Good morning. On this day in 1986, Eddie Money released “Take Me Home Tonight,” his first hit in years following a period of poor sales, which ended up revitalizing his career.

Fun fact: Eddie actually wasn’t a fan of the song when producers first approached him. But after being persuaded, he came up with the idea to get Ronnie Spector to sing the line from the chorus referencing her 1963 hit, “Be My Baby.” Ronnie hadn’t been in the music industry for years, but when Eddie asked, she agreed – then went on to release an album the next year titled "Unfinished Business."

In today’s edition:

• 👩‍🏫 A crash-course in campaign finance
• 👩‍🔬 How the global scientific arms race is shaping up
• 🌧👃 You know the smell outside after a rainstorm? It actually has a name.

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.98 minutes to read.

“Be confident, not certain.”

–Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

The first lesson of Campaign Finance 101: elections cost money. Over the 2020 cycle, Congressional candidates spent a record $3.68 billion running for office. An additional $5 billion was spent by outside groups, and the 2022 midterms are expected to cost even more – so where does all this money come from?

☝️ First things first: Campaign financing can be broken down into two categories: “hard money” and “soft money.”

1. Hard money refers to money given directly to a political candidate, and is highly regulated by federal law. Under current rules, each American is limited to donating $2,900 per election to each federal candidate, and can’t give more than $36,500 per year to any national party commit­tee.
2. Soft money refers to campaign contributions that aren’t regulated by federal law, since they’re donated to organizations working independently of any candidate. These orgs, typically called “Super PACs,” first originated in 2010 after the Supreme Court ruled that previous laws limiting how much money corporations can independently spend on politics violated the First Amendment. (More on Super PACs here.)

📅 That brings us to the midterms… Candidates running for Congress this election cycle have received ~$2.5 billion in hard money donations so far, split roughly equally along party lines, per data from OpenSecrets.

• On the soft money side of things, more than 2,250 Super PACs have received a total of $1.49 billion in donations, spending $428 million. Of the money spent to date, OpenSecrets reports 70% went towards conservative causes, 20% went towards liberal causes, and 10% went towards “other.”

+In recent news: Last week, federal regulators approved a new proposal from Google that would make all political campaign emails exempt from GMail’s spam filter, after a study found the company’s filters disproportionately flagged Republican emails compared to Dems’.

Scotland became the first country in the world to establish a legal right for its citizens to obtain free menstrual products after new landmark legislation took effect yesterday.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 More deets… The Period Products Act, which was approved unanimously, requires all public settings – including colleges and universities – to house free items such as tampons and sanitary pads for "anyone who needs them."

• Since 2017, Scotland’s government has spent ~$33 million providing menstrual products free of charge at all education providers across the country, per the BBC.
• ​​A 2018 study found one in four school-aged women in Scotland had faced period poverty at some point in their lifetime.

🇺🇸 Closer to home: Six US states currently mandate free menstrual products in all public schools: California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, and Vermont.

• There’s also a growing campaign to eliminate taxes on menstrual products in the US. Nonprofit Period Equity estimates 26 states currently have a “tampon tax,” aka a tax treating menstrual products as non-essential items, which brings in a collective ~$120 million in annual revenue.

Since 2012, the Chinese government has been focused on shifting its economy from quantity (think: cheap, plastic toys) to quality (think: knowledge-based products and services), with a publicly-stated goal of being a global powerhouse in innovation by 2050.

And it seems to be working. According to a report by Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy published last week, China has overtaken the US in both quantity and quality of scientific research.

👩‍🔬 By the numbers… Between 2018 and 2020, 23.4% of the world's scientific papers were published in China. The US published 16.9% of the world’s papers over that same period, good for second-place.

Enough on quantity – what about quality?

• Since there’s no truly objective way to measure the quality of research studies, scientists use something called citations – essentially the social proof of the scientific community. Similar to how we lend more credence to TikToks with a lot of likes, the more a study is mentioned (“cited”) by other researchers, the more it’s assumed to be of higher-quality and have a greater impact on the field.
• Chinese research accounted for 27.2%, or 4,744, of the world's top 1% of most cited papers between 2018-2020, overtaking America at 24.9%, or 4,330. The UK came in third with 5.5%.

📸 Big picture: The quality finding is in-line with research published earlier this year, which found China overtook the US in 2019 in the top 1% measure, and passed the EU in 2015.

+Dive deeper: Overall, the US still spends more on corporate and university R&D – for now at least. The Aspen Institute released a report in July predicting China would overtake the US by 2025, though part of the recently signed CHIPS and Science Act includes $170+ billion for research funding over the next five years.

Ok, ok… we may have been laying it on a little thick when it comes to letting you know about Refind. We’ll concede that much, but the facts remain:

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Across the US, one-fifth of daily flights on average were delayed reaching their destinations in the first six months of this year. That’s up from ~11% through all of 2021.

But according to the WSJ, one state in particular has been performing poorly on the flight delay and cancellation scale, and it’s uniquely positioned to have compounding effects on air travel across the country: Florida.

🤔 What’s going on?... In plain English, people like to visit Florida – a lot, in fact. And being in the business of serving the travel needs of individuals, airlines have adapted to meet that demand. Every major airline serves Florida, and some, like Spirit, say more than a third of their flights cross its airspace (Spirit actually wants to add more flights to the state, but is currently unable to).

But bad weather, too much traffic volume, and staffing struggles have contributed to an above-average amount of delays and cancellations. Plus, there are military operations, such as flight-training exercises, and a growing number of space launches that restrict airspace for passenger flights. Private jet usage is also up.

