. (From the Left | From the Right)

💬 Quoted… “100% based on greater fool theory… I’m not involved in that.”

Bill Gates is apparently not a big fan of crypto or NFTs. 

• The world’s fourth-richest man was referring to the idea that overvalued assets (i.e., crypto) will still go up in price if enough investors are willing to pay more for them, aka people who believe ‘there’s always a greater fool’ than themselves… until there isn’t.

🇵🇸 Stat of the Day: 80% of children in the Gaza Strip suffer from depression, up from 55% four years ago, per a new study from UK nonprofit Save the Children; nearly half of the ~2 million Palestinians living in Gaza are children.

🤯 Did You Know?... Snow animation code from the Disney movie Frozen was recently used to help solve a 1959 cold case involving the mysterious deaths of nine Russian hikers.

📖 Worth a Read: A Crypto Project that Promises 300,000% Returns → (Axios)

🤖 It already exists today (22%): “AI has come such a long way in recent years to the point where its own engineers do not understand AI programming. In other words, the creators do not know what they have created, so why rule out the possibility that AI is sentient if we truly don't know what is going on?”

✋ Less than 5 years (18%): “The hardest part is defining consciousness/sentience. I really like the list of 5 challenges Ernie Davis and Gary Marcus came up with to counter Elon Musk on the question, and I think AI will easily be able to do these things in another 5 years.”

✋✋ 5–10 years (11%): “Science and discovery increase in an exponential pattern. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ll develop it sooner rather than later, but we still have a few years before becoming that technologically advanced.”

⏳ 10–20 years (5%): “Alexa, where’s my phone?”

⌛ 20+ years (13%): “Emotions will be very difficult to master. So will instilling common sense. 20+ years seems appropriate given our current state of technology. ”

❌ It’ll never happen (31%): “I genuinely don’t believe that computers and robots could TRULY feel, not just mimic feeling. I think scientists are creating increasingly advanced programming and machinery meant to imitate real life, but at the end of the day it’s all manufactured and man-made, not really ‘real.’”

+Note on sample size: We received 10,256 responses.👏🥳 Some may have been lightly edited for grammar or clarity.

BONUS QUESTION: Who actually has their read receipts on?

• 🙋‍♀️ On: 19%
• 🙅‍♀️ Off: 81%

A team of archaeologists recently uncovered a 3,400-year-old Mittani Empire city once located on the Tigris River. They believe it could be Zakhiku, a major center of the empire from 1550 B.C. to 1350 B.C.

🤯🌊 A real-life Atlantis... The city had been submerged underwater for decades, but a recent drought in Iraq meant water levels dropped low enough to uncover the ruins. 

• The archaeologists had to work quickly, as they had no idea when water levels would rise again. 
• Thankfully, they were able to map out the entire ancient city and excavate some well-preserved artifacts before their time ran out.

🗯 What they're saying: “It is close to a miracle that [the artifacts] survived so many decades under water,” per one of the expedition's lead archaeologists. 

☝️ Can you name this river? Hint: It’s considered the world’s second-longest.

(keep scrolling for the answer)

👆 Check out the referral prizes you can get just for introducing people you know to little old us. 

What to do: Copy your unique link below, then send it to anyone you think would like the DONUT.

Don't be in denial: it's the Nile