Good morning. Here’s a stumper: what TV show, current or not, has the most spoken words per minute?

In the top spot, with 176.2 wpm, is…. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which juuuust beat out Brooklyn 99 (174.6 wpm), according to a study done by WordFinderX earlier this month.

Comedy was far and away the most chatty genre, averaging about 115 wpm.

The least verbose category went to sci-fi/fantasy, which topped out at 93.9 wpm for True Blood. Sci-fi/fantasy also held down the top five shows with the least amount of words per minute, including Obi-Wan Kenobi (50.5 wpm) and The Walking Dead (54.3 wpm).

Which sorta makes sense, Jedi masters and zombies aren’t exactly known for their conversational skills.

And now, as always, THE NEWS.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.91 minutes to read.

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”

–Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

The students have become the teacher. Kids enrolled in an elementary school in Ottawa, Canada, recently schooled NASA scientists, after discovering that cosmic radiation in space causes epinephrine, the active ingredient in EpiPens, to turn potentially lethal instead of life-saving.

This experimental project was undertaken as part of NASA’s Cubes in Space program, which allows school-aged children from around the world to design and test experiments that are later carried onboard real-life space missions.

🌌 Background: Cosmic radiation is a term used to describe the extremely high-energy particles that are constantly being released by all stars, including our Sun. The Earth’s atmosphere mostly protects its surface from harmful cosmic radiation, but objects in outer space are fully exposed to the damaging rays.

The Canadian students’ experiment involved sending samples of pure epinephrine – as well as the slightly different solution from an EpiPen (which are used to combat severe allergic reactions) – to space and back, with a goal of studying how the substances are impacted by unfiltered cosmic radiation.

🧪 The results: After scientists at the University of Ottawa analyzed the returned samples, they found the epinephrine came back only 87% pure. The remaining 13% had turned into benzoic acid derivatives that are extremely poisonous to humans😳.

• And the EpiPen solutions didn’t fare much better – the epinephrine that was previously present had decomposed entirely while in outer space, rendering the devices useless.

👀 Looking ahead… The 9- to -12-year-old Canadian students are now working on a special packaging for EpiPens that would shield them from harmful cosmic radiation in space. They’ll present their findings to NASA this June.

🇬🇧 English architect Sir David Chipperfield this week was awarded the 2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The annual award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of architecture,” represents the highest honor in the entire industry. Chipperfield is widely known for merging elegant and modern spaces with historic buildings, per the NY Times, with his past work including a restoration of the Neues Museum in Berlin that was partially destroyed in WWII, as well as a restoration of the 16th-century Procuratie Vecchie in Venice.

🇹🇭🐒 HelloFresh will stop selling any coconut milk sourced from Thailand, due to allegations of forced monkey labor. Not a typo – a recent PETA Asia investigation found monkeys in Thailand’s coconut-farming industry were being forced to climb trees and pick coconuts for hours on end while attached to chains, and were sometimes subjected to punishments like whipping. Many major retailers – including Walmart, Costco, Target, and Kroger – have already dropped Thai suppliers allegedly using forced monkey labor, but HelloFresh said it decided to go one step further and pull out of the country entirely after receiving nearly 100,000 emails pushing for the change.

🌊 The amount of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans is doubling every six years, per a new peer-reviewed study. A team of international scientists analyzed global data collected from nearly 12,000 sampling points in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea between 1979 and 2019. They found a “rapid and unprecedented” increase in ocean plastic pollution starting in 2005, with the estimated total amount of plastic particles increasing from 16 trillion back then to 171 trillion in 2019 (which would weigh a combined 2.3 million tons, if collected).

Forget everything you thought you knew about autonomous drone lifting capabilities… good job. Now, prepare for the future of emergency response technology!🥁

💁‍♀️ Why the old drones, ehrm, suck: Electric drones can only fly 15 minutes max with heavy payloads. Gas-powered can fly longer, but can’t carry any real weight. Nifty camera angles? Sure… but when it comes to life-saving situations (firefighting, delivering blood), current tech is sorely underpowered.

