Good morning. In the latest installment of “well meaning but strange attempts to define Gen Z through market trends” we bring you: freeze-dried candy.

They look like minions at a Grateful Dead show, and ya know what? That’s great.

Here’s everyone’s favorite: freeze-dried pickle taffy.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.11 minutes to read.

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.”

–Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

A 43-year-old gunman opened fire Monday night on the campus of Michigan State University, killing three students and wounding five others before fatally shooting himself off-campus after an hours-long manhunt.

🏫 More details… Police said the 43-year-old man "had a history of mental illness" and didn’t have any apparent connection to Michigan State, though all eight shooting victims were MSU students. The five surviving victims are currently hospitalized in critical condition.

• After shots were first reported in two school buildings around 8pm, the ~19,000 MSU students who live on campus were ordered to turn off all lights and lock themselves in their rooms, where they remained until the gunman’s body was discovered more than three hours later.

🇺🇲 Zoom out: Data shows mass shootings are headed the same direction as a driver seeing headlights on a one-way road: the wrong way. The US experienced 690 mass shootings last year, defined as four or more victims injured or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That represents a 153% increase since 2014, the first year the organization began collecting data.

🏛️ On Capitol Hill: In a statement addressing Monday night’s shooting at Michigan State, President Biden renewed a call for Congress to consider a series of gun control measures that include mandatory background checks on all gun sales, a federal ban on assault weapons, mandatory safe storage of guns, and eliminating some legal immunities for gun manufacturers.

📊 Flash poll (long-form): In your opinion, what can be done to reduce the occurrence of mass shootings in America? The best responses will be featured in tomorrow’s newsletter.

Click here to leave a response.

🇷🇺 A trio of Russia-related stories made headlines yesterday. 1) NATO officials said a major Russian offensive has begun in eastern Ukraine, after Moscow mobilized thousands of fresh troops to the region in recent weeks; 2) A joint report published by Yale University and the US State Department found Moscow has deported 6,000+ Ukrainian children to “reeducation camps” in Russia over the past year, which would constitute a war crime; 3) Norway’s intelligence service said Russia has deployed nuclear-armed ships for the first time since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

🇪🇺 EU lawmakers approved a new law effectively banning the sale of new gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035. The law requires all new cars and vans to reduce their carbon emissions by 55% starting in 2030, with that level falling to zero emissions by 2035. The EU joins several other jurisdictions that have passed similar legislation, including Canada, the UK, and 18 US states including California and New York.

🦠 The WHO has abandoned its plans for a follow-up investigation into the origins of Covid. The WHO cited difficulties in doing field research in China and "politics across the world" as reasons for the cancellation, Nature first reported. The organization’s initial investigation in March 2021 concluded it’s “extremely unlikely” Covid escaped as the result of a lab accident, saying the virus likely spread from bats and then to humans via another small mammal species – though many scientists raised concerns that China had influenced the report.

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🏊 Deep dive… Funded in part by NASA, NSF, and USDA, Parallel Flight Technologies is positioned to impact industrial logistics in a big way. The drones provide heavy lift and long-range for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) applications. 

• This allows advanced solutions for tactical support for firefighters and first responders, healthcare logistics, renewable energy, defense, and environmental protection. 

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Somewhere, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are punching the air with excitement – because the holy grail may be near. According to a study published yesterday in Nature Communications, Cornell University researchers have developed a male birth control drug that successfully prevented pregnancy in mice.

📅 Background: A working female contraceptive, the birth control pill, was developed in the 1950s. But history is littered with failed attempts at creating a male contraceptive, in large part due to the challenges that biology provides.

• Men make millions of sperm every single day, each of which needs to be altered/disabled in order to prevent pregnancies.
• On the other hand, women’s ovaries typically release one mature egg per month – a far easier target for contraceptives.

⏩ That brings us to yesterday’s study… where Cornell researchers tested a new drug that blocks a specific protein that allows the sperm to move or swim around, rendering them immobile. Upon receiving the drug, male mice were unable to get their mates pregnant for a roughly 2-hour window, after which they regained normal fertility levels and could father normal offspring.

💊 Big picture: No male birth control treatment – not even the “testicle-bath" that won the 2021 Dyson Award for Engineering – has ever made it past human clinical trials. There are two treatments currently undergoing human trials in the US: a male contraceptive gel from UC Davis, and a testosterone-suppressing pill developed by one of the National Institutes of Health.

Looks like someone needs to remind Netflix that there’s always money in the banana stand. Earlier this week, the streamer announced that all five seasons of Arrested Development will be leaving its platform on March 15.

And Netflix isn’t the only streamer saying “bye brother” to content:

• HBO Max has let 36 titles go, including 20 originals (like Westworld).
• Paramount and Showtime, who have merged into a single platform, have said goodbye to several shows, including The Twilight Zone reboot from Jordan Peele.
• And from the sounds of it, Disney is next – the media giant yesterday announced plans to cut $3 billion in content costs.

