Good morning and welcome to September. Ever read/written a word so much in a short span that it starts to look weird, leading you to question the spelling?

Anyways... here’s a clip of Kevin Bacon playing a crispy bacon-colored guitar while wearing “Bacon” Air Max 90s.

In today’s edition:

• 🧬 A CRISPR milestone
• 🍅👊 The world's largest food fight
• 🤖🖼️ Cashing in on AI-generated art

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.97 minutes to read.

“With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.”

–Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

Yesterday, the FDA approved a pair of updated vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna specifically tailored to the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron sub-variants. They represent the first updated shots to be authorized in the US.

💉 More deets… The Pfizer/BioNTech booster will be available to Americans 12 and older, while Moderna’s shot was cleared for people aged 18+. Neither will be offered to those who haven’t already received their first doses.

• The FDA approved both shots before human clinical testing was completed, and without the use of an advisory committee – the same approach it takes with flu shots, which are updated annually to keep up with a mutating virus.
• The pharma companies previously ran human clinical trials with a version of their booster that targets BA.1 (an earlier form of omicron), and have tested the BA.4/5 shots in animals; the FDA used this data to approve the vaccines.

👀 Looking ahead… A CDC advisory committee meets today and tomorrow to determine whether to recommend an omicron-specific booster. The agency already recommends two booster shots for Americans aged 50+, as well as vulnerable populations.

📊 Zoom out: Covid death rates across the country are near their lowest levels since the start of the pandemic. On average, about 400 Americans are dying from the disease every day.

• Nearly 95% of the US ages 16-and-up has some form of Covid immunity through a past infection, vaccine, or both, per a CDC analysis of blood donor samples.

The first trailer for Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a slasher horror film based on the beloved A.A. Milne characters, dropped yesterday – and it’s not quite as rosy as our childhood memories.

The plot revolves around Pooh and Piglet, who were forced to survive years without food as Christopher Robin grew up and forgot about them. Then, out of the blue, ‘ole Chris comes back to the Hundred Acre Wood to visit… and the “increasingly hungry and feral” Pooh and Piglet go on a rampage.

As you can probably guess, this wasn’t exactly approved by Disney. But there’s really not much they can do about it.

• As of January 1, 2022, A.A. Milne’s first Winnie-the-Pooh book is in the public domain. Meaning no licensing fees need to be paid, or creative approval garnered, if anyone wants to build upon the world or its characters. (Fun fact: Tigger wasn’t introduced until the second book, meaning he’s still protected under copyright law.)

👀 Looking ahead… we’ll probably see some other… *interesting*... takes on traditional characters over the next few years. 400,000+ works entered the public domain this past January – one of the largest amounts since the start of copyright law – including Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Felix Salten's Bambi, and Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

More popular works are on the way, too. Disney’s Steamboat Willie, which contains the first-ever appearance of Mickey Mouse, enters the public domain in 2024.

A team of Chinese scientists successfully created the world’s first mammal with fully reprogrammed genes, a mouse called Xiao Zhu or "Little Bamboo," per a new peer-reviewed study published in Science.

☝️ First things first… Chromosomes are essentially the building blocks of life. They’re long strings of DNA present in the nucleus of every cell where an organism’s entire genome is organized and stored.

• The genes held within chromosomes contain instructions that tell the organism’s cells to make certain proteins. Those proteins ultimately determine features like height, eye color, hair color, and more.

🐁🧬 Now, back to the study: The Chinese researchers used CRISPR gene-editing technology to take each single chromosome from a mouse, break it down, then reorganize it into a new combination. They did so inside a single, unique reproductive cell that was tailor-made by the team to grow into a living mouse.

👶 Big picture: The invention of CRISPR, which is cheap and easy to deploy, could potentially lead to cures for genetic-based diseases – but it’s also turned the possibility of "designer babies" into a reality.

A Chinese scientist created the first genetically-edited human babies in November 2018, altering their genomes in an attempt to resist possible future infection with HIV. Following international outcry, the scientist was sentenced to three years in prison for "illegal medical practices." He was released earlier this year.

• The incident prompted calls for a global ban on all related experiments, though some scientists predicted it could help accelerate public adoption of human gene editing.

😐 Admit it.