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The first few months of 2023 have seen a notable uptick in incidents where US passenger jets have either collided, or narrowly avoided making contact, with another plane. In fact, commercial jets are currently experiencing close calls with other aircraft at a faster pace than the previous five years combined, per a new Politico analysis of FAA data.

• From 2018 through 2022, there were 23 total incidents where two planes in the US came close to colliding.
• But this year has already seen six near-misses, plus one minor collision that occurred in Boston on Monday. At this pace, we’ll see more than 35 incidents in 2023 alone.

🤔 What’s behind the recent uptick?... Short answer: it’s currently unclear. Airline industry experts say there doesn’t appear to be a common denominator between the situations, making it difficult to identify which specific areas need fixing.

• A leading theory, suggested by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg this week, is that the trend is connected to the increased number of new pilots and air traffic controllers hired over the past couple of years, as travel demand bounced back from the reduced levels it experienced during the pandemic.

👀 Looking ahead… Each of this year’s incidents is currently being investigated by both the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board, with the agencies’ final reports and recommendations expected to take around a year to complete.

For anyone worried about the potential TikTok ban, fear not. Yesterday, Spotify announced a significant redesign of its app – and it’s giving TikTok vibes.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told CBS Morning that users can expect a home screen that’s been “completely redesigned from the ground up.”

Most notably, the new design will add Previews, aka a vertical “discovery” feed that you can swipe through a la TikTok – except each clip is an audio and video preview of whatever content is being recommended. Though unlike TikTok’s “For You” page, users won’t be shown Previews as soon as they open the app.

Other features of the redesign include:

• AI DJ: Just like it sounds, an AI-powered DJ will play music that matches your tastes, and talk to you while doing it.
• Smart Shuffle: A new play mode that builds on Spotify’s existing Enhance feature by automatically updating your playlists with recommended tracks (with Enhance, you had to add them manually).

📸 Big picture: The changes are meant to increase what Spotify calls “foreground discovery” – introducing users to new content at the start of a listening session, rather than hope for it to happen during or at the end.

Though Spotify’s move may not be just about improving user experience. According to TechCrunch reporters Sarah Perez and Aisha Malik, the feeds also introduce a prominent new surface for running ads.

💬 Quoted… "Clearly the individual choices that animals make within a social group are important to them."

Everyone knows that ducks fly together (s/o D2: Mighty Ducks) – but flamingos seem to be a bit less of a cohesive species. After studying 262 flamingos, UK scientists found that the birds form friendship groups based on personalities. "For example, bolder birds had stronger, more consistent ties with other bold birds, while submissive birds tended to spend their time with fellow submissive flamingos," per researcher and ​​animal behavioral scientist Dr. Paul Rose.

• The research was documented in a study, which was published yesterday in the journal Scientific Reports.

🖥🌝 Number of the Day: $5 million = the amount that Lonestar Data Holdings, a cloud computing startup, recently raised in seed funding; the company plans to build data centers on the Moon. Lonestar has already tested its data center on board the International Space Station successfully, and plans to launch a small data center box to the lunar surface later this year.

🤯 Did You Know?... The Fahrenheit temperature scale was standardized in 1724, or about 20 years before the Celsius scale. Much of the world – sans the US and a few other holdouts – didn’t end up exclusively using Celsius until after 1961, which was when the British Empire stopped publishing temps in Fahrenheit.