✌️🎞 Bottom line: Today’s streaming landscape is marked by price hikes, consolidation, and cost-cutting, which means there's a good chance a whole lot more shows and movies get booted from their current platforms – and maybe find homes elsewhere.

Though there may be some good news for Arrested Development fans with a Netflix account: the streaming platform has until March 14th to extend its licensing deal with Fox. And the situation is giving similar vibes to last year, when Netflix’s first Original show Lilyhammer was set to be removed until an agreement was reached with one day to go, keeping the show on the platform until 2029.

💬 Quoted…​​ “Some commercial or benign purpose.”

• This is the US intelligence committee’s leading explanation for the three unidentified flying objects shot down over Canadian and American airspace this weekend – that they weren’t aliens or spying for a foreign nation, but were rather part of some research or commercial effort.

🏈👀 Stat of the Day: Super Bowl LVII was the third-most-watched television show in history, with an estimated 113 million people tuning in on Sunday, per data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics.

🤯 Did You Know?... Amazon’s average cut of each sale – accounting for commission, fees for warehouse storage, packing, delivery, and advertising – surpassed 50% last year for the first time ever, according to a recent study by Marketplace Pulse.

📖 Worth a Read: A guide to (not) understanding quantum mechanics → (ArsTechnica)

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• ☝️ Leonardo da Vinci first attempted to unravel the mystery of gravity more than a century before Sir Isaac Newton – and he had a pretty good grasp of it, too, per a recently-published peer-reviewed study that examined da Vinci’s now-digitized notebooks.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 📉🏛 The US Consumer Price Index, America’s most widely-used measure of inflation, rose 6.4% in the 12-months period ending in January; that's down from a 6.5% increase the previous month, but above the 6.2% economists were projecting. | US stock markets close mixed (S&P: -0.03%; Dow: -0.4%; Nasdaq: +0.6%) | President Biden will appoint Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard as his top economic adviser in the coming days, per multiple reports.
• 🚗 Hyundai and Kia announced a free software update for over 8 million of its cars that are at high-risk of being stolen. | Tesla employees in Buffalo launched an effort to unionize yesterday; if successful, it would be the company’s first union.
• 💻 Reddit is looking to IPO in the second half of this year, per The Information.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• ⚾ The MLB announced plans to more strongly enforce the balk rule in 2023.
• 💼👔 Pharrell Williams will become the creative director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, the world’s biggest luxury brand.
• 🎬⚽ Rust hired a new Director of Photography as the movie prepares to continue filming; the production team also announced a documentary that’ll cover the film’s completion and celebrate the life of Halyna Hutchins, who was shot and killed on-set in October 2021. | Ted Lasso Season 3 will premiere on March 15, Apple announced yesterday. (The teaser)

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🤖🚘 Amazon's Zoox Inc. carried passengers in its fully autonomous vehicle on public roads for the first time as part of a test in Foster City, CA, last week; the firm will now operate an autonomous shuttle for employees on the same route.
• 🦖 A team of US and UK researchers managed to reconstruct the brains and inner ears of two spinosaurus – the largest known carnivorous dinosaur – from scans of 125 million-year-old fossils.
• 💊 A $3-per-pill epilepsy medication was found to alleviate the functional changes and symptoms associated with autism when used in mice, per a newly published peer-reviewed study.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🚂 Some business owners and residents of East Palestine, Ohio, filed lawsuits this week against Norfolk Southern, alleging the railway firm’s negligence led to the derailment of a train carrying several different hazardous chemicals earlier this month.
• ⚖️ The Senate confirmed President Biden’s 100th federal judicial nominee yesterday; Biden is ahead of both Trump and Obama at the same point in their presidency.
• 🗳️ Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, officially entered the 2024 presidential race yesterday; she joins former President Trump as the only two people to formally announce their candidacy thus far. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

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• 🗣️ Man's cancer caused "uncontrollable" Irish accent, doctors say.

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Beth Neale and Miles Cloutier, from South Africa and Canada respectively, are a free-diving couple with a passion for saving the oceans. 

💋🐠 Hold your breath... In an effort to raise awareness for marine conservation and their love of the ocean, the duo locked lips for an impressive 4 minutes and 6 seconds while underwater, successfully breaking the Guinness World Record just in time for Valentine's Day.

• "We've had an incredible journey of underwater love together," said Beth. "The goal is to share that with the world and inspire other people to love and fall in love with the underwater world."

The following movie titles are written solely with emojis. Can you guess what they are?

1. 👑👰
2. 😈👗👠 
3. 🐀🧑‍🍳

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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1. The Princess Bride (1987)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
3. Ratatouille (2007)

**The Parallel Flight sponsor block was written and/or published as a collaboration between The DONUT's in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of The DONUT. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works separately to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. The DONUT may receive monetary compensation from the issuer, or its agency, for publicizing the offering of the issuer’s securities. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investing advice. This is a paid ad. Please see 17(b) disclosure linked in the campaign page for more information.