Good morning. February has begun! We’re talking Black History Month, Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, and more.

Scratch beneath the surface, though, and you’ll quickly learn: February is a weird lil guy of a month!

First off, that ‘r’. What is it doing there? A quick Google search points back to, and this is not a joke, The Great Vowel Shift between 1350-1700. Imagine being alive during that? Vowels changing on you, or would it be ‘yew’?? Crazy times, man…

It’s also the only month with 28 days, unless it decides to really let loose once every four years and have 29 days. We call it a leap year, but February just calls it living its truth – sometimes you just need that extra day. We get it, February, and we love you for it.

Hey, speaking of: 2024 will be a leap year, so get ready, February is about to lose its 28-day mind.

NOW LET’S GET INTO THE NEWS.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.91 minutes to read.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

–Will Durant (1885-1981)

Alleyn’s School, one of the top private schools in the UK, recently announced plans to stop assigning written homework in English classes, claiming the advent of ChatGPT has made the practice obsolete.

👩‍🏫 More details… In a blog post, Alleyn’s Head Teacher Jane Lunnon said instructors began moving to eliminate written homework, after a blind test involving the head of the school’s English department resulted in an essay written entirely by ChatGPT receiving an "A" grade (between 90% and 100%).

Lunnon said that instead of requiring English students to write essays or answer questions for homework, Alleyn’s School – which costs upwards of $28,000/year to attend and is ranked as one of the top-30 schools in Britain – will transition to a new teaching style called “flipped learning.” Under this regimen, English students will be asked to prepare at home each night for discussions and assessments in class the next day.

🇺🇲 Across the pond… Many US teachers, professors, and administrators are also starting to overhaul classroom learning protocols in response to ChatGPT.

• Some are redesigning courses to avoid AI chatbots entirely, with changes that include more oral exams, increased group work, and handwritten assessments in lieu of typed ones.
• Others are actively integrating ChatGPT into lesson plans by using the chatbot to create study guides and practice tests, or devoting class time to critically reviewing and evaluating ChatGPT’s responses.

📰 And in other recent news: OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, unveiled a new tool yesterday aimed at helping teachers detect whether an essay or homework problem was written by an AI. Though in an accompanying blog post, OpenAI said its new tool “is not fully reliable” – especially with texts under 1,000 characters – and sometimes incorrectly but confidently flags human-written content as created by an AI.

📊 Flash poll (long-form): Calling all 15,000+ classrooms using the DONUT: How do you plan on addressing ChatGPT, if at all? The best answers will be featured in tomorrow’s newsletter.

Submit a response here.

🇩🇪 A German woman used Instagram to find and kill her doppelgänger in order to fake her own death, prosecutors say. When Munich authorities discovered the body of a 23-year-old woman earlier this month who had been stabbed to death, they initially thought it was a German-Iraqi woman recently reported missing by her parents. But after performing an autopsy, police arrested the missing 23-year-old woman – who looked “strikingly similar” to the victim – on suspicion of homicide, alongside a 23-year-old Kosovan man. Authorities say the woman allegedly faked her own death and went into hiding “because of a family dispute.”

🇷🇺 Moscow has violated a US-Russia treaty limiting the build-up of nuclear weapons, per US officials. The State Department said it found Russia to be in “noncompliance” with the nuclear treaty after Moscow refused to allow on-site inspections, and also rejected US officials’ requests to meet to discuss compliance concerns. It marks the first time Washington has accused Russia of breaking the 2011 New START arms treaty, which limits the number of nuclear warheads, bombers, and launchers each country can possess.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong’s strict ban on CBD takes effect today. The Hong Kong government’s decision to label CBD as a “dangerous drug” places it on the same level as hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. Residents were previously given three months starting on October 27 to dispose of their CBD products, with penalties of up to seven years in prison for possession – and up to a life sentence for importing, exporting, or producing the drug – starting today.

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Much like a frozen computer, DC Studios needed someone to hit the restart button. And that’s exactly what DC co-heads James Gunn and Peter Safran did yesterday, announcing their eight-to-ten-year vision for a cohesive, rebooted DC universe (DCU). It even has a name: Chapter One: Gods and Monsters.

↗️ Where it’s headed: According to Gunn, the last twelve years have been a mess for DC Studios. Always one step behind Marvel, the Warner Bros-backed studio rushed into its superhero team-up movie, Justice League, without first setting up each hero individually in their own film (like Marvel did before making The Avengers with Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor).

Highlights of the new slate include:

• Superman: Legacy (2025): A new origin story and “the start of the DCU,” per Safran.
• Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow: A sci-fi epic film about a jaded girl from Krypton.
• Paradise Lost: A Game of Thrones style TV show about the all-female island Themyscira, Wonder Woman’s birth place.
• Waller : Starring Viola Davis, this HBOMax series starts where season one of John Cena’s Peacemaker ends.

🌎 Elsewhere in Elseworlds: The upcoming sequels for Joaqin Phoenix’s The Joker (2024), Robert Pattinson’s The Batman (2025), and a yet-to-be-named Black Superman Movie written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and produced by J.J. Abrams will all exist in DC’s Elseworlds, a home for one-off properties that are not part of the DCU.

