Good morning. THE NEWS AWAITS.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.02 minutes to read.

“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

–Thomas Watson (1874-1956)

We accidentally switched conferences in yesterday’s Donut Hole about the NFL playoffs🤦‍♀️. The Chiefs are playing the Bengals in the AFC Conference Championship, while the Eagles are facing the 49ers in the NFC Conference Championship. Thanks to Julie A. for first bringing this to our attention.

This is the 37th correction out of the 263 newsletters we’ve published since January 2022, and the second in as many days (though if mirror pep talks actually work, the streak ends today!).

Besides being a great guess for a Taylor Swift lyric, this story’s headline is also the current setting of the Doomsday Clock, which measures humanity’s current threat of self-annihilation. And at 10 am ET this morning, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will announce its annual update to this end-of-the-world measuring timepiece.

☝️ First things first: The Doomsday Clock isn’t an actual clock, but rather a symbol created in 1947 by the Albert Einstein-founded Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The hands serve as a metaphor for “how close we are to destroying our world,” with this theoretical doomsday occurring when the clock reaches midnight.

When it was first created, the Doomsday Clock was intended as a direct analogy for the threat of nuclear war, with considerable overlap between the Bulletin’s founding members and those who worked on the Manhattan Project (including Bulletin Chairman J. Robert Oppenheimer).

But over time, the Bulletin’s focus expanded like your brain after reading this newsletter to encompass a wider range of issues, including biological threats, societally disruptive technologies, and climate change (added in 2007).

• The clock's original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. Since then it’s been set forward 16 times, and backward eight times.
• The furthest from midnight it’s ever been was 17 minutes in 1991 – after the US and Soviet Union signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty – and the nearest is 100 seconds from 2020 to the present – because Covid.

📝 Bottom line: Some experts have pushed back against the widespread popularization of the Doomsday Clock, casting doubt on its usefulness as a measurement of “actual risk” and calling it mostly fear mongering. And since the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists doesn’t have any ability to set global policy, many experts say it’s best to use the Doomsday Clock as a way of stimulating discussion, rather than a strict indication of how much time humanity has left.

🇪🇬 Egyptian archaeologists found a papyrus scroll containing texts from the ancient Book of the Dead. The 16-meter-long scroll, discovered at a site near Cairo last year, represents the first time a complete Egyptian papyrus has been found in a century, according to local government officials. After researchers analyzed the papyrus, they found it held texts from the Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian manuscript that provided instructions on how to conduct a funeral to ensure the dead person was prepared to navigate Duat (their version of the underworld).

🇵🇰 Every major city in Pakistan lost power for 12+ hours yesterday. The nationwide power cut, which began around 7:30am local time, is Pakistan’s second major outage in the past three months, on top of rolling blackouts the country’s ~220 million residents experience on an almost-daily basis. Local officials attributed yesterday’s outage to a voltage surge that resulted in a cascading series of failures across Pakistan’s national power grid, which multiple sources say is outdated and underfunded.

🇨🇳 The northernmost city in China saw its lowest temperature ever recorded. The city of Mohe, located near Russian Siberia, saw its temperature dip down to negative 63.4°F on Sunday, approximately 36°F below the average temps around this time of year. While that figure marks the lowest temperature recorded in China, it pales in comparison to the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth – a whopping negative 128.6°F at Vostok Station, Antarctica, in July 1983🤯.

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If seeing whether That 90’s Show is any good hinges upon you having your ex’s password, this is no time to chill – it’s time to Netflix. Because the password-sharing clock is quickly running out.

According to new Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters, the era of laissez-faire password sharing may be over as soon as March – but definitely before the end of June. And the impact is set to be yuuuuge. The company estimates roughly 100 million households will be affected by the change.

👥📺 How it’ll work: While nothing has been officially announced yet, it appears – based on a letter to shareholders included in its Q4 earnings report released last week – the crackdown will be modeled after the streamer’s 2022 pilot program in Latin America.

During the pilot program, Netflix separated its users into two categories:

• Account Owners, who were able to pay for a limited number of ‘sub-accounts’ outside of their primary residence (as defined by IP address and user activity). By the end of the pilot they could also use a new “Manage Access & Devices” feature to see and remove any device using their account.
• Moochers, who could either have the account owner pay for their access, or transfer their existing profile onto a new account without losing their personalized recommendations and viewing history. Each added moocher is rumored to cost between $3 and $4.50 per month, though if they branch out on their own the normal account pricing applies.

📈 Zoom out: The password crackdown comes on the heels of a big subscriber growth quarter for Netflix; the company exceeded its own subscriber projections for Q4 2022 by more than 70% (adding over 7.6 million net new subscriptions vs. 4.57 million expected).

If the NFL playoffs have been on your TV at any point in recent weeks, you’ve probably seen some players wearing a black or white horseshoe-shaped collar around their lower neck.

And while it looks like it could download the entire Spotify database without breaking a sweat, this $199 accessory is actually a next-gen medical device aimed at reducing brain injuries caused by repeated hits to the head.

🤔 So, what is it?... Called the Q-Collar, the device pushes against the jugular veins in an athlete’s neck, increasing the volume of blood in their skull and creating a tighter fit of the brain. This reduces the likelihood of a “slosh” incident, which occurs when the brain moves around unrestrained after experiencing blunt force trauma.