📖 Worth a Read: Ripples in spacetime are passing through you right now. This mission will reveal their secrets → (VICE)

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• ☝️ You’re looking at the oldest known reference to the Norse god Odin, which was recently discovered on part of a gold disc unearthed in western Denmark; the inscription, which translates to “He is Odin’s man,” represents the first solid evidence that the Norse god was worshiped as early as the fifth century.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed mixed yesterday (S&P: +0.1%; Dow: -0.2%; Nasdaq: +0.4%).
• 🙅🚲 Peloton and iFit were banned from importing their video-streaming fitness devices yesterday after a federal judge ruled they infringe on patents held by Dish Network. | 🚗 Tesla is being formally investigated by US safety regulators over steering wheels coming off in moving vehicles and a fatal crash involving its Autopilot feature.
• 🪙 Silvergate Capital, a top crypto bank, said yesterday that it will shut down and return all deposits.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🎲 ChatGPT created and coded a playable game called Sumplete based on a user’s prompt to “invent a logic puzzle similar to Sudoku that doesn’t currently exist.”
• 🤼 WWE has begun discussions with gambling regulators in Colorado and Michigan to legalize betting on scripted matches.
• 🏀 Hall of Fame basketball coach Jim Boeheim is retiring after 47 seasons at Syracuse.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🧬 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was the mystery investor who gave startup Retro Biosciences $180 million worth of funding in mid-2022 to pursue its goal of adding 10 years to the average human lifespan, per a new report from MIT Technology Review.
• ⚡🧲 Researchers at the University of Rochester claim to achieve room-temperature superconductivity (though it still requires pressures ~10,000x greater than atmosphere); the breakthrough could lead to longer-lasting batteries, more efficient power grids, and magnetically levitating high-speed trains in the US, per a study published yesterday in Nature.
• 🍺 A liver-produced hormone called FGF21 sobered up mice that had passed out from alcohol, allowing them to regain consciousness and coordination twice as fast compared to mice that didn’t receive the treatment, per a new peer-reviewed study by UT Southwestern researchers.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🙅‍♀️🌿 Nearly 62% of voters in Oklahoma rejected a measure that would have seen it become the 22nd US state to legalize recreational marijuana, per results from Tuesday’s vote.
• 🚨 The Justice Department blamed the Louisville PD for widespread unconstitutional practices in a two-year probe launched after the 2020 police killing of Breonna Taylor; the DOJ said Louisville police routinely used excessive force, made illegal arrests and traffic stops, and unlawfully executed search warrants – all of which disproportionately affected Black people. | Separately, the DOJ announced an investigation into the Memphis PD in response to the January death of Tyre Nichols following a police beating.
• 🏛️ The Senate voted 81-14 yesterday to block changes to D.C.’s criminal code that would have reduced penalties for some violent crimes; it marks the first time Congress approved overturning local D.C. legislation since 1991. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

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• 🪐 Astrophysicist reveals planet that could end life on Earth.

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Yesterday we covered a bill introduced by a bipartisan group of 12 senators that would allow the US to enact a nationwide ban of TikTok or other foreign-based technologies – if they’re found to pose a threat to America’s national security.

❓ Our question to you: In your opinion, should TikTok be banned from every device in the US?

• 👍 Yes: 52%
• 👎 No: 36%
• 🤷 Unsure/other: 12%

Click here to read some of the best responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 9,844 votes and 825 longform responses.

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

• Newly discovered chemicals are so deadly to fungi they are named after Keanu Reeves → (CNN)
• Nic Cage doesn’t need the MCU because he’s Nic Cage, says Nic Cage → (The A.V. Club)
• Cemetery staff take out personal ad for goose whose mate died — and find her a new match → (CBS News)
• Perth museum naming poll chooses 'Perth Museum' → (BBC News)

Linda Williams hates funerals. So when the 76-year-old was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year ago, she decided early on that she didn't want a funeral after her passing. 

She wanted a party while she was still here💃.

🥳 Let's dance... Linda spent the better part of a year planning the party with some friends she met at a Lindy Hop dance class.

• While she had a health scare and almost passed away a few weeks prior, Linda thankfully made it to her party and danced the night away. The strong senior described the event as "the best night " of her life.
• "I very nearly died just before it but I thought 'I am going to flipping well get there,'" she shared. "I just decided I would go for it and everybody had a phenomenal time."

The Taj Mahal is located in which Indian city?

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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**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 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.