Yesterday, gene-editing startup Colossal Biosciences announced a $150 million funding round reportedly valuing it at $1.5 billion. Though the company should change its name to The Walking Dead, because the funds will be used for “de-extinction activities” – aka bringing extinct animals back to life.

Colossal, which has now raised a total of $225 million from investors ranging from the CIA to Paris Hilton, previously announced plans to revive the wooly mammoth and thylacine (Tasmanian tiger). But yesterday it unveiled plans to revive a third extinct species: the dodo bird.

• To create a dodo – which went extinct in the late 17th century – the company plans to try to modify the bird’s closest living relative, the brightly colored Nicobar pigeon, then “re-wild” the animal in its native habitat on the island of Mauritius, MIT Tech Review reports.

🤔 What’s the point?... Colossal co-founder George Church says the research involved to resurrect the animals could help improve conservation efforts and other things, including human health care. But as anyone who's seen Jurassic Park can tell you, it could also have some pretty gnarly implications.

So you tell us: good idea or nah?

Yes

No

Don’t really care

💬 Quoted…​​ “What on Earth… Let me close these blinds.”

• New Yorkers – including NY Giants safety Julian Love(👆) – had some choice words for the operators of the Empire State Building, after the privately-owned skyscraper was lit up green on Sunday evening in honor of the New York Giants’ rival, the Philadelphia Eagles, going to the Super Bowl.

💸 Stat of the Day: Pfizer earned more than $100 billion in revenue last year, with over half of that total ($56.7 billion) coming from two products: its Covid vaccine and Paxlovid, its Covid antiviral treatment.

🤯 Did You Know?... Foreign accent syndrome is an exceedingly rare – but very real – condition where people suddenly begin speaking with a foreign accent after experiencing head trauma. There have been just ~100 confirmed cases since the condition was first discovered in 1907, across dozens of different languages.

📖 Worth a Read: How to Be 18 Years Old Again for Only $2 Million a Year → (Bloomberg)

• ☝️ A mysterious moving spiral formation was spotted in the night sky above Hawaii earlier this month; astronomers say they believe it’s connected to a top-secret US military GPS satellite that launched from a SpaceX rocket earlier this month.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 The International Monetary Fund raised its growth prediction for the world’s economy to 2.9% on Monday; that’s up from the 2.7% projection in October of last year.
• 🛢️⛽ Exxon Mobil reported a record $55.7 billion in profits for 2022, the third highest of any company so far behind Apple and Microsoft (Alphabet is projected to post higher profits as well).
• 🖥️ Paypal is laying off 7% of its workforce, or ~2,000 employees.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🌵📺 King of the Hill is coming back after Hulu ordered a new season yesterday; the creators, Mike Judge (Silicon Valley) and Greg Daniels (The Office), and original cast are all attached. | Paramount will fold Showtime into its Paramount+ offering starting later this year; the new service will be called, believe it or not, “Paramount+ With Showtime.”
• 🏆 The Academy Awards said yesterday Andrea Risenborough’s Best Actress nomination for To Leslie will stand; the announcement follows a backlash to an actor-led campaign for Risenborough’s nomination.
• 🏈The Denver Broncos have a new head coach: Sean Payton; the team needed to make a trade with the Saints to secure the rights to hire him. | The Houston Texans hired a new head coach: former 49ers defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🐻 Most Bigfoot sightings in the US and Canada were probably black bears walking on their hind legs, according to a new peer-reviewed study.
• 🌌 A large team of international scientists recently published the most precise map of all the known matter in the universe.
• 🪐 NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has stored its 10th and final sample of Martian rocks that the space agency eventually plans to bring back to Earth for further study.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🚌 Washington, D.C., this week became the largest US city to pass a law making public buses free for all riders; the measure will take effect by this summer.
• 🏛️ Rep. George Santos (R-NY) announced yesterday that he’s temporarily stepping down from his assignments on two committees – Small Business and Science, Space, and Technology – “to take time to properly clear my name”; Santos faces multiple investigations into fabrications he made while campaigning for office.
• ⚖️ Alec Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter by New Mexico prosecutors yesterday. (Background)

CLICKBAIT

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Expectant mother Ashton Johnson is visually impaired. At every OBGYN appointment during her pregnancy, she relied on her husband and doctors to share what her baby was doing. 

• Thanks to her creative doctors, however, she was granted the gift of "seeing" her new son.

👓🍼 What a gift... "The thought came like it would be really nice to get her something tangible to hold on to, to feel the contours of the baby's face and to really get an understanding of what baby looks like," said Ashton's doctor, Dr. Katie Sekpe.

• After using a 3D printer to make models of the baby's face, Dr. Sekpe gave Ashton the life-like creations at a recent appointment.
• "This is so cool. Like I have not been able to feel his, like see his ultrasounds like at all so like this is so cool," Ashton said. "I can see his lit tle lips and his little nose. That is so cute. And his little eyes. Oh my gosh!" 

❓ Trivia: What mineral is referred to as “Fool’s gold”?

🤖 True or False?... Androphobia is the fear of robots that look like humans.

🤔 Riddle Me This: Where does 10 + 4 = 2?

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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❓ Trivia: Pyrite

🤖 T/F: False, it’s the fear of men

🤔 Riddle: On a clock