• The Q-Collar isn’t just for NFL players either. The device, which received FDA authorization in February 2021, has also been adopted by members of the Premier Lacrosse League, the National Women’s Soccer League, the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, and dozens of football teams at the high school and collegiate levels.

🧠 Zoom out: While the FDA warns that Q-Collars can’t prevent serious head injuries, it can lesson the chance of getting a concussion – which is a problem that affects more than just professional and other high-level athletes. Between 1.6 million and 3.8 million sports and recreation-related concussions occur in the US each year, per the latest data from the Brain Injury Research Institute.

💬 Quoted…​​ “We hope to show that every dog is beautiful no matter how ugly they might first appear.”

A UK-based custom printing company called Parrot Prints has launched a new competition to find Britain’s ugliest dog, with founder Matt Dahan saying the seven finalists – three pictured above – were “the ones who made our eyes hurt when we looked at them.”

• For a grand prize, the eventual winner will receive a doggie makeover, plus a photoshoot with their owner.

🥚 Stat of the Day: The average price of a dozen eggs in the US rose 66 cents last month to reach $4.25, its highest level since the Fed started tracking that data in 1980. (Background: Why eggs are so darn eggs-pensive)

🤯 Did You Know?... The first known instance of a job resume was written in the early 1480s by Leonardo da Vinci, who was applying to become a military engineer for the de-facto ruler of Milan.

📖 Worth a Read: The eerie emptiness of 'Britain's Area 51' → (BBC Future)

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• ☝️ You’re looking at some of the winning photos from the fourth-annual ranking of the Top 100 Close-up Photographers of the Year.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🖥️🤖 Microsoft has made a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, the company announced yesterday; the exact amount has not been disclosed but previous reporting from Semafor pegged it at up to $10 billion. | Google is fast-tracking over 20 AI projects in response to ChatGPT, per the NY Times; founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have reportedly been brought in to support the “code red” situation.
• 🏦 Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and four other banks are launching a digital wallet to compete with PayPal and Apple Pay; the banks collectively also own Zelle.
• 💰 Citadel made $16 billion for clients after fees in 2022, per a report from LHC Investments; that marks the largest annual gain by a hedge fund in history.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 📱 TikTok employees can artificially inflate view counts on specific videos, per a recent Forbes report; internally the practice is called “heating.”
• 🍬 M&M’s announced Maya Rudolph as their new spokesperson yesterday, stating the candymaker was taking an “indefinite pause from [its] spokescandies.”
• 📺🎮 HBO's The Last of Us saw a 22% jump in viewership from episode one to episode two, the largest increase of any HBO drama in history, the streamer announced yesterday; the pilot episode has now been seen by 18 million viewers, an almost 4x increase from the premiere night audience.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🤖🦵 A team of international researchers created a series of remote-controlled walking robots powered by living, lab-grown mouse muscles, per a new peer-reviewed study published in Science Robotics.
• 🚀 NASA’s Lucy mission team, which is currently sending a space capsule to a series of asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit, has decided to suspend further solar array deployment after one of the craft’s two arrays failed to fully unfold.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🙏 Seven people were shot and killed and one other person was injured yesterday at two separate locations in Half Moon Bay, CA; the suspected shooter, a 67-year-old male, is in police custody. | Separately, officials said an 11th victim died due to injuries sustained from a mass shooting in Monterey Park, CA, Saturday night.
• ⚖️ The trial of South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who stands accused of murdering his wife and youngest son, officially kicked off yesterday.
• 🏛️ Charles McGonigal, a former FBI official who led the agency’s counterintelligence division in New York, was arrested and charged for allegedly violating US sanctions by working for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the DOJ announced yesterday.

CLICKBAIT

• 💭 What Gen Z wants to be when they grow up.

Yesterday we covered the ongoing classified document situation surrounding President Biden, and briefly compared it to a similar situation featuring former President Trump.

❓ Our question to you: Which statement most accurately describes how you feel about Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents after they left office?

• 🔴 What Trump did was a more serious concern: 48%
• 🔵 What Biden did was a more serious concern: 14%
• 🟰 Both were about the same: 27%
• 🙅‍♀️ Neither was a serious concern: 4%
• 🤷‍♀️ Unsure/other: 7%

Click here to read some of the best responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 16,972 votes, and 1,417 longform responses.

❄️ Knock knock... Alex Campagna and Andrea Schmitt were hunkering down and preparing for a massive snowstorm in their Buffalo, NY, home, when they heard a knock on their door. 

Two tourists were standing on their doorstep. They explained that they were part of a tour group from South Korea, and their van had become stuck in the snow on their way to Niagra Falls that afternoon. 

• Alex initially brought them shovels to help dislodge the vehicle, but soon invited them all inside to get warm. 

🏠 What's mine is yours... As the snow continued piling up, Alex and Andrea ushered all ten travelers into the house and ended up hosting them for the entire weekend.

• "No matter where you are in the world," said Alex, "if you receive a knock on the door, at your home, and you open the door to perfect strangers, you never know who's going to come inside. But the compassion and love that human beings have for each other triumphs." 

❓ Trivia: What is mycology the study of?

👅 True or False?... Giraffes have green tongues.

🤔 Riddle Me This… You leave home, take three left turns, and return home. Who are the two masked men waiting for you?

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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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.)

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❓ Trivia: Fungi

👅 T/F: False, they're purple/bluish-black

🤔 Riddle: A baseball umpire and catcher