Good morning. The ongoing drama in the chess world just got hotter. As you may remember from our previous coverage, chess world champion Magnus Carlsen cryptically accused 19-year-old grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann of cheating after losing a match to him earlier this month.

The two met for a rematch yesterday at an online event… and Carlsen resigned and disconnected his stream without explanation after his first move.

In today’s edition:

• 🍻 A craft beer shortage is brewing
• 🔭 Is the James Webb breaking science?
• 🤫 Mariah’s secret alt-rock album

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.78 minutes to read.

“One loses many laughs by not laughing at oneself.”

–Mary Engelbreit (b.1952)

+Quick note: To everyone who wrote in regarding yesterday’s Sprinkle from Jonathan Swift, we actually discovered conflicting versions of the same quote – so we chose the one that spoke to us more.

Beer snobs and garage brewmasters everywhere, prepare yourselves for disappointment this upcoming fall. Independent breweries across the world are facing a CO2 shortage – which, for the non-brewmasters, plays a critical role in many different aspects of beer production and packaging.

🍻📉 Driving the shortage… Many news orgs are pointing to natural contamination at the Jackson Dome, an underground CO2 reservoir in Mississippi originating from an extinct volcano, as the cause. But most of the CO2 used in the beer industry is a byproduct of industrial processes – not naturally occurring.

Rather, what we’re dealing with here is a simple case of demand outpacing supply, with a sprinkle of production concerns (or a lot of sprinkles, depending on who you ask).

• Enter demand, stage left: According to reports from TOP, beer consumption increased more than 50% in 2022.
• Enter supply, stage right: This exacerbated the supply of CO2, which “has remained tight since the shortages in the Spring of 2020,” per a recent report from the Brewers Association, a trade group representing smaller, independent breweries.

As for production concerns, we only need to look to Europe. Ammonia plants, which require large amounts of natural gas to run and create CO2 as a byproduct, have been scaling back operations following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. About 70% of the continent’s production capacity is shut down, per the Financial Times.

✋ Yes, but… These CO2 issues haven’t quite spread everywhere. "So far, we've been safe from it, but it is geographically-based," Fred Maier, vice president of the Susquehanna Brewing Company, located in northeastern Pennsylvania, told a local news station.

• And most large brewers use carbon-capture systems, as beer blogger Kendall Jones pointed out. So Miller Lite drinkers out there can rest easy – there’s gonna be enough for the next tailgate.

P.S. Go blue!😉

The Pentagon recently ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts psychological operations (psyops) online, WaPo reported yesterday, citing several internal military sources. The reason for this sudden introspection? Social media platforms identified and removed ~150 fake accounts they suspected were run by the US military.

📱 More deets… The Pentagon’s review comes after an outside report published last month uncovered a series of fake online accounts with AI-generated faces for profile pictures, created to “promote pro-Western narratives” in countries like Russia, China, and Afghanistan.

• While the report’s authors didn’t conclusively link them to the Pentagon, they said the accounts “consistently advanced narratives promoting [US] interests,” and only linked to news sites financially backed by the US government and/or military.
• Two internal sources later confirmed to WaPo that US military officials were indeed behind the operation, which was identified and deleted by Facebook and Twitter a few months ago. (We knew there had to be something behind all those "Bames Jond" friend requests.)

🌎 Zoom out: Creating fake accounts in an attempt to influence online discourse in another country is a tried-and-true tactic used by intelligence agencies around the globe, especially those from Russia and China.

Many European nations are looking for new ways to save energy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine turned an ongoing energy crisis from bad to worse. Case in point: Switzerland’s government asked its citizens to shower together over the weekend in a bid to cut energy consumption by 15%.

But others are going with a more… futuristic solution. Several Nordic cities have launched projects aiming to recycle the large amounts of heat given off by data centers, something typically treated as a useless byproduct.

• 🇸🇪 In Sweden: Stockholm Data Parks – a partnership between the country’s capital city and several private firms – believes it can use the excess heat to meet 10% of the city’s warming needs by 2035.
• 🇫🇮 In Finland: Microsoft announced a partnership to heat some 100,000 homes in Helsinki using excess energy from their data centers.
• 🇳🇴 In Norway: The country is developing a new commercial area called Lyseparken with the liquid-cooling infrastructure needed to recycle heat from data centers on a city-wide scale.

🇺🇸 Closer to home… Amazon's Seattle HQ has been warmed with the waste heat from a nearby data center since 2017, saving the company an estimated 80 million kilowatt-hours of energy over a 25-year span – or enough to power 7,500 US households per year.

⚡ Bottom line: ​​In 2020, the world’s data centers collectively accounted for ~1.5% of global electricity use. Since energy can’t be created nor destroyed (shoutout thermodynamics), the power flowing through those data centers has to end up somewhere after being used to perform tasks… and that somewhere is almost entirely in the form of excess heat.

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The tools astronomers typically use to decode images of outer space may not be good enough to keep up with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, per a new peer-reviewed study published in Nature Astronomy.

🪐 A deeper dive… Current mathematical models used to calculate the properties of faraway planets must be re-tuned to match readings from the JWST, which are far more accurate than previous data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers from Harvard and MIT said.