• At a Jacksonville air-traffic-control facility, FAA data shows the largest source of delays over the first half of this year was weather, followed by volume. The state’s two air-traffic-control centers trail only Atlanta’s in the number of aircraft handled.
• And then there are staffing struggles, the third-biggest factor. 21% of the time lost to delays in Jacksonville was tied to staffing challenges; when short-staffed, control facilities close off parts of the airspace so controllers don’t become overwhelmed.

✈️ Looking ahead… In May, officials from the FAA, the airlines and trade groups met to hash out plans to improve ops in Florida. Among other steps, the FAA said it would share more information about events that could affect airspace and boost the ability of carriers to fly different routes and altitudes.

💬 Quoted…​​ “Extreme Heat Belt.”

The number of Americans exposed to ‘extreme heat’ conditions – defined as a max heat index of at least 125°F – is projected to grow from 8 million this year to 107 million over the next three decades, per a new report from nonprofit research group First Street Foundation.

💰🚘 Stat of the Day: Car companies have announced $45.9 billion worth of investments in the southern US since 2017, while Midwest states saw $39.9 billion over that same period, per a new report from nonprofit The Center for Automotive Research.

• It marks the first time the South has outpaced the Midwest for announced auto investments since at least 2010.

🌎 Around the World: Current vice president William Ruto was declared the winner of Kenya's presidential election yesterday by the country's elections chief – though protests broke out after four of seven members on its election commission resigned, disputing the result. Whoever wins will become the country's first new president in 10 years, overseeing East Africa's largest economy.

🤯 Did You Know?... The earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil (aka the smell outside after a rainstorm) is called petrichor.

📖 Worth a Read: How Amazon Consumed All of Commerce → (Gizmodo)

📊 Poll results: Yesterday, we asked whether y’all agreed with the FBI’s search of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

• 61% of y’all said yes, 21% said no, 10% said there’s still not enough info, and 8% were unsure or had a more nuanced opinion.
• When we asked the same question last week, 53% of y’all said yes, 25% said no, 18% said there’s not enough info yet, and 4% were unsure or had a different, more nuanced opinion.

See the full 360° view here.

• ☝️ Researchers discovered the remains of a previously unknown species of house cat-sized armored dinosaur in Argentina; it lived between 94 million and 97 million years ago.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🏘💰 Flow, a residential real estate startup founded by WeWork co-founder and former CEO Adam Neumann, received a $350 million investment from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz per a blog post published yesterday; the deal values the startup at $1+ billion and is the single-largest investment a16z has ever made.
• 🇨🇳 Chinese tech giants – including TikTok-owner ByteDance – have shared details of their algorithms with the country’s regulators in an “unprecedented move,” per CNBC.
• 🚫🚗 Dodge will discontinue its Charger and Challenger models at the end of next year, citing emissions reasons.
• ↩️ More than two million MamaRoo swings and RockaRoo rockers are being recalled after the strangulation death of a 10-month-old and a close call involving another child. | More than 13,000 pounds of Home Run Inn-branded frozen pizza were recalled over fears they might have been contaminated with "extraneous materials, specifically metal."

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 👻 Snapchat Plus amassed more than 1 million users in its first six weeks, the company revealed yesterday.
• 📺 Walmart and Paramount Global signed a deal to make Paramount+ available to all Walmart+ subscribers for free. | Third Point, a hedge fund, has taken a $1 billion stake in Disney and is pushing for the company to make several changes, including spinning off ESPN as a standalone network.
• 🏈 Alabama sits atop the AP's preseason Top 25 poll for the seventh time in head coach Nick Saban's 15 years as head coach; Ohio State and Georgia round out the top-three.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• ⚡️ A lightning bolt from an Oklahoma storm in 2018 may be the most powerful ever recorded, per a study published earlier this month.
• 🧲🚆 China unveiled an 800-meter experimental maglev line with permanent magnets that can keep an 88-passenger train afloat forever without a power supply.
• 👁 Eye see: An eye implant engineered from proteins in pigskin restored complete or partial sight in 14 blind people, according to a study published Thursday in peer-reviewed journal Nature Biotechnology.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🚢 A United Nations ship departed Ukraine with grain shipments for East Africa, the first UN-chartered ship to leave since the war began. | 42 countries plus the EU urged Russia to remove its military from Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on Sunday. (Background)
• 🏛️ The DOJ on Monday rebuffed efforts to make public the affidavit supporting the search warrant for former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, saying the investigation “implicates highly classified material” and the affidavit contains sensitive information about witnesses. (Background | From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)
• 💪 #jesspicks gives you weekly inspiration and resources for building your side hustle or passion project without quitting your day job. Come for the tips and stay for the music and TV show recommendations. Sign up free here.*

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Arizonan Gean LeVar and her veteran husband were together for 58 years before he passed away last January. When the police entered their home after his passing, they were forced to repossess the house due to unsafe living conditions. 

❤️ Love your neighbor... Luckily for Gean, she lived across the street from Carmen Silva and her eight children. When she fell upon homelessness, Carmen took her in without batting an eye. 

• "I've always taught my kids to take care of their elders," shared Carmen. 

The Silva family opened their home to Gean for 18 months while her house was renovated by a local organization that cares for veterans and their families. 

• Gean is back in her own home now, and says her newfound family truly "means everything." 

​​❓ Trivia: In which classic horror film franchise did Johnny Depp make his film debut?

🏛️ True or False?... The US Supreme Court Building has a private basketball court.

🐸 Riddle Me This: What's a frog’s favorite year?

(keep scrolling for the answers)

👆 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.

❓ Trivia:  A Nightmare On Elm Street

🏛️ T/F: True; it’s on the top floor and is nicknamed “The Highest Court In The Land”

🐸 Riddle: A leap year