If it didn’t make you sick, you wouldn’t actually have cookies because you would’ve eaten all the cookie dough.

It’s okay – you’re not alone.

🍪 Introducing Edoughble... As seen on Jimmy Fallon, Edoughble is the original edible cookie dough, made with all-natural ingredients. That means no preservatives, no hormones – and they’re officially non-GMO.

• Choose from 14 delicious flavors, all made from scratch. 
• Plus, Edoughble dough-nates 5% of all proceeds to the Food Recovery Network, which is working to end US hunger.👏

😋 Treat yourself… with Edoughble's build-a-box. Select any flavors, and customize your own 2, 4, or 6 pack.

• Pro tip: Make sure to use the code DONUT15 to get 15% off.🍩

Treat yourself with Edoughble!

🇷🇺 Russia is toying with gas flows to Europe… again. Yesterday, Moscow temporarily stopped natural gas deliveries through Nord Stream 1, the pipeline through which ~35% of Europe’s Russian gas imports flow, citing maintenance issues. It also cut off all supplies to a French utility over its refusal to pay in rubles, instead of dollars or euros as stated in contracts. In recent months, Russia has decreased flows via other pipelines, as well as slashed supplies through Nord Stream 1 to just 20% of capacity. Prices have more than doubled over that period, per the Financial Times.

🇵🇰 Pakistan is still underwater. About one-third of the country is covered by floodwaters caused by a “monsoon on steroids,” per UN Secretary General António Guterres. So far, ~33 million people – or about 14% of Pakistan’s population – have been affected. More than 1,100 people have been killed. Agriculture, a mainstay of the country’s economy, per NPR, has been severely impacted; nearly half of the cotton crop in the southern Sindh province has been lost.

🇸🇦 A Saudi Arabian court sentenced a woman to 45 years in prison for “disrupting the cohesion of society” and “destabilizing the social fabric,” per a court document obtained by Democracy for the Arab World Now yesterday. And once you peel away the euphemisms, what was Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani’s offense? Social media use that “offended the public order.” Her posts/activity still remain a secret, though her sentence follows a similar 34-year prison term handed down earlier this month to Salma al-Shehab, a Saudi doctoral student at Leeds University in England, whose offense was following and retweeting dissidents and activists on Twitter.

💬 Quoted…​​ “World’s largest food fight.”

Thousands of people crammed the streets of Buñol, Spain, yesterday for the “Tomatina” – an annual festival where attendees launch overripe, squishy tomatoes at each other. The event, inspired by a food fight between local children in 1945, celebrated its 75th anniversary this year.

🪙 Stat of the Day: Crypto.com, who you may know from the LA Lakers arena or Matt Damon Super Bowl commercial, mistakenly sent a customer $7.2 million instead of a $68 refund in May 2021, per a newly published report… and didn’t uncover the mistake until seven months later.

• By that time, the recipient of the funds had already spent ~$890,526 of it on a five-bedroom home. A court has since ruled that the funds must be returned to the company, and the property sold – though the case will pick back up in October.

The lesson here? Fortune favors the bold those who pay attention.

🤯 Did You Know?... Marijuana use just passed cigarette use in the US for the first time on record. 11% of American adults report smoking nicotine cigarettes, per a Gallup poll published last week, and 16% say they smoke weed. And peep these trends:

• Cigarettes: In the mid-1950s, 45% of US adults smoked.
• Marijuana: 4% of adults reported trying weed at least once in their life in 1969. Last year, that number was 48%.

📖 Worth a Read: McLovin It: An Oral History of ‘Superbad’ → (Vanity Fair)

• ☝️ A Colorado man recently won a local art competition – and a $300 cash prize – by entering an AI-powered image that he generated using a program similar to OpenAI’s DALL·E.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 Sam’s Club raised its annual membership fee yesterday for the first time in nine years.
• 🙅‍♀️ Nvidia said yesterday that it’s been told by the US government to stop selling chips in China and Russia, jeopardizing ~$400 million in annual sales.
• 📉 Bed Bath & Beyond announced $500 million in new financing and said it plans to close 150 stores nationwide, sell more stock offerings, cut jobs, and overhaul its merchandising strategy; the company’s shares closed down over 21%.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• ⚽🎾 The New York Yankees will join a consortium of investors – including LeBron, Jimmy Iovine, and Drake – buying Italian soccer club AC Milan; the Yanks are set to own a 10% stake. | Serena Williams defeated No. 2 seed Anett Kontaveit to advance to the 3rd round of the 2022 US Open; it's likely to be the 40-year-old's last tournament.
• ⚖️🎤 Micky Dolenz, the last surviving member of The Monkees (a ‘60s-era pop band who sang “I’m A Believer,” among others), is suing the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain its files on the band.
• 🐭 ​​Disney is exploring an Amazon Prime-like membership program that would offer discounts or special perks to across its streaming services, theme parks, resorts, and merch, sources told the WSJ.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 📸👂 There’s a new way to explore some of the first full-color infrared images and data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope – through sound.
• 🪐🌳 MOXIE, a custom tool onboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, is creating as much oxygen on Mars as a small tree, per a new peer-reviewed study.
• 🇺🇸📉 Remember how 2020 was the worst year for US life expectancy since WWII? Well, the following year wasn’t much better: the average American could expect to live 76.1 years in 2021, down from 77.0 the previous year and 78.8 in 2019, per new gov’t data published yesterday.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• ☀️🥵 “A prolonged and possibly record breaking heat wave" is expected to hit much of the Western US through at least Labor Day, the National Weather Service said yesterday.
• 🚁 The US Army grounded its entire fleet of CH-47 Chinook helicopters after several engine fires broke out in recent days, officials announced yesterday.
• 📈 Support for labor unions in the US is at its highest level in 57 years (71%), per a new Gallup poll; that’s up from 64% in 2019.

Yesterday, we asked if you thought teachers should be allowed to corporally punish their students – with parental consent – when other discipline options have failed.

• 20% of y’all said yes, 69% said no, and 11% were unsure or had a more nuanced opinion.

See the full 360° view here.

We bring you the most unusual, off-the-wall and occasionally laugh-out-loud headlines from this week…

• ‘Are you kidding me?’ Goats take over deputy’s car, eat his paperwork → (WFLA)
• Winnipeg mayoral candidate gets bike stolen 85 minutes after promising to reduce bike theft → (CBC)
• Woman charged $8,000 after rental car company claims she drove 36,000 kilometres in three days
• 1 in 4 Gen Z-ers plan to become social media influencers → (The Hill)
• A Southwest pilot threatened to turn the plane around and go home if passengers didn't stop AirDropping nudes to each other → (Insider)

CROWDSOURCED

Have you ever encountered a glitch in the matrix, quirky animal behavior, or even just a hilarious first grader? Tell us about it here for a chance to be featured in next Thursday’s newsletter.

👩 Who: Eli K. from Ann Arbor, MI

💬 The experience: I've been housesitting for a pair of married friends going to a family reunion, and I swear this place is haunted. Shades are left up – or down – when they weren't before, and I can hear voices talking sometimes when I'm supposed to be alone.😨 Maybe Alexa is playing a prank on me...

P.S. Don’t forget to share your odd or hilarious experience with us here.

Meet Leo Wyatt, a kitten that just made history at the Mac Tabby Cat Cafe in Charlotte, NC. 

Mac Tabby opened in 2017, and for the past five years, they've become the 'cats meow' of Charlotte - serving up coffees, sodas, and treats, while adorable and adoptable cats wander around freely. 

• Leo Wyatt was Mac Tabby's 1,000th adoption, and the cafe has no plans on stopping any time soon. 

❤️ One cat at a time: “It takes a lot of caring humans to get each cat from where it starts to its forever home,” said owner Lori Konawalik . “We are a small part of the greater good and are thankful to be able to spread goodness into the world in the very best way, one cat at a time. One thousand... and counting.”

☝️ This country has the most natural lakes in the world. Can you name it?

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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

What to do: Copy your unique link below, then send it to anyone who you think would like the DONUT. Once you hit each milestone, you'll get an email with a link to claim your prize. (Pro tip: there's no need to ration points, you're entitled to a prize at each tier.)

Start referring.👇

Canada. (Pictured is Emerald Lake in British Columbia.)