Translation: If the models are left untouched, astronomers could end up severely misinformed about the atmospheres of planets throughout our galaxy – and whether they have the potential to support life. (To the aliens reading this, it’s okay to breathe a sigh of relief. But we’ll find you soon. Hopefully.🙏🤞)

• “There is a scientifically significant difference between a compound like water being present at 5 percent versus 25 percent, which current models cannot differentiate,” said study co-leader Julien de Wit.

📸 The big picture (heh): The JWST has been upending scientific norms left and right since its very first images were released in July. In them, astronomers immediately started finding numerous galaxies that were older, larger, and brighter than previously thought possible – and we’re still trying to figure out why.

💬 Quoted…​​ “We’re still doing a lot of work on it … but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”

• In a 60 Minutes appearance that aired on Sunday, President Biden declared the pandemic over, pledged US forces would defend Taiwan in the event of an attack from China (though officials say America’s policy of “strategic ambiguity” hasn’t changed), and said he hasn’t made a firm decision about running again in 2024.

Dive deeper: From the Left | From the Right | Read the transcript

🙏 Stat of the Day: Traffic deaths in the US are finally headed in the right direction. According to NHTSA data released yesterday, the number of fatalities from traffic accidents declined during the second quarter of this year – following seven straight quarters of year-to-year increases.

🤯 Did You Know?... The oldest ship in the world still afloat is the USS Constitution, aka Old Ironsides. Built in the 1790s to serve as one of the first ships of the brand-new US Navy, she served for approximately 80 years before being removed from service and converted into a floating museum.

📖 Worth a Read: The Day We Nuked Mississippi → (Hancock County Historical Society)

📊 Poll results: Yesterday, we asked whether y’all thought Section 230, a law that gives broad legal protections to websites hosting user-generated content, needs to be changed.

• 46% said yes, 40% said no, and 14% weren’t sure or had a more nuanced take.
• Among those who responded “yes”: 57% liked the Democratic proposal, 19% preferred the Republican proposal, 21% supported both proposals, and 3% went for neither.

See the full 360° view here.

• ☝️ Queen Elizabeth II was laid to rest yesterday; hundreds of mourners, including world leaders, were in attendance at the country’s first state funeral since Winston Churchill’s death. (Read a recap/See photos.)

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 📈 ​​The yield on a 10-year Treasury bond closed at its highest level since 2011 yesterday (nearly 3.5%); bond yields are typically higher when interest rates are elevated.
• 🏥⚖️ UnitedHealth’s $8 billion acquisition of rival Change Healthcare can’t be blocked by the Justice Department for antitrust reasons, a federal judge ruled yesterday.
• 🏘️ Opendoor, a Zillow competitor that buys and sells thousands of homes in a typical month, lost money on 42% of its transactions in August, per research from YipitData, up from ~16% in July.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 📺 70% of Gen Z’ers – and 53% of millennials – say they watch video content with subtitles most of the time, per a recent survey from Preply; that percentage falls to just over 33% among Gen X and Boomers.
• 🎤 Mariah Carey hinted at releasing a secret alt-rock album she recorded in 1995 on a recent Rolling Stone podcast.
• 🎮 Recently leaked footage from Grand Theft Auto VI is legit, officials at Rockstar Games confirmed yesterday; the company is reportedly trying to scrub all leaked content from the Internet; the hacker behind the leak claims to be the same one behind the recent Uber hack; GTA VI is one the most anticipated games in history, as its predecessor stands as the highest-grossing single piece of entertainment ever made.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• ⚛️ UK scientists have succeeded in creating matter from nothing, confirming a 70-year-old theory that it should be possible.
• 🇮🇳🩸 Over 100,000 people in India donated blood on Saturday, setting a new world record for the number of blood donations in a single day.
• 👂☄️ NASA recently recorded the sound of a meteoroid crashing into Mars. Have a listen.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🇺🇸🇦🇫 US contractor Mark Frerichs was freed yesterday in a US-Taliban prisoner swap after being held for more than two years.
• 🌀 Most of Puerto Rico remained without power yesterday in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona, which also made landfall in the Dominican Republic; one person was confirmed to have died on the US territory; some 1,500 others were rescued by the National Guard.
• ⚖️ Adnan Syed was officially released from jail yesterday after a Baltimore judge vacated his murder conviction in the 1999 death of Hae Min Lee; Syed’s case drew national attention after it was featured on the first season of the hit podcast “Serial”; prosecutors have 30 days to decide whether to drop the charges or retry the case. (Background)

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High school English teacher Larry Abrams loves to read. But the bookworm never realized just how lucky he was to grow up around literature – until he discovered many of the students in his under-resourced school had never owned a book of their own.

• “I’d heard of food deserts," he shared, "but I’d never heard of book deserts. And it occurred to me that I teach in a book desert." 

📚 Taking action... In 2017, Larry reached out online to see if any of his friends and family had old children's books they would be willing to donate to his students. They started flooding in by the thousands. 

• Larry is the now the owner and founder of non-profit organization BookSmiles, which has collected, sorted, and distributed hundreds of thousands of books throughout New Jersey and the Philadelphia area – and will soon reach 1 million.🤯  

🏀 True or False?... Of the 11,330 baskets Shaquille O’Neil scored in his NBA career, only one was a 3-pointer.

🤔 Riddle Me This: What starts with an 'e', ends with an 'e', and only has one letter in it?

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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🏀 T/F: True

✉️ Riddle: An